Philip Morris: The CEO trying to make his own product obsolete

Jacek Olczak is attempting something few chief executives would willingly sign up for: dismantling the core product that built his company. As CEO of Philip Morris International, his strategy is not incremental change but full-scale reinvention and it offers a striking lens on how leaders approach transformation when the stakes are existential.

At the heart of Olczak’s thinking is a clear-eyed acceptance of reality. “We essentially want to once and forever solve the problem of smoking by leaving cigarettes the way we know them behind,” he says. That ambition is not just moral positioning. It is grounded in a hard commercial logic: if a better product exists, continuing to back the old one becomes indefensible. “If you have a product which creates harm and you know that you can create a product which has 95 or more reduced exposure, why the heck should we be spending the time on the old product?”

What follows is a level of self-disruption many organisations struggle to execute. Olczak describes actively cannibalising Philip Morris’s most iconic brands. “Somebody asked me, are we really so committed that we are willing to throw Marlboro under the bus? I said we already did it,” he explains. Resources, investment and attention have been almost entirely redirected. “99.9% is working for the new products. I’m not investing at all in the old products”.

The scale and speed of this shift are what set it apart. While corporate reinvention is not new — Olczak points to examples from mining to food or paper to telecoms — those transitions took decades. “We want to do it fast,” he says, reflecting a broader reality: technology and market cycles no longer allow for slow evolution. According to McKinsey research published in 2025, companies that reallocate more than 50 per cent of capital expenditure within a decade are significantly more likely to outperform peers, underlining the importance of decisive capital shifts in transformation.

Yet strategy alone is not enough. Olczak repeatedly returns to culture as the anchor that allows radical change to stick. Capabilities such as “people’s belonging culture highly motivated, fully aligned with the purpose” are, in his view, the assets that survive reinvention. These are not easily replicated or acquired, but they are what enable organisations to pivot without losing coherence.

Trust, however, remains the defining challenge. Leading a transformation from within a controversial industry means operating under constant scrutiny. Olczak does not attempt to sidestep that tension. “It’s perfectly okay that people are sceptical, you cannot take it as the currency,” he says. Instead, he frames trust as something earned through consistency over time, not assertion. In a public company environment, he notes, claims are continually tested: “If we say we go smoke free, they will very quickly verify, you really doing this or you’re not doing this?”

There is also a pragmatic recognition that transformation rarely happens in isolation. Entire ecosystems — regulators, suppliers, customers — must move in step. Olczak advocates for coordinated change, even suggesting structured “gliding paths” where industries transition over defined timeframes. It is a reminder that leadership often extends beyond the organisation itself.

Perhaps the most compelling insight is the willingness to embrace contradiction. Philip Morris continues to sell cigarettes even as it works to eliminate them, a tension Olczak argues is necessary to control the pace and direction of change. “As long as we have it together, we can manoeuvre this transformation,” he says.

For leaders, the takeaway is not the specifics of the sector, but the mindset. Transformation at scale demands uncomfortable trade-offs, sustained conviction and a readiness to undermine what once made you successful. In Olczak’s words, the task is not to be believed immediately, but to prove, over time, that the direction of travel is real.