Read Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback Online
Authors: David Novak
I’d also venture to say that most of our 1. 4 million people around the world now know and do the Yum! cheer, spelling out the name of our organization: “Give me a Y,” the leader will say, and team members will shout back “Y!” and so on. When I first started doing things like these, I was told by some people that my “Western ideas” wouldn’t work in places like Asia or Europe. Boy, were those people wrong. I believe that, just like Bob, all people, no matter what they do or where they’re
from, want to know that they are important and to have fun while they’re doing their job. My favorite picture, which now hangs prominently on the walls of our headquarters, features two thousand restaurant general managers proudly doing the Yum! cheer on the Great Wall of China, all of their hands held up high to create the “Y” in Yum! It always reminds me that
my shadow has traveled a long way. It also reminds me of the power of taking people with you and the fact that it’s the key to achieving breakthrough results. My goal for this book is to share with you everything I’ve learned about how to lead your team so you can do just that.
Taking People with You
is not just another book filled with leadership principles you’ve heard time and time again. It’s really more of an action plan. It offers a very specific process that will help you maximize your potential as a leader and show you how to use your leadership skills to achieve the most important goals you can imagine. It’s a book that will force you to look in the mirror and challenge yourself to rise to a higher level. It’s a step-by-step guidebook and workbook, and by its end, you’ll walk away with a tangible plan that you can use over and over again to get big things done. This is a book that will help you become not just a better leader, but also a better person, by making you more self-aware and showing you how to build up the people around you.
How can I make such bold promises? I’m certain this book can do these things because I have been developing and testing its content for the past fifteen years. This book comes out of a leadership program of the same name that I have taught to more than four thousand people in my organization.
It all started back in 1996, when I was working for PepsiCo as the president of KFC and Pizza Hut. Roger Enrico, who was chairman of the company at the time, called me up and said, “David, I’d like you to create a leadership program for PepsiCo executives. You’ve got a pretty good reputation for building and aligning teams, and I’d like you to share what you know and what you do with others.”
I was really honored and excited by the opportunity, because this is just the sort of thing I love to do. I went to work on the program right away. I had pretty much figured out what I was going to present—I even
had a date scheduled to give my very first program to a group of fifteen PepsiCo executives—when I got a phone call that changed everything.
It was Roger again, only this time he had something different to tell me. “David,” he said, “we’re going to spin off the restaurants.” I immediately asked, “What the heck does that mean for our people and our company?”
What it meant was this: PepsiCo was going to keep its packaged foods brands—Pepsi and Frito Lay—but it was going to shed all three of its restaurant brands—KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. They were going to spin them off together to become a brand-new, totally independent public company.
I was part of the restaurant side of the business, of course, so it no longer made sense for me to give my leadership program to a group of PepsiCo executives that I wouldn’t be working with for much longer. The program got shelved, and I was distracted by other details, like who was going to lead this new company.
It turned out that the answer to that question was me, along with a guy named Andy Pearson, a past president of PepsiCo and a professor at Harvard Business School. I became president and Andy became the chairman and CEO, as well as my mentor even after he retired and I took over his position a couple years later. One of the first things Andy said to me when we were starting out was, “How would you like to have lunch with Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, and talk to him about what we’re going to do with our new company?”
Of course I said yes. The opportunity to pick the brain of one of the most successful businessmen alive was too good to pass up. I asked Jack every question I could think of and just sat there taking notes as he answered. One of my last questions was, “If you were in my position, about to start a new company, what would you do?”
What he said really hit home. He told me, “Looking back on my career at GE, one of the things I wish I could do over is I wish I would’ve talked to our people more about what kind of company I envisioned us to be … what our values were and what we really stood for.”
I went back to my office and spent the next week thinking about how I could do just that.
I wanted us to be a company with a unique culture, one that revolved around a genuine belief in people. I took another look at my leadership program, revised it, and made it part of communicating that message. My goal was to scale the program so that I could reach as many people as possible and make it relevant to a broad audience. There are obviously a lot of people I have to reach when I want to communicate an important message about our company. Launching this program was my first step toward building the unique Yum! culture.
I taught my Taking People with You program for the very first time to a group of just eight executives in London. In the years since then, I have expanded the reach significantly and strengthened the content, constantly adding to it, refining it, and making it better. As CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ve had the opportunity, along with my team, to study best practices and learn from some of the most successful companies in the world. I’ve interviewed experts like Jim Collins on building great companies, Larry Bossidy on execution, Bob Rotella on the psychology of winning, John Wooden on coaching for performance, Noel Tichy on having a “teachable point of view,” and Ken Blanchard on creating a people-first culture. I’ve sought insights from highly respected active CEOs, like Jamie Dimon, Indra Nooyi, Bill Weldon, Jeff Immelt, Dave Cote, Steve Burke, Randall Stephenson, Andy Taylor, and Alan Mulally.
I’ve also benefited from the wisdom of a prestigious board of directors that includes David Dorman, Ken Langone, Massimo Ferragamo, Jon Linen, David Grissom, Tom Nelson, Bonnie Hill, Tom Ryan, Bob Holland, and Bob Walter. (At the back of this book is a list of people I’ve sought knowledge from in one way or another, including in-depth, videotaped interviews that I’ve done with many of them to share with the participants in my leadership program.) In the coming pages, you will see how these people, who are some of the most successful leaders and experts alive today, apply many of the steps in this book to their own businesses.
This book also benefits from the inclusion of interactive tools, which have been provided by two of the most notable thinkers on culture and breakthrough thinking in business:
John O’Keeffe.
During a visit to the Yum! division in China a few years ago, I noticed that team members there displayed a tremendous drive for performance. Everyone I talked to had these big goals that they were working on, and they all used language like
step-change
and
breakthrough.
The division was then, and still is, hugely successful, China being our largest and most rapidly expanding market, so I had to find out what this was all about. I asked the head of our China division, Sam Su, and he told me about this Business Beyond the Box training course he had taken in London, given by an international speaker, author, and former colleague of Sam’s at Procter & Gamble, John O’Keeffe. Sam had liked it so much that he had the materials translated into Mandarin and personally taught them to everyone on his team. I was so impressed with how the training had worked in China that I
wanted everyone in our organization to be exposed to it. Now, thanks to the efforts of our vice president of people development, Tim Galbraith, we have cascaded and taught a version of John’s program (which we call Achieving Breakthrough Results) in every corner of our organization. It has become an invaluable part of our training at Yum! Brands. John has generously allowed us to use a number of his tools from that program throughout this book.
Larry Senn.
I first met and worked with Larry, founder and chairman of Senn Delaney, when I became the president of KFC in the mid-1990s. Out of the blue, I got a letter from a culture expert who said he had a process, including tools and exercises, that helped people become better leaders and work better as a team. I met with him and was so impressed that I took my KFC team to an offsite meeting in Blackberry, Tennessee, to learn from Larry. They in turn were so impressed that they took the tools to their own team members, and Larry’s influence kept spreading until it reached our front-line employees. I used Larry and the Senn Delaney process again when I took over Pizza Hut and in the first years after the spin-off when we used his tools to grow and implement our culture all around the world. Several of my favorites among Larry’s tools are included in this book.
I still teach my Taking People with You program regularly—up to eight times a year, in fact, in three-day sessions each time—and people often ask me how, in my position, I can afford to spend so much time on it. I figure that with three famous brands and an international infrastructure already in place, if I can teach our people how to get big things done, then just imagine the potential for even more growth. I’m pleased to say that despite global challenges, Yum! Brands has been growing during these hard economic times. Our stock has increased over six times, and we’ve had 13 percent growth or more for the past nine years. The fact that our organization has put the lessons in this book into action is a major reason behind our success.
A good leader has to be goal-oriented; otherwise you might end up just leading people around in circles. So I’ll start you off in the next chapter with a provocative question: What’s the single biggest thing you can imagine that will grow your business or impact your life?
Once you’ve set a goal for yourself in
chapter 1
, each subsequent chapter focuses on a single step along the path to achieving it. These steps are divided into three sections: (1) getting into the leadership mind-set, (2) developing a plan and building alignment, and (3) following through, on both the execution of that plan and the support of your people.
At the end of each chapter, you will be challenged to self-reflect on where you stand in relation to the lesson you just read and asked to apply what you learned to your current goal. Each of the book’s three parts will end with additional questions to help you turn these lessons into action, so that this becomes more than just a passive reading experience. This is a book you can use to truly grow and improve and reach your goals.
My coaching is that you do
not
sit down and read this book cover to cover in one sitting. If you do, you’ll be selling yourself short. This is a workbook on how to get things done better and faster by getting people fired up to help you achieve your goals. To do this right, you need to take your time, reflecting on each step and on your own leadership
style. In fact, I suggest that you read no more than one chapter a day. Altogether there are fourteen chapters in this book, which means that in just two weeks, you can be well on your way to being the kind of leader who accomplishes big things. If you’re willing to put in the time, I believe this could be one of the most powerful and most action-oriented books you’ve ever read.
You have to begin by asking yourself three big questions that will drive your approach to leadership and allow you to take people with you. They are:
Before I ask you to answer these questions, I need to explain the right way to approach them. When Roger Enrico first asked me to develop a program on leadership, the request forced me to take a look in the mirror and ask myself what was my key to taking people with me. How, exactly, was I able to get people on the same page and marching toward a goal? I concluded that the core of my leadership success stems from my ability to think like a marketer.
My current title is CEO, but I’m a marketer at heart. I graduated not from Harvard Business School, but from the University of Missouri with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a major in advertising. My first job out of college was as a copywriter at a tiny ad agency in Washington, D.C.,
that worked on only local business accounts. From those modest beginnings, my career grew to where it is today.
In marketing, if you can get inside the minds of your customers, you have the opportunity to solve their problems for them in a way that can improve your business. You need to have a good understanding of what they’re thinking and why they’re thinking that way. In order to get people to buy your product, for example, you have to start by gaining insight into what will convince them that they can’t or shouldn’t live without it. To be a successful leader, one who gets big things done, you need to have the same kind of insight into the minds of those you lead.
To give you an example of how this works in marketing, let me tell you how we turned around Taco Bell several years ago. Taco Bell is our most profitable brand in the United States today, but a number of years ago, we were struggling. As a result, we did a problem-detection study and found out the biggest, most important, and most frequently occurring problem customers had with our brand was that our products weren’t portable because they were just too messy. Our tacos, burritos, and nachos just didn’t work on the go, and they could easily end up in your lap if you dared to eat and drive. That’s a real issue when 70 percent of your business comes from the drive-thru.