In my late thirties, I campaigned to grow to be chief operating officer of Pepsi’s beverage division within the East – and got the job. I used to be somewhat young for the position, but I had an even bigger hurdle to beat: I had almost no operational experience. Up until then, I had worked in marketing. I had convinced the CEO and chairman to offer me a likelihood with a dangerous offer. If I could not prove myself in six months, they may fire me or demote me. Neither option would help my profession.
Why did I actually have the boldness to take the danger?
I knew something crucial about myself: I used to be an energetic learner. No matter what role or team I used to be on, I searched for good ideas and insights wherever I could find them, after which connected them to motion and execution. It’s a habit and mindset I’ve seen in most leaders I love and learned from throughout my profession.
Active learning was crucial for me because I did not have the identical level of education as lots 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 highschool.
This is how my energetic learning began. When I used to be in elementary school, my mother fearful 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 learn – as much as possible, from as many alternative people as possible, as quickly as possible. I learned that you just never know where the following essential idea might come from, and that you mustn’t judge people or the worth of their insights based on their background.
Through my willingness to learn, I actually have built a fame for solving big problems and getting teams and types on the correct path. That’s how I succeeded as COO, which paved the best 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 is how I’m making a positive impact on people’s lives today.
I actually have developed the essential discipline to learn from everyone, every experience, and each recent environment that has something invaluable to supply.
For example, the very first thing I did in my recent role as COO was to tour our bottling plants. I knew I’d learn the foundation causes of our big problems and the very 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 satisfy our customers. I spent hours with people working on the lines and within the warehouses. “What do we need to do better?” I asked. “What are we doing right?” I learned that our forecasts were incorrect. We were continuously running out of supplies. We couldn’t get product out of the warehouse fast enough. And morale was at all-time low. 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 effect on my profession trajectory.
One of the hazards 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 did not have the experience, I could have fallen into that trap. But I saw leaders like that and the way 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 higher questions that would help me understand the basics, see the world because it really was, expand our options, and get clear on what was right. For example, once I was fearful that we would stagnate or miss a chance, 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 continuously compared ourselves to our competitors and asked, “What could we learn from them to win?” These kinds of questions increased the flow of great ideas in my teams.
For example, about 10 years before I began my job as COO, I used to be hired for the marketing department of Pizza Hut, which was then owned by PepsiCo. 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, most notably Kids’ Night on Tuesdays. Kids got a free single pizza and a small party kit with their order of a daily pizza – and were in a position to achieve weekend-level sales.
Career step by profession step, I learned by doing the things that needed to be done or that would make the most important difference, like tackling recent challenges, doing the hard things, or doing the correct 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 after we feel positive emotions, and I consistently made profession decisions that allowed me to do work I enjoyed with people I liked, achieve great results, and rejoice doing it. Just a few years after my COO position, once I was president of KFC, I used to be offered the position of president of Frito Lay, an ideal opportunity. However, I turned it down because I discovered how much I loved the restaurant industry. And eventually, that call led to the chance to guide Yum.
At Yum, we developed a culture of recognition from the start. It allowed us to discover the behaviors that might result in our success, search for those behaviors in our teams, showcase them across the corporate, 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 because of this.
Over the course of my profession, I’ve learned that energetic learning is the inspiration for just about every other essential leadership habit. When you learn with purpose and the goal of creating a positive difference, the result is bigger opportunity – for you and the people and teams around you.
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