P&G Shortlists 129 Teams for CEO Challenge

Procter & Gamble (P&G) Nigeria, a leading consumer goods manufacturing company, has shortlisted 129 teams out of the 449 that applied for the P&G CEO Challenge Competition from various universities and business schools across Nigeria.

When the challenge was announced earlier in the year, interested participants, following the terms and conditions stipulated on the company website and Facebook pages, uploaded their photographs on the Facebook page and solicited likes of their photographs from their friends.

Temitope Iluyemi, Director, Global Government Relations, P&G Sub-Sahara Africa, who announced the short listing of these teams said that these

129 teams that have been shortlisted are those teams whose uploaded photographs were able to garner more than 60 likes on the P&G Facebook page. She informed that the short listed teams will then move on to the first phase of the competition, which is the Brand Manager’s Challenge.

She further informed that this competition was part of P&G’s commitment to touching and improving lives through talent development, as the competitors will get hands-on experience on how to solve P&G challenges on a more professional level.

According to her, “talent development is a top business priority for us at P&G because our people are our greatest competitive advantage. This makes us aim at attracting, hiring and retaining the very best talent. Our investment in growing and developing talent over time has made us known for developing the finest business leaders.”

The P&G CEO Challenge is a virtual competition among university students across the globe aimed at identifying, developing and grooming business leaders of tomorrow. The competition requires interested participants to form a three-man team from the same university who will together attempt to resolve the case studies that will be thrown to the competitors in the course of the challenge.

“The competition will be in five stages and stage one will be kicking off very soon with the 129 surviving teams. We have designed a case study-based challenge to give them the opportunity to experience working on world class brands and developing their business acumen via face to face interactions with top P&G leaders at the stage 3 of the competition, deliberating on solutions to business cases”, she said.

Talking on the modalities for the competition, Iluyemi said that the first elimination round is the Brand Manager Challenge in which 20 teams will be promoted to the second stage, which is called the Country Manager Challenge. Five teams are expected to emerge at the second phase level and move to the third phase which is the CFO Challenge.

From the CFO Challenge, a team will be promoted to the COO Challenge, where regional champions will compete to determine who advances to the last phase, the CEO Challenge. The winner of the CEO Challenge will emerge the overall champions of the competition.

The winning team will be sponsored on an all-expense-paid one week trip to Dubai. There will also be consolation prizes, including iPads, for grabs by the competitors.