P.&G. started in 1837, and it’s still going strong, at a time when the average lifetime of a publicly traded company is only 17 years. The company has enormous values that permeate all levels and all places in the world that it operates. Ethics, doing the right thing for the long term, taking care of your community is really the way you want a responsible business to be run. A search for excellence would also apply to P.&G. You always wanted to ensure that you had the best products.

At Nestlé I found a totally different way of doing things. P.&G. was a little bit insular because the results until then were fairly good, so you also think you’re invincible to some extent. Nestlé is a very modest Swiss company, and thinks quite differently. It’s far more decentralized because the food business means working a lot with farmers and investing in these countries. It had a big footprint in these emerging markets, and a business model that is flexible. Food, by nature, is a little bit more local.

And how did you wind up as C.E.O. of Unilever?

I ended up at Nestlé as the chief financial officer, and then Unilever was looking for a new C.E.O. They interviewed quite a lot of people, but at the end they chose me. I insisted t hey check that there were no better people out there, because I knew there were. Once you get the challenge under your skin, you want to go for it. It’s an Anglo-Dutch company, and being Dutch myself, that’s how I became the C.E.O. 10 years ago.

When you go from one company to another, you learn a little bit of modesty, you learn listening skills. I could not have gone from P.&G. to Unilever. But having three years at Nestlé prepared me for the job at Unilever.

Pretty soon after you started at Unilever, you launched an ambitious sustainability agenda. To what extent was that mind-set being developed during your time at P.&G. and Nestlé?

At P.&G., I moved to Newcastle and was responsible for the U.K. and Ireland. In Newcastle, many people had lost their jobs, and for the first time I saw second-generation unemployment. We were the biggest employer, so I got involved in efforts to help make that community grow. This was a defining moment. I began to orient a little bit less just toward myself and my career, and got a little bit broader perspective of humanity and what are the more important things in life.

Going to Nestlé, it added another dimension because Nestlé is incredibly strong in these on-the-ground programs, investing in these emerging markets and helping build up economies over 10, 20, 30 years’ time. Those two learnings were the most important ones I took with me going to Unilever.