P&G CEO Faces Crisis Over Whether Brand Empire Is Still Too Big

  • Activist investor Nelson Peltz slams culture as slow, insular
  • Taylor, who became CEO in 2015, rose up through company ranks

Trian Nominates Nelson Peltz for P&G Board Seat

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David Taylor, a company man at Procter & Gamble Co. who spent decades working his way up the corporate ladder, is now confronting his biggest challenge: whether the business’s slow-and-steady culture has doomed it to fail.

P&G, a consumer-products empire that includes Crest, Gillette and Tide, is in the cross hairs of activist investor Nelson Peltz, whose firm Trian Fund Management is lobbying for a board seat. Though Peltz isn’t calling for a breakup of the company -- or suggesting that Taylor be ousted -- he has criticized P&G’s unwieldy number of brands and its “suffocating bureaucracy.”