The Fortune 500 Insider Network is our newest online community where top executives from the Fortune 500 share ideas and offer leadership advice with Fortune’s global audience. Jerome Peribere, CEO of Sealed Air, has answered the question: What’s one quality that drives your company’s success?
At Sealed Air our success is driven by a renewed obsession with our customers’ success. When a company works diligently to find customers’ pain points, quantify their costs, and find opportunities to create new value for them, it can better help them achieve their own goals.
New value for our customers is created by using unique technologies that reduce food waste through innovative packaging that increases shelf life. This shelf life doesn’t just provide access to healthy food and reduce waste, but it contributes to increased food security and environmental benefits. We no longer sell cleaning products — we sell hygiene. We no longer sell packaging that simply delivers what consumers buy. We sell product security that helps our customers reduce costs associated with breakability, returns, and reshipment, which reduces negative environmental impacts like additional waste and energy use.
At Sealed Air (SEE), sustainability is a business imperative and a business driver. It is critical for any company’s long-term success to consider the full-life cycle of every innovation it’s creating and selling. The Trillian in Sealed Air’s logo, for example, expresses the key components of our company: cost competitiveness, performance and sustainability. When companies have a deep focus on elements that shape their foundations, they deliver superior business results in a competitive market.
The challenges in a changing world and business environment are great. I see the world increasingly intersected with sustainability, technology and business. For a company and its customers to succeed, it must harness these themes in ways that drive the company forward. Businesses must deliver for customers now — and anticipate what they will need in five years, 10 years and beyond.
So that is our challenge: to constantly reimagine our business and how it engages with an ever-changing world, but I have never been more confident that we are well on our way. Our 2020 sustainability goals are aggressive, and are a commitment to our customers, our industries and the world in which we live to provide them with success.
When a company can mitigate the impact of its work on the environment and improve the lives of those in the communities in which it operates, it benefits communities the world over — from the most advanced cities to villages in remote areas. With this combined strategy of being obsessed with our customers’ success and with the world around us, we will be successful, but not without our highly trained and confident employees. Their engagement with our goals and commitment to our company-wide values of purposeful innovation and ingenious collaboration are changing the game in the industries we serve.
Read all answers to the Fortune 500 Insider question: What’s one quality that drives your company’s success?
The Internet could be sabotaging your business by Terry Cavanaugh, CEO of Erie Insurance.
Meet the former janitor who runs the world’s biggest oil company by Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation.
