"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 taking people with you 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 fi lled 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. taking people with you PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen''s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © David Novak, 2012 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Novak, David.
Taking people with you : the only way to make big things happen / David Novak. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. EISBN 978-1-10155-396-1 1. Leadership. 2. Employee motivation.
3. Organizational change. 4. Success in business. I. Title. HD57. 7.
N684 2011 658.4 092--dc23 2011031469 Printed in the United States of America Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Designed by Jaime Putorti Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author''s rights is appreciated. 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.
contents introduction taking people with you 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.