A Global Career

Passerini has seen a lot of P&G in a nearly 30-year career with the company. Born and raised in Rome, he joined the company as a systems analyst, working in Italy for eight years. He took a stint in IT management in Istanbul, thinking he'd get some international exposure. He was right, moving to jobs in the U.K., Latin America, and P&G's Cincinnati headquarters. He still gets back to Rome every six or eight weeks, dropping in as he travels the world to see his mother and other family members.

Passerini, by his admission, is not a patient man ("I'm working on that," he says, in his rich Italian accent), even after three decades navigating the bureaucracies of a sprawling multinational company. He dreads that a good idea might wallow in the concept stage.

"We take a lot of risk," Passerini says. "When there's a new idea, rather than talk about it philosophically, we do a pilot for free with one of the business operating units."

That's how one of Passerini's major successes, P&G's information cockpit, got started. There were plenty of days when it looked like this idea was doomed to crash and burn.