He went back to school.
Even before we met, I was disposed to like Chappell. Some of his products had been around my house for years, and his radio ads -- "Hi. I'm Tom Chappell of Tom's of Maine" -- are straightforward and friendly. Presumably the man responsible would be the same. But at our first meeting I didn't find him so. He put me off with what seemed an air of self-righteousness, a touch of moral snobbery, a whiff of BS. Chappell dropped phrases instead of names. "Business as a moral agent," he would say, for instance, as if everyone knew what that meant. I didn't. Did he? Later, on my first visit to Tom's of Maine's Kennebunk offices, I noticed that every executive's desk held a slim volume: Kant on History.
Oh, come on. The company makes toothpaste and underarm deodorant. For this, they need an eighteenth-century German philosopher?
It turns out that for the past two-plus years, Chappell has been taking himself through a big change. He's picked up lots of food for thought. The people who work for him, skeptical at first of his turnaround, are beginning to forgive him his exuberance. They like the revived enthusiasm he's showing, the autonomy he's granting them, the ideas that he's starting to have again. They're even reading Kant -- a little of it, anyway. Chappell doesn't know what all those phrases and philosophers mean -- not yet. But he's having a great time finding out. Chappell's a man with a lot of new stuff on his mind, and he's just learning how to express it. Meanwhile, he's back in comfortable control of the business, his self-confidence renewed, a better boss and a much happier man. What went on?
The answer has two parts, one simple, the other not quite so.
The simpler part has nothing to do with where Chappell went to school or what he studied there -- or that he went back to school at all. The mere fact that he, with his board's and managers' concurrence, left the business on its own for a few days a week meant that some things had to change.
Tom's of Maine was forced to create what is now, people there say, a well-tuned reporting system that gives the part-time CEO timely information in meaningful form. And Chappell has had to come to terms with the fine art of delegation. It's a stronger organization for his having not been there. "I've maintained an involvement in anything that had to do with the personality of the company," Chappell says. That means participating in decisions about advertising, product ingredients, and packaging design and copy. But routine internal functions, he says, he has learned to leave to others.
So just getting away, even if only part-time, has helped to revive him and the company.
The other part of the answer to what happened, the part that's not so simple, does have something to do with where Chappell went to school and what he studied there.
He didn't know exactly what he wanted. He knew exactly what he didn't want. "Business school? God, no. Never. Business school was the thing I spent my time trying to undo in people."
Harvard Divinity School, which is where Chappell enrolled, might seem an odd place to look for the solution to a business problem. But the problem, as Chappell then suspected and now knows, wasn't business. It was a growing uncertainty about who he was and what role the business should be playing in his life. He thought he knew what he was doing and why in 1970 when he started the company; by 1985 he'd lost the conviction. He wanted three things from school. "I needed some spiritual fulfillment on a personal level. I needed a better understanding of the contribution I could make in my life. And, third, I had to resolve this thing called Tom's of Maine in my life. What was I going to do about it?"
Divinity school wasn't the only place he considered. He contemplated a master's degree in English, his undergraduate major at Hartford's Trinity College. Reading the works of great writers and writing oneself is an often-traveled route to self-understanding. But a visit to the divinity school in Cambridge, Mass., two hours' drive and a world distant from Kennebunk, removed the issue of choosing. He listened to Dean Ron Thiemann tell prospective students about the value of a theological education in a secular world, and he was captivated.
Now, he is very clear about what he has gotten out of the experience so far. In fact, he can list the gains.
Foremost is a reaffirmation and better understanding of his own values. That's not as exotic as it may sound. What it means as a practical matter is that Chappell can comfortably explain actions and decisions that earlier he could only attribute to instinct.
When he and marketer Eldredge argued over the symbols and words on the product packages, for instance, Eldredge, with his technical knowledge, seemed to have all the answers. But those answers, which he brought with him from business school and from the corporate marketing departments where he had worked, were based on value-laden assumptions: about the role of business in society, about the relationships between businesses and their customers, and about the separation of economic and spiritual man. They seemed to assume that a product's principal characteristics were function and price.
Whatever those values were, Chappell believed that they weren't his. The flowers and message on product packages felt right to him. What he understands today is that they are an effective way to establish emotional and spiritual relationships with customers who hold similar values. Eldredge was right, says Chappell, to argue that Tom's of Maine needed to address the consumer's intellectual side by pointing out benefits. "But now I know that a strategy that doesn't also allow for the spiritual and emotional relationship with the customer is not a complete strategy." Now, it isn't Eldredge who has all the answers.
