Read Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback Online
Authors: David Novak
Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback
Taking People With You
The only way to make big things happen
‘David Novak is a great CEO. A lot of people claim to be good people managers, but David has actually made the investment to train the next generation of leaders at Yum! You will enjoy
Taking People with You
for its commonsense approach to, well, taking people with you.’
Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO, General Electric
‘David Novak is an inspiring leader and a very astute student of the art of management.’
Steve Burke, CEO, NBCUniversal
‘David Novak has led Yum! Brands to achieve phenomenal business performance. He has accomplished this by being a word-class leader/teacher. His book is a very readable and energizing hat trick combining a compelling personal leadership narrative, great case examples, and pragmatic tools for others to use to build winning organizations.’
Noel Tichy, professor and director, Global Citizenship Initiative at the University of Michigan, and coauthor with Warren Bennis of
Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
‘
Taking People with You
is recommended reading for anyone who wants to learn more about leadership. Whether you want to grow a business or just grow as a person, David Novak’s book contains valuable lessons on how to perform at your best and help others do the same.’
Andrew C. Taylor, chairman and CEO, Enterprise Holdings
‘David’s career is replete with excellent accomplishments in motivating teams and large organizations to achieve the extraordinary. Yum! Brands is a great example. This how-to book distills these lessons so they can easily be adopted by any organization. Just excellent!’
David Cote, chairman and CEO, Honeywell
‘No one exemplifies dedicated personal leadership better than David. He has taught a class in leadership for many years and now is sharing those lessons in his book,
Taking People with You
. David shares his strategies for the kind of meaningful leadership that can move an organization forward and provides examples from his own career and from many other companies including Johnson & Johnson. I highly recommend
Taking People with You
for leaders at all levels in every organization.’
William C. Weldon, chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson
‘Over the course of my nearly thirty-five-year career, I’ve worked with many different executives. Few are true leaders. David Novak is one of those rare individuals. Whether you are just starting your career or have already climbed a few rungs, the lessons taught in
Taking People with You
are dead on and should be universally embraced by anyone who wants to get ahead in business or in life. You can’t do it alone. And the ride is a whole lot more interesting when you’re surrounded by bright people who constantly and respectfully challenge one another to do their best.’
Howard Draft, executive chairman, Draftfcb
‘Great leaders understand their leadership point of view and are willing to share it with others. That’s what David Novak has done for years with Yum! Brands, Inc.—and we are now fortunate enough to have him share his winning philosophies with us. I’m a big David Novak fan and you will be, too, after reading
Taking People with You
—a must read!’
Ken Blanchard, coauthor of
The One Minute Manager®
and
Lead with LUV
Introduction: Taking People with You
1
An Insight-Driven Approach to Leading People and Achieving Big Goals
2
Be Your Best Self: Be Yourself, Know Yourself, Grow Yourself
3
Be an Avid Learner: Seek and Build Know-how
5
You Have to Believe It Can Be Done
HAVE A PLAN: STRATEGY, STRUCTURE, CULTURE
6
Strategy: Tell It Like It Is … and How It Could Be
7
Strategy: Create a Vision and Personalize It
8
Strategy: Gain Alignment Every Step of the Way at Every Level
9
Structure: Resources, Organization, and Process Enable Execution
10
Culture: Make “Winning Together” a Big Idea
11
Market the Change: Be a Bold Ad for Your Big Goal
12
Understand and Overcome the Barriers to Success
13
Use Recognition to Drive Performance
Afterword: Be Your Own Big Goal: Move from Me to We
To my daughter, Ashley, and all the other people in the world who want to be the best leaders they can be.
A special thanks to all of you who shared your insights and coaching, which helped make this book possible.
All of the author’s proceeds will go to the United Nations World Food Programme.
I did my first Yum! cheer on Founder’s Day—October 7, 1997—the day we were spun off from PepsiCo, to help launch a new culture filled with fun and positive energy. Now our people are doing Yum! cheers around the globe, including these two thousand restaurant general managers who recently celebrated their success on the Great Wall of China.
This book starts with a basic premise: We all need people to help us along the way. You can go only so far by going it alone. If you want to start a business, if you want a big promotion, if you are developing or launching a new product, if you want your company to move in a new direction, if you want to expand your sales territory, if you want to raise money for a good cause, even if you become the coach of your child’s soccer team, which has lost every game so far, and you want to show those kids what it feels like to win, you’re going to need people to help you get there. You’ll never accomplish anything big if you try to do it alone.
Early in my career, I had an experience that changed how I thought about my own role as a leader and inspired me to accomplish what, for me, is my greatest example of taking people with you. I was working for PepsiCo at the time, making my way up through the ranks, and had recently become head of operations for Pepsi Bottling. I had held mainly marketing positions until then, so operations was a new world for me. One of the first things I did was travel to our various plants to meet with the people there and find out more about how things worked.
I was at a plant in St. Louis, conducting a 6:00 A.M. roundtable meeting with a group of route salesmen, when, over coffee and doughnuts, I asked what I thought was a pretty straightforward question about merchandising, which is all about the displays and visibility we get in convenience and grocery stores. I wanted to know what they thought was working and what wasn’t. Right away, someone piped up,
“Bob is the expert in that area. He can tell you how it’s done.” Someone else added, “Bob taught me more in one day than I’d learned in two years on the job.” Every single person in the room agreed: Bob was the best there was. I looked over at Bob, thinking he must be thrilled by all this praise. Instead, I saw that he had tears running down his face. When I asked him what was wrong, Bob, who had been with the company for over forty years and was about to retire in just two
weeks, said, “I never knew anyone felt this way about me.”
The rest of my visit to the plant went pretty well, but I walked away that day with an uneasy feeling. It was such a shame that Bob had never felt appreciated. It was a missed opportunity for the business, too. We all could have benefited from his expertise, and more people could have learned from him. This guy was clearly great at what he did, but who knows how much better he could have been in a workplace that recognized and rewarded his knowledge. I knew that if he felt overlooked and underappreciated, others at the plant did too.
I’ve always believed in people, but that experience made me even more determined to be the kind of leader who would never let a person like Bob go through his entire career without being thanked for what he did and encouraged to find out how much more he could do. I wanted the people who worked for me to know that they mattered, and I wanted them to enjoy coming to work every day. I also understood that none of this would happen unless I made it happen. It was my job to cast the right shadow of leadership, because no one else was going to live up to these principles unless I lived up to them first. As a leader, you always have to remember that people tend to follow the leader’s actions. You can’t say one thing and then do another and expect people to believe in you or follow you. As the leader, you have the opportunity to set an example of how the business should be run.
I am now chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, the world’s largest restaurant company and owner of the brands KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. When I started in this position over a decade ago, I thought of the Bobs of the world and made it one of my first priorities to create a recognition culture in which everyone counted and to do it so successfully that our company would become renowned for it. That was no
small task, considering we now have more than 1.4 million employees spread out over 117 countries around the world. But while we’re far from perfect, it’s working. I know it’s working, because I get proof of it practically every day.
Today I am probably best known within my organization for casting a shadow of recognition and positive energy. I do this demonstrably by: (1) recognizing people in a unique way for their performance and (2) leading people in our Yum! cheer every chance I get. These two aspects of our culture have traveled all the way around the world. When I first started giving out recognition awards, I decided I wanted them to be much more memorable than your typical plaque or a pen. So when I was at KFC, for example, I gave out these floppy rubber chickens. In my current position, I give out a huge set of smiling teeth mounted on a pair of skinny legs with big feet. Now everywhere we do business, leaders in our organization give out their own versions of these awards. Our HR director in India recognizes outstanding performers by giving them a replica of the Taj Mahal, because the workers who built it are remembered for their passion,
determination, and overall excellence. A general manager in Dubai gives out his Camel Award, because camels are revered animals in the desert, known for their steadfastness, perseverance, and undying spirit. The head of our construction department recognizes people with his Shovel Award, naturally, and our chief financial officer has his Show Me the Money Award, which consists of a transparent piggy bank filled with Monopoly money and a copy of the movie
Jerry McGuire,
in which that famous phrase originated. The fact that each leader took the time to personalize these awards makes recognition that much more meaningful and fun for everyone.
