Being disciplined in 'how and where to play'.

• Author: Luke, John
• Position: LEADERSHIP - Company overview

I joined Westvaco, MWV's predecessor company, upon graduating from Wharton. The company had a long history of industry leadership and was very well managed, diligently and successfully staking out ways to win in its field, here and around the world. It had operations throughout North America and Brazil, and beachheads around the globe to support product distribution. Innovation and productivity were core to the company's values, as were integrity and a strong bias to build for the long term.

I learned a great deal from my predecessors about competitive positioning, sound financial management, and leadership, including building and nurturing a strong organization and culture, engagement in the communities where we live and work, and sustainability.

At the time, the company's principal lines of business included high-quality printing papers and packaging. Over the years, the business model had been continually shaped to position the company to seize emerging opportunities. While this had been successful, it became clear as we moved into the mid to late 1990s that the pace of change in our markets, heavily influenced by technology and the forces of globalization, had accelerated dramatically and posed a disruptive threat to our large printing papers business.

With great contributions from a strong team, we confronted this reality by aggressively assessing the challenge and initiating a series of transformational moves that combined a focus on what we did best with a clear read on where the best opportunities for growth and success lay. That was packaging, where we already had a sound business and saw very attractive global growth trends. Packaging is a large global market ($300 billion) in the segments we targeted for participation. And it is growing rapidly, 5-10 percent per annum, reflecting enhanced economic prosperity and middle class expansion in developing economies.

Just to put this into perspective, there are more middle class consumers in each of China and India than there are people in the United States. We know that those...