L'Oréal's intuition-driven strategy (Full version)

In this episode, we chat with Jordan Colreavy, who’s the Head of Category Strategy at one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies L'Oréal.
Jordan gives some rare insights on how L’Oreal use a unique mix of both Intuition & creativity for strategy & execution across the business.
He talks about how L'Oréal's French heritage and culture have a big influence on this - and how other organisation leaders can learn from this sort of approach.
L’Oreal also captures unique customer insights and don’t let the traditional strategy ‘rulebook’ constrain them.
We also cover the different ways that organisations can get unique customer and market insights from seemingly unrelated industries and subsectors.
Jordan shares the example of L’Oreal and Red Bull - two very different sector players. And how they are working together to share and uncover unexpected insights though ideation conversations.
And finally, Jordan talks about how collaboration is key, and how that means ‘opening up’ Strategy and involving the people who are going to actually execute it.
There’s plenty of helpful tips in this episode on how to start Co-Creating strategy with customers and staff.
We hope you get some really meaningful insights on how to apply practical strategy to your own leadership and organisation.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
06:15 Background to L'Oréal Australia and their strategy
11:35 Balancing processes and innovation
13:50 Sharing insights: Red Bull and L'Oréal
19:26 Strategy shouldn't just be a document
22:16 Seeing what's on the ground
27:16 Involving staff in strategy
32:10 Long-term vs short-term strategy
38:00 Looking forward