A Conversation with Chip Bergh, former CEO of Levi Strauss

On risk, leadership, and knowing when to leave

Editor’s Note: The Harbus is enthused to introduce our Leadership column, a series of conversations with leaders from across business and society. Our hope is to share their insights with the broader HBS community. We sat down with Chip to discuss the path to the top, what it’s like to run an iconic global brand, what makes a successful leader, and how he knew it was time to hand over the reins.

Pranav Bharadwaj: There’s no single path to becoming a CEO. But some talented people make it and others do not. What sets the successful group apart?

Chip Bergh: There are a couple of common themes. First, there is always a certain amount of luck—being in the right place at the right time can sometimes be the difference.

But, second, the people who make it to CEO usually have a track record of not being afraid to take career risk. They put themselves out there. They sign up for assignments that nobody else wants. They go overseas. They look for big challenges that will stretch them and grow them.

I was blessed to spend 28 years at P&G, and it is a promote-from-within company. They did a better job managing my career than I might have done on my own. They put me into assignments I’m not sure I would have raised my hand for. And, assignments where I felt I may not have been ready. So I do think there is this element of stretching yourself, constantly focusing on your own growth and not being afraid to take chances along the way.

Was there a mentor who really shaped you?

Yes—and to this day he is still my mentor. He took a real interest in me, even before he became my boss.

When I had the opportunity to come to Levi’s as CEO, I was faced with this career decision: do I quit a company I had been at for 28 years and take a chance on being a CEO in a completely different industry? I had my thesis on why I thought I was a good fit for the role. But the track record of CEOs coming from consumer packaged goods into apparel was not good.

My mentor had already retired from P&G, and I flew to Cincinnati to have dinner with him and ask what he thought. 

He said: Here I am today in my seventies, and I still wonder whether I would have been a good CEO. And if you think you may be asking yourself that question when you are seventy, go scratch the itch now.

That was incredibly helpful. I’m forever thankful for his mentorship.

If you were graduating from business school today and wanted eventually to become a CEO, what path would you choose?

If it were me, I would probably do what I did all over again, because it worked. But your generation is different, and the world is different too.

There aren’t many companies like P&G today. There aren’t many places people go and stay for thirty or forty years. So you are going to have to be very intentional about your career.

If your ambition is to become a CEO, you have got to build a solid foundation. So my advice would be: when you leave school, look for something where you can stay for the first four or five years, probably get at least one promotion, and establish real credibility in a function or industry.

The firm probably matters a little. Your first boss matters a lot. There was a ton of data at P&G about the importance of your first manager, because that can make all the difference in how you get set up for the rest of your career.

And I think you should manage your career in three-to-five-year windows. Every few years, ask: what do I need to learn, how do I need to grow, and what challenge should I be looking for next?

What should people look for in an early manager?

Sometimes the challenge is that the people interviewing you may not even end up being your manager. That happened to me at P&G.

But if you are able to have a say in who your boss is, look for someone who seems genuinely committed to your development and growth.

The best way to find that out is to ask about their track record. Who has worked for them before? What are those people doing now? Did they continue to grow in the company? That is usually the best indication of what kind of leader they are going to be for you.

Many graduates think they can shortcut the journey by joining a smaller or earlier-stage company. How do you see that route?

I think it is a legitimate path. At an earlier-stage company, you will probably get more exposure to many different things much sooner. You might be doing marketing one day and supply chain the next. I don’t think there is necessarily a right or wrong path. Each has strengths and downsides.

If you go to a big company like P&G, you are going to get a more rigorous and disciplined foundation. At an earlier-stage company, you are going to get broader exposure and more opportunity to do different things, but probably less structured training and development.

And if you have a great idea and you are passionate about starting a business, now is the time to do it. Being a founder is the fastest way to the top. But you have got to be successful - as everyone knows, the odds of success are low.

Looking back on Levi’s, what are you proudest of? And what would you have done differently?

I’m most proud of the team that I built, and I’m also very proud of the succession plan. My successor is doing great, and that makes me proud.

But we also turned Levi’s around. It is one of the most iconic brands in the world, and it had been on a more-than-decade-long decline when I joined. We turned it around and put Levi’s back at the center of culture. At the end of the day, that is probably the thing I’m most proud of.

What would I have done differently? Speed. Everything took too long. I wish we had done the women’s relaunch faster. I wish we had made more progress on DTC faster.

What were the big decisions behind that turnaround?

Levi’s Stadium was definitely one. That was a huge bet. We signed that deal in 2013, when the company had only just had its first year of top- and bottom-line growth in over a decade.

What we did know was that when Levi’s was at its best, we were at the center of culture. That was our war cry: put Levi’s back at the center of culture. And culture, in the US and in many parts of the world, is sports and entertainment.

Before I joined Levi’s, I was running Gillette at P&G, and Gillette has Gillette Stadium. I knew the economics of stadiums, and I knew how good that kind of investment could be. So Levi’s Stadium was a big bet, but it worked, and it really did begin to put Levi’s back at the center of culture.

Another big thing was reconnecting with consumers. The company had gutted the advertising budget when the business was declining. I was doing a consumer visit in Bangalore, and one woman said to me: “You wear other jeans, you live in Levi’s.” I thought, that is it. “Live in Levi’s” became our advertising, and once we started putting money behind it in 2014 and 2015, the business really started to inflect.

The third big bet was women’s apparel. When I joined, women’s was only about 20 per cent of the business. We decided we were going to go big and really try to win back women. Today it is still not 50 per cent, but it is north of 40 per cent of the business.

And then there was DTC. We started really investing in our own retail stores, ecommerce and retail capabilities. That business has gone from 20% to almost 50% in the last 14 years. 

When you run a brand like Levi’s, are you a custodian of it or someone trying to remake it?

That was one of the real tension points. I used to talk about it like the Johnnie Walker logo: one foot firmly rooted, the other moving forward.

We had to stay rooted in authenticity and originality. Levi’s is the original. We are the OG when it comes to denim. But at the same time, you cannot just rest on your laurels. If you do that, you become dusty and old. Nobody wants to buy their father’s jeans.

So yes, there is an element of stewardship, but I hate the word “caretaker” because it sounds like all you are doing is protecting the status quo. You also have to innovate and keep driving the brand forward.

Levi’s is also a brand that seems to stand for America around the world. How did you balance that with local relevance?

It is a big global brand, distributed in well over 100 countries. In some markets, Levi’s is seen very much as a classic American brand. In others, consumers do not really think about it that way—they just see it as a great brand in their market.

That is true in India, for example.

I think every global company struggles with how much you do globally versus how much you localize. For us, a lot of the supply chain and big investment decisions were global, but a lot of the marketing and activation was done very locally.

Music is a big part of the brand, and music festivals are very local. So the brand would show up consistently around the world, but in a locally relevant way. That was a big part of the balance.

How did you know it was time to step down?

I went into the job thinking I was going to do about 10 years. Then the pandemic happened, and I wasn’t going anywhere in the middle of that.

But I had already been working with the board on succession since 2017. We had a very rigorous process, with development plans and succession plans reviewed with the full board twice a year.

Then the pandemic happened, and I lost my succession candidates because they went off to become CEOs elsewhere. So I had an empty bench.

At the same time, I had become very clear that what the company needed next was somebody with deep retail experience. We were becoming much more of a retailer, and DTC was becoming a much more important part of the growth story.

I felt I had done what I came to do. My thesis was: if I fix the brand, it will fix the company. And we fixed the brand, fixed the company, and took the company public.

Then Michelle (my successor) became available, and I felt she was exactly what the company needed next. So it was a process. There was not one day where I woke up and said, it’s time. The most important thing was having the right successor.

What does good leadership mean to you now?

If you had asked me this question five years ago, you probably would have gotten a different answer. But right now, I think the most important characteristic of being a good leader is humility.

It is about being selfless. One of the things that gets in people’s way is ego and wanting the job because it is about them. That can be a real blind spot.

Being a CEO requires a huge amount of selflessness. It cannot be about you. It has got to be about the team, the brand and the business.

Beyond that, great leaders bring out the very best in the people who work for them. They set high expectations, but they also provide the coaching and resources people need to meet them.

People who do that consistently become talent magnets. Everybody wants to work for them because they have a track record of developing talent.

And over time, helping people go on to do great things becomes the most satisfying part of your career. That has certainly been true for me.

How do you balance coaching people with making the tougher calls on roles, exits and reorganisations?

One thing I would say is that sometimes I kept people too long. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I moved too fast on that person.”

We all want to make sure we have given people a shot at turning around a performance issue. But human nature is to wait too long to call the question.

If you are tolerating underperformance, there is a very high probability that people in your organization know that—and that is a reflection on you.

So I would say two things. One, trust your instincts. Two, sooner is probably better than later.

How did you handle the emotionally difficult conversations?

I always rehearsed. Sometimes literally in front of a mirror if it was going to be a really hard conversation. At a minimum, I would run through the conversation in my head and think about where it might go.

And then you have to be human about it. It is never easy to tell somebody that you are letting them go. Do it with warmth and humanity to the extent that you can.

On larger organizational moves, what helped me most was that I was always a straight shooter with the organization. I was never into spinning things or trying to make a bad situation look good. I was direct, factual and human.

In today’s environment, what role should CEOs play in society more broadly?

My track record on this was pretty clear, but it was a different day. It is a very different world today.

The first responsibility a CEO has is to the business and to the stakeholders of the business. And today’s environment is very challenging. If you say something that goes sideways politically, you run the risk of your business—or you personally—being singled out.

But I spend a lot of time with CEOs still, and my sense is that they are still actively engaged in trying to make the world a better place. They are just doing it a little more quietly, because they have to.

At Levi’s, we also cultivated networks with other companies and CEOs. One example was getting out the vote. My whole line on it was simple: democracy only works if people vote. We gave employees time on election day to vote, and we worked with over 1000 other companies to do the same thing through timetovote.org.

Last question: which current CEO do you most admire, and why?

I’ve got a lot of CEOs I admire, but I’ll pick Joe Preston at New Balance.

It is a private, family-owned company right down the street from Harvard Business School, and New Balance is on a tear right now. They recently reported they had reached $10 billion in sales. They have really invested in connecting with the consumer and becoming more direct-to-consumer.

And he is the real deal. I talked about humility, and he is exactly that kind of guy. If you didn’t know he was the CEO, you would never guess it. He is down-to-earth, people love working for him, and he has delivered fantastic results over the last several years in a quiet, understated kind of way.

Chip Bergh is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., where he led the company from 2011 to 2024, including its return to the public markets in 2019 after a broader business turnaround. Before Levi’s, he spent 28 years at Procter & Gamble in a range of brand and leadership roles, and earlier served as a U.S. Army officer in West Germany. He currently serves as chair of HP Inc., sits on the boards of Pinterest, Lululemon, and e.l.f. Beauty, and is a Trustee of his alma mater, Lafayette College.

Pranav Bharadwaj (MBA '27) is from London, UK and the current CEO of the Harbus News Corporation.