Biography|Chris Kempczinski — Four Years on Soap Brands at One Procter and Gamble Plaza

The first job after Duke was not hamburgers. It was soap. Kempczinski joined Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati in brand management and spent about four years in the soap sector. Contemporary profiles name Comet, Mr. Clean, and Spic and Span as the brands on his desk. The company still occupies One Procter and Gamble Plaza in downtown Cincinnati. That towers-and-plaza campus is the place where a Cincinnati-raised Duke graduate learned packaged-goods brand work before he left for Harvard Business School. He was not yet in restaurants. He was learning how a consumer company prices, packages, and repeats a household product. That training is what later employers at PepsiCo, Kraft, and McDonald's kept hiring. The plaza is a working headquarters, not a museum. Visitors see the towers from the street. They do not see the brand rooms of the early 1990s. Photo: Derek Jensen (Tysto), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons