His face has glared from the cover of
Business Week. You've seen him over and over again in those pin-point portraits that
The Wall Street Journal uses to portray influential business people. Open the pages of
Forbes and here's the same fellow again, in four-color bleed-page portraiture.
The face looks slightly familiar, even after all these years. And
the name is slightly familiar, at least part of it. But who is this
white-haired guy A.G. Lafley?
Our Alan Lafley, in fact, was A.G. both before and after college.
Because both his father and grandfather shared the same name, "A.G."
was how the family distinguished the youngest of the three Alans. In
his time at Hamilton, there were no other family members around to
engender confusion, so for four years, it was straight-ahead "Alan."
Back in the real world, it was back to "A.G."
Which explains why the name is more or less familiar. But, what about
the hair -- the personal statement of style that gets a
wink-wink-nudge-nudge not just from the world's most learned business
observers, but from his class notes Alumni Review contributors as well?
Take a look at the Class of '69 yearbook. There's the Lafley Hamilton
remembers: peacoat wrapped warmly around his neck. In profile, there
are the sideburns of the time, right down to the end of his ear, flat
across the bottom trimmed just before they would grow wide with a
beard. Lafley's hair, for the time, is not long; but, in the back, it
seems to curl back into his collar. It's what might have been called a
modified early Beatles mop. Nowhere is there a hint of buzz.
"In high school I had close-cropped hair," he remembers today. "At
College it was longer hair with longer sideburns. From that point, my
hair really wasn't much of a topic of discussion, not until 1998 (when
he was P&G's executive vice president with responsibility for
Asia). I was in Japan and our business was so bad that I wanted to come
up with some sort of challenge. I told everybody that I would shave my
head if we reached a certain market share before I left.
"We missed it by a half-point. So, I didn't shave -- but I did get a
crew cut." From then, his appearance has been a matter of convenience:
"I just don't have the time to get it cut. I leave it spiked. I'm just
lazy."
What about the color of his hair? Here's a hint: Take one more look at that yearbook. It's 34 years old.
Gray happens.
