Management tutorials, no matter how action-packed, are not known for their appeal to teenage boys. Some years ago, though, a series of informal chats about big business made a big impression on a young Jake Barr—an impression that has lasted throughout Barr's career.

Barr clearly had a business bias from early on. In high school, he was president of his Junior Achievement chapter. But what sticks with him from his teenage years are the long conversations with his sister-in-law's father, a senior manager at IBM who had developed the ball for the famous Selectric typewriter. “He was a walking glossary of insight about management and leadership skills,” recalls Barr. “He could give you chapter and verse about how everything at IBM ran—and about how to present the impact of a change he was planning.”

Barr took to heart his relative's lesson that good managers are knowledgeable about what goes on in their companies far beyond their immediate sphere of influence. A 25-year veteran of The Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G), Barr is associate director of supply network operations for Global Feminine Care, one of P&G's most important product lines. But he is perhaps best-known for his work in developing P&G's demand-driven supply strategy, which has become the linchpin of P&G's effort to make the consumer and shopper the primary focus of its supply network.

So how come he didn't end up running his own company? In practice, Barr has had plenty of entrepreneurial challenges at P&G and the freedom to deal with them—freedom that many founding entrepreneurs would envy.

The supply chain leader explains it this way: “At P&G, new hires need to be able to demonstrate immediately what they can do. They are not sidelined in training. In your first assignment, you have direct accountability for results. You're surrounded by coaches and mentors, but you are accountable for tangible things from day one.”

P&G is the perfect proving ground for young leaders—and one that fosters core leadership attributes. One such attribute, according to Barr, is an interest in and ability to effect change. “I've never found a winning leader who wasn't in some way a change agent,” he says. “They don't run away from change—they embrace it.”

That description fits Barr exactly. His team is responsible for delivering P&G's Consumer-Driven Supply Network (CDSN) operating strategy within the Global Feminine Care business. That strategy aims to ensure that brands such as Tampax are always available for consumers at the right place, time, quality, and value.

Barr consistently strives to improve on that mission. Retail shelf stocks are the perfect case in point. High in-stock levels are pivotal to P&G's success, both in the short term and over the long term. Barr cites retail industry data suggesting that out-of-stocks run at about 10 percent, with promotion and other special sales events pushing that number as high as 25 percent. The consequences are dramatic: more than 30 percent of consumers respond to out-of-stocks by not buying. That can mean that they do not even buy competitive brands, which results in lost sales for the retailers. After no more than three consecutive out-of-stock experiences, consumers change their habits and are willing to break even their most loyal ties to brands.

In his earlier role as associate director of supply network innovation in P&G's Global Supply Operations group, Barr was one of the primary architects of the CDSN system that has done so much to predict and minimize P&G's out-of-stocks. “The thing that has really made a profound difference has been focusing on the consumer,” he says. “You think about things differently when you look at what delights them, what will motivate them.”

Addressing a 2005 meeting of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, he pointed out that for manufacturers such as P&G, everything should be focused on winning two moments of truth: when the consumer chooses their brand and when the consumer uses the brand. “The consumer is the boss,” Barr told his audience. “And her needs are changing fast: She expects more new products and more diversity in those products. She expects products to be customized to her needs. And she is more sensitive than ever to cost and value.”

At the same time, noted Barr, the retailers have new demands. Their sector has been undergoing significant consolidation. They need cash more than ever, and they're more sharply focused on operating margins. They are also more interested in private labels, which increasingly represent good value and quality to the consumer.

As a leading supply chain innovator, Barr's job was—and to a large extent still is—to build supply chains that can accommodate more frequent product introductions while ensuring consistent deliveries to stores and as few stock-outs as possible. A key element of P&G's demand-driven supply chain initiative was the development of an analytical tool that detects out-of-stocks and alerts store managers accordingly. “The out-of-stock effort provided important insights into how the supply system behaved beyond our historical understanding of both the physical and information flow. This learning provided us with a better definition of what is required, relative to supply network capabilities, to support a winning 'first moment of truth' execution,” explains Barr.

Overall, the innovation efforts of the lead team have paid big dividends: the number of product categories with excessive shelf out-of-stocks has dropped from 20 percent to 7 percent in five years even though P&G now has more than twice as many product SKUs in the field.

Barr is quick to credit his team's performance for the results achieved. But he also credits P&G's culture of continuous improvement and its emphasis on leadership development. He notes that while the company consistently hires bright, motivated individuals, it goes further, seeking those who identify what needs to be done and who can help build the requisite bridges with others so the job gets done.

“Part of a leader's job is to remove roadblocks,” he explains. “They will help to position and package the risk vs. the reward. Winning leaders have very clearly defined values and beliefs. They're able to model them and articulate them in a way that makes people want to follow them.”

True leaders also focus on acquiring new skills to meet newer and larger challenges—not on a title they'd like to see on their business cards. That's a lesson Barr learned a long time ago. As a young manager in an assignment planning meeting, he recalls, he mentioned a specific job he wanted. His manager took him aside to offer this advice: focus instead on the skills he should acquire. Besides, said the manager, the actual role that Barr had cited was very likely to change in just a few years. The lesson sank in, helping Barr to accept challenging assignments in Asia and Latin America during the 1990s and to develop skills befitting a senior manager of a global manufacturing enterprise.

These days, Barr spends time coaching younger managers at P&G—an essential element of the company's strength in leadership development. As his relative once did with him, he urges the up-and-comers to really get to know the company inside and out beyond their own areas of responsibility. He also encourages a constant search for new processes and practices. “If you don't really understand what's going on outside your manufacturing or distribution area, it's very difficult to become much more than an administrative manager of a process. You're not leading change,” he says.

Outside of P&G, Barr serves on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Supply Chain 2020 (SC2020) Industry Advisory Council and as a member of SAP's Consumer Products Industry Advisory Council. Focused as it is on the big supply chain issues of tomorrow, the SC2020 initiative is nectar to an operations innovator like Barr. It meshes perfectly with how he thinks about supply chain contingency planning. “I don't mean that in the context of the effects of Sept. 11,” he says. “I mean it in the context of supply network design. It's about how you factor in market conditions and economic conditions to shape your supply chain network.”

And in the highly unlikely event that Barr runs out of intriguing supply chain challenges at P&G? You'll probably find him doing something he loves just as much: teaching emerging managers about the elements of supply network design and about the many unwritten rules of good leadership.

Which seems like the perfect continuation of the entrepreneurial journey that Barr began back in the days when there were such things as typewriters.