By Cliff Peale
Enquirer staff writer

Among the most important lessons small companies can learn from Procter & Gamble's 167-year history are a willingness to take risks, an ability to learn from mistakes and a nonstop focus on the consumer.

Those lessons are front and center in Rising Tide, the new P&G corporate history published this summer by Harvard Business School Press. Author Davis Dyer and P&G executives presented those lessons Thursday to a group gathered by the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.

While there have been hiccups, including the 2000 stock drop that cost it nearly $40 billion in market value, P&G has jockeyed between competing priorities remarkably well, Dyer said.

"The company has been able to understand that it is managing tensions and has never veered too long in one direction," he said. "One thing about P&G is its tenacity."

Dyer was one of three authors who worked with P&G corporate archivist Ed Rider on Rising Tide. The company hired The Winthrop Group, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm that produces corporate histories and other studies. While P&G's pure size makes it a different animal from most small and mid-sized companies, there are applicable lessons, said Dyer and Charlotte Otto, Procter's global external affairs officer.

Those lessons include:

• Risky business: In developing Tide in the 1930s and 1940s, P&G hit "the biggest home run in its history," Dyer said. But he noted that company executives had to be willing to let the new synthetic detergent hurt other businesses, including Oxydol.

"It's a crossroads that some companies come to and don't go through," he said.

• Internal competition: When P&G rolled out Pampers diapers nationally in the 1960s, it followed soon after with Luvs. Although Pampers has recovered to become P&G's biggest brand, Dyer called the Luvs introduction "disastrous."

Otto said P&G has learned to put its products into different price tiers that don't cannibalize one another.

• Who's the boss?: Procter chairman A.G. Lafley's "the consumer is boss" mantra has become more visible in recent years, and troubled times in the company's past can be traced to straying from that path, Otto said.

For example, in 2000, P&G was concentrating most on big product innovations that investors were demanding, in the process neglecting the reasonable prices and newer versions of their favorite P&G brands that consumers wanted.

"I would say perhaps Wall Street was the boss then," Otto said.

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com