Procter & Gamble

The consumer goods giant that learned sustainable growth requires knowing what to kill.

Procter & Gamble ($84B revenue, 2024) operates one of the world's largest consumer goods portfolios, competing with Unilever across personal care, home care, and food products globally. P&G dominates categories: laundry detergents (Tide, Ariel, Gain, Downy - 35-40% global share), shampoo (Pantene, Head & Shoulders), oral care (Crest, Oral-B). The company pioneered brand management, consumer research, and modern marketing.

But P&G's competitive advantage isn't just winning categories - it's deliberately killing businesses before they become liabilities. Between 2014-2016, P&G divested 100+ brands worth $15B+ in proceeds, extracting R&D capabilities, manufacturing expertise, and consumer insights before divestiture. The company retained key components like Olay skin care technology and fragrance formulation capabilities while selling beauty brands to Coty. This is organizational decomposition as strategy: systematically breaking down what doesn't work and redistributing resources to what does.

The P&G-Unilever rivalry demonstrates category-level predator-prey dynamics where market leadership oscillates through innovation cycles, price competition, and marketing intensity battles. Neither can eliminate the other - they're locked in coevolutionary arms races that drive innovation benefiting both. Competition for shelf space, consumer attention, and distribution creates selection pressure that makes both companies better.

The lesson: portfolio pruning isn't failure - it's essential maintenance. Strong businesses generate excess resources; weak businesses consume them. The constraint isn't having winners - it's recognizing when businesses have shifted from generating resources to consuming them, then extracting valuable components before divesting the rest. Growth comes from reallocating freed resources to high-return opportunities, not holding everything forever.