Kees Kruythoff described himself as a bit arrogant when he first applied to work at Unilever in the 1990s. He had a vision of where he wanted to go in his career and was forthright in sharing those aspirations with his interviewers. "I told them I wanted to work four years in marketing, then two years in sales and then I would go abroad and work in places like China, South Africa, Indonesia or Brazil," Kruythoff said during a recent Wharton Leadership Lecture. "'I will tell [them] what I want from this company,' I told myself when I went in there. I was naïve, I admit."
The Unilever executives, though, liked what they saw in Kruythoff and hired him in February 1993. "Six years later, I arrived in South Africa" to lead Unilever there, he noted. "You have to know what you want. When you are clear to an organization, the organization can work in a better way to help you reach that goal."
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