In my late thirties, I campaigned to become chief operating officer of Pepsi’s beverage division in the East – and got the job. I was a little young for the position, but I had a bigger hurdle to overcome: I had almost no operational experience. Up until then, I had worked in marketing. I had convinced the CEO and chairman to give me a chance with a risky offer. If I couldn’t prove myself in six months, they could fire me or demote me. Neither option would help my career.
Why did I have the confidence to take the risk?
I knew something crucial about myself: I was an active learner. No matter what role or team I was on, I looked for good ideas and insights wherever I could find them, and then connected them to action and execution. It’s a habit and mindset I’ve seen in most leaders I admire and learned from throughout my career.
Active learning was crucial for me because I didn’t have the same level of education as many of my peers. I had a journalism degree from a state school, not an MBA from an Ivy League university. And because my father marked latitude and longitude with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Team, I moved from town to town every few months, living in over 30 trailer parks in 23 states before high school.
This is how my active learning began. When I was in elementary school, my mother worried that the frequent moves would hurt my education. My teacher in Dodge City, Kansas, Mrs. Anschultz, reassured her. “David has already lived in more places than most of these kids will visit in their lifetime,” she said. “Your son is getting the best education of anyone I know.”
I learned how to learn – as much as possible, from as many different people as possible, as quickly as possible. I learned that you never know where the next important idea might come from, and that you shouldn’t judge people or the value of their insights based on their background.
Through my willingness to learn, I have built a reputation for solving big problems and getting teams and brands on the right path. That’s how I succeeded as COO, which paved the way for my later role as CEO of Yum Brands. That’s how I helped grow Yum’s market cap from $8 billion to $32 billion during my 17-year tenure, and that’s how I’m making a positive impact on people’s lives today.
I have developed the important discipline to learn from everyone, every experience, and every new environment that has something valuable to offer.
For example, the first thing I did in my new role as COO was to tour our bottling plants. I knew I would learn the root causes of our big problems and the best solutions. But I didn’t go to the managers. I got up at 5 a.m. and talked to the route sales people, sometimes driving with them to meet our customers. I spent hours with people working on the lines and in the warehouses. “What do we need to do better?” I asked. “What are we doing right?” I learned that our forecasts were wrong. We were constantly running out of supplies. We couldn’t get product out of the warehouse fast enough. And morale was at rock bottom. When I asked the plant managers, they said, “How did you find out so quickly?”
I asked. I observed. I paid attention to the ideas and lessons being offered. This discipline, which I applied from my early days as an aspiring marketing executive, helped me learn the ropes in each role more quickly, allowing me to make a positive impact sooner. It had a huge impact on my career trajectory.
One of the dangers of leadership is that as you advance in your position, you lose touch with reality, let your ego take over, and stop listening. Given that I sometimes felt like I didn’t have the experience, I could have fallen into that trap. But I saw leaders like that and how it affected their teams and their results, so I worked hard to develop and maintain an open, curious, and humble attitude.
I learned to ask better questions that could help me understand the fundamentals, see the world as it really was, expand our options, and get clear on what was right. For example, when I was worried that we might stagnate or miss an opportunity, I asked, “If a new star came in and took over, what would he do?” I asked my team, “What could we do” instead of “what should we do” to broaden their horizons. In difficult situations with other teams or organizations, I asked, “What would be possible if we built trust first?” We constantly compared ourselves to our competitors and asked, “What could we learn from them to win?” These types of questions increased the flow of great ideas in my teams.
For example, I was hired as marketing manager for Pizza Hut, then owned by PepsiCoabout 10 years before I started as COO. Pizza Hut needed help with its numbers, so we asked ourselves, “How can we get weekday sales much closer to weekend sales?” The team had many successful ideas, especially Kids’ Night on Tuesdays. Kids would get a free single pizza and a small party kit with the order of a regular pizza – which gave us those weekend-level sales.
Career step by career step, I learned by doing the things that needed to be done or that could make the biggest difference, like tackling new challenges, doing the hard things, or doing the right thing. When we learn by doing, we discover the insights that come from doing. Two habits I became known for were pursuing joy and recognizing the team members who contributed to our success.
We learn more when we experience positive emotions, and I have consistently made career decisions that have allowed me to do work I enjoyed with people I liked, achieve great results, and have fun doing it. A few years after I was COO, when I was President of KFCI was offered the position of President of Frito Lay, a great opportunity, but I turned it down because I discovered how much I loved the restaurant industry. And that decision eventually led to the opportunity to lead Yum.
At Yum, we developed a culture of recognition from the beginning. It allowed us to identify the behaviors that would lead to our success, look for those behaviors in our teams, showcase them across the company, and make people feel like their contributions mattered and were valued. We became known for it, and I attribute much of our incredible growth and success to what we learned from our dedicated team members as a result.
Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that active learning is the foundation for pretty much every other important leadership habit. When you learn with purpose and the goal of making a positive difference, the result is greater opportunity – for you and the people and teams around you.
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