Lessons - The CEO Who Ran 1.5 Million Employees at KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell | David Novak - Fmr Chairman & CEO of Yum! Brands ($50B+ Revenue)

In this lessons episode, discover why the best leaders turn learning into consistent action and measurable results. Understand how curiosity and pattern thinking uncover new opportunities. Explore why seeking knowledge from unexpected sources accelerates growth and uncover practical ways to transform insights into lasting business success. So let's talk about learning a little bit. We've sort of woven in learning into a couple different things we've spoken about, but your book is How Leaders Learn. So you took a whole bunch of lessons from your career from people that you spoke to, and you spoke to some incredible people. But you recognize sort of three different things or three different types of behavior required to learn. So let's talk about those. Okay. Maybe, do you want me, I can go through them right now. So, I mean, and then you can sort of, yeah, because you have, so you can, if you're going to try to learn properly, you have to learn from anybody and any experience that has something new or interesting and valuable to teach you. You have to learn to maintain an open, curious mind. So curiosity, you know, the forever student, very important. And then learn by doing things that need to doing or that will make the biggest difference. So sort of three things. attributes of learning that are important. So let's go maybe expand on lessons that you've experienced personally or some of the awesome people that you've interviewed. Go one by one. So learning from anybody. Give me like a practical example or a way that that has impacted your career in a major way. Well, the first thing, a great one on that is a chapter on, you know, learn from people who know what you don't. When I came up in PepsiCo, I was the marketing person. And so I went to Wayne Calloway, who was the chairman of PepsiCo, and I'd always have meetings with him every quarter. And, you know, finally he asked me. What do you want to do in your career? And I said, well, you know, I'd like to be a president of division. He said, well, you know what, David, you're a really good marketing person. And I said, well, I'd really like to be a president of division. He said, you're a really good marketing person. I said, no, I want to run something. Oh, you're a really good marketing person. Well, I walked out of there, and I knew that I was going to have to demonstrate that I was more than a good marketing person. So... You know, the chief operating officer job came up at Pepsi-Cola Company. So I go to my boss at that time, Craig Weather, beg him for the opportunity, tell him he can fire me in six months if I do a bad job. But give me the opportunity to demonstrate that I'm more than a marketing person. Okay. Now, when I got that job, Scott, I didn't know anything about bottling. I'd been into a bottling plant, but I'd gone in sort of as the marketing person where I'm walking around and I'm thinking about what creative ideas I got to get done while I'm in this bottling plant. I wasn't really paying it any attention. So I didn't know anything. So what I did is I went to the people who did. I found out who the top operating people were at Pepsi-Cola Company, brought them in, asked them what's working, what's not working, what they would do if they were B. And, you know, then I used my power to get after that. Then I also went out into the bottling plants and met with the front line. These people know the business better than anybody else. I would buy them coffee in the morning, and we'd sit down, and we'd talk for a couple hours about what was working, what's not working. And these people knew what I didn't. And then I applied it. Now, it's one of the things I talk about. I used to think that being an avid learner was the key thing that really drove success. You know what? If you're an avid learner, you can learn stuff for learning's sake. The real thing is, can you turn the corner and pair that learning with execution? Okay? That's when you become an active learner. And that's what I write about in the book. How do you become an active learner where you actually take the learning and pair it with execution? And that's exactly what I did when I was the chief operating officer. I learned all this stuff. Then I used all the power I had to come back and put the processes and discipline in place and get people working on the things that I knew were the biggest problems. But I couldn't have solved all those problems. I couldn't have done it. I didn't know anything about operations. But, man, I got a lot of really good results in a real hurry because I learned from people who don't. Who learned from people who did know a lot more than me. Yeah, exactly. And I think that also, like, there is a little bit of a culture of accumulating knowledge. I think people like to listen to podcasts, and they like to read books, and they like to do all that stuff. But, I mean, you got to apply. You got to apply. That's what differentiates. Scott, you know, how many times have you seen people? I used to drive me nuts. OK, you know, you go to a three day seminar. You say, oh, that's really terrific. You come back. Nothing changes. You know, it happens so much. So, like, I taught a leadership program at Young Brands. And one of the things I talk about is learn to teach. Yeah. Because if you teach, then you'll learn, you'll know it even better and you'll share. You're not hoarding your knowledge. You're building the capability of your people. But we did a, I did a three-day program called Taking People With You, which I wrote a book called Taking People With You, the only way to make big things happen. And to make sure that people didn't just come in and learn about my approach and then just go back and do the same thing. I had 30-day follow-up, 90-day follow-ups, and six-month follow-ups where they had to show what they were doing with the single biggest thing that could have the biggest impact in our company, which is they had to come in with that project when they came to the program. Then I followed up, and they had to demonstrate to me that they were putting the learning and putting it into use. Okay, so they're actually, like, you're doing, like, a specific call to action after a seminar. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people go to these seminars and they go back, and I pick up something. But, you know, if I'm going to spend three days teaching people everything I know about how to take people with them to get the single biggest thing that they're working on done, okay, then I got to put some sort of mechanism in place that drives execution. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, another good example of this, for me personally, when I became the head of Yum Brands, I was a marketing operations background now, didn't know how to work with the investment community. So I found a way to get into Warren Buffett's office in 1998 and asked him how to work with the investment community. He said, David, he said, you know, You got to tell them you're in a tough business. You're going to win more than you lose, but you're going to be doing the right thing. And tell them what the problems are that you have. That'll give you credibility. Now, I'm a salesperson. I was like, oh, man, we're the greatest company. No problems at all. But then what I started doing, I said, now, if you buy our stock, you need to realize that we potentially could have this happen or that happen or whatever. And then investors would start arguing with me and say, that's not really going to happen. That's fine. But I was sober selling. I learned to sober sell from Warren Buffett. And it was something that I thought was very, very powerful. But I put it into use immediately when I started going out to Wall Street and talking to investors. What percentage of a CEO or leader, chairman, whatever's job is market making? I didn't even think about that. You had to do that regularly as well? Yeah, I think it's the one thing that the CEO has to do, okay? Because, you know, you've got other people doing other things. I had presidents of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, and, you know, but when it comes to growing the stock and telling the story and getting people excited about what our future was internally and externally, I viewed that to be my job. So, you know... You got to watch what you say, though. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do. You have to be a sober salesperson. You got to not get carried away. You know, you got to and you got to do what you say, you know. Yeah. But the reason why our company did so well, Scott, is we had 13 percent earnings per share growth for 13 straight years in a row. Yeah. OK. You know, so that that gives you a little bit of credibility over time. And that wasn't me. That was just the organization and everything that we were doing together. Yeah, of course. Second thing, curiosity. So being a student all the time, I think is super important. You were showing me this, like when you list off the things that you talk about in the book, sometimes you're like, okay, it's a nice, it sounds nice, but does this guy actually do this stuff in real life? And then five minutes for the podcast again, you're asking me everything that I've done about the podcast. So I know that you live this every single day. So let's talk about some other examples, maybe somebody that you spoke to on your show or even yourself. I mean, you said you're always a student, you're always learning. How do you leverage that for your career, for your business, for whatever it is you're building? Well, you know, one of the things, moving on to the second thing, you learn from things like your upbringing, new environments, being a truth teller, crises. You know, I write about all these things that you can learn from. You also can learn to, you know, ask better questions, you know. Check on your own judgment, you know, see the way the world the way out really is, not the way you necessarily want it to be. But one of the things I talk about is you need to learn to be a pattern thinker. You know, one way that I did it, and I'll give you an example of how somebody else did it, okay, was when I was on the Frito-Lay account, they needed a new product idea. So I said to my team, I said, look, let's go to the grocery store and let's just walk around, see what's growing. So we get to the salad dressing aisle. Okay. This was for Doritos. We get the salad dressing aisle and we realize that ranch flavored dressing had the most facings and was the fastest growing new salad dressing. So I come back and I call Dennis Hurt, who was the head of R&D at Frito-Lay, and say, hey, look, this ranch flavor is really, really growing. Do you think we could do a ranch flavored Dorito? He goes, yeah, I think we could. So we ended up doing cool ranch Doritos. Huge success. But it was patterned. Delicious. I looked at what was going on in the salad dressing category and said, how can we do it in the snack business, okay? You know, and then, you know, I talked to Roger Goodell on one of my podcasts, okay? He goes to, he visits technology companies every year. He goes out and goes to Google and Apple and, you know, Microsoft, you know, and then he comes back and figures out, you know, you know, what they could do. Now, years ago, he made sure that the stadiums all had Wi-Fi and, you know, so, but he put it into action. And so he looks at what's happening in another part of the world and says, how can I apply it in my business? Okay. And I think if you can learn to be a pattern thinker, all of a sudden you open up all kinds of ideas. You know, that's why I always loved reading the Wall Street Journal. marketing magazines, everything. And I go, well, if they're doing this at Dick's Sporting's Goods, how could I do that at Taco Bell? Yeah, it's going to be different. It is not going to be the same, but it's going to give you ideas that you otherwise wouldn't have. And if you can find success and learn from it and then say, how can I apply it to my business? Man, you're opening up all kinds of avenues for growth. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.