The Most Successful Leaders Never Stop Learning

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Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickiff.

All confess. When I hear someone say that person has a lot to learn,

I picture someone in over their head or maybe new in their career just starting out in a

corporate job or green in their dream role at a nonprofit. I don't picture someone at the

top of the organization, the executive director or CEO. But our guest today does picture that

person because our guest today was that person, a longtime executive who fundamentally believes

that the best leaders recognize the need to learn continually and they actively pursue the

best ways to do that. David Novak is the former chair and CEO of Yum Brands where he scaled KFC,

Pizza Hut and Taco Bell into one of the globe's biggest restaurant companies. He didn't have the

education and pedigree you might expect, but he attributes his success to the fact that he's

always been hungry to learn. Novak wrote the new book How Leaders Learn, master the habits of

the world's most successful people. David, thanks for coming on the show to share what you've learned.

Kurt, it's my honor. I look forward to the conversation. Why is learning so important to you?

I can tell you that learning has been the single biggest skill that's helped me succeed

in life and in my career. I've always been a person that just took the opportunity to

learn from new experiences, my environment, from other people, from ways to become more curious,

from the experiences that I've had, but I've always taken the time to learn. And it became very

important to me because as I was developing and growing Yum Brands, I've always had to really try

to identify the high potential talent or higher, great people that could come in and make our

company better. And I realized that the very best people we had in our company were avid learners.

And then when I moved on from Yum Brands and I focused on my passion, which is developing

leaders, helping people become the best leaders that they can possibly be, what I wanted to do,

Kurt, was basically share everything that I've learned about learning and help people master

that skill, because I believe it defines the most successful leader.

How do you define learning or how do you think of it yourself?

Well, I think learning is the capacity to build know-how that helps you develop as a person,

helps you grow your business, helps you move up in your career. And as I wrote this book,

Caledars Learn, I focused in on three aspects of learning. One is to learn from the people and

environments and the experiences that are available to you right now. This would be like, how can you

learn from your upbringing? How can you learn from new environments? How can you learn from people

that are already in your network that you can just access? But so I really honed in on that.

The second thing is I think that you have to learn how to really be curious and open-minded and

make that a habit. So I wanted to help people get the learning that would help them develop the

thinking skills to be really successful. And that's like learning to listen, which is so fundamental,

but a lot of people just don't do it. Learning how to ask better questions, learning to see reality,

see the world the way it really is, not the way you want it to be. Learning to take the time to

reflect so that you can really understand who you are and what you need to become. And then the

third aspect of learning that I really tried to hone in is by learning from the experiences that

you have in your life. This leads to the insights that I think really drive action. And that'd be

things like learning to recognize on purpose, which was the key to my success in building the culture

that we had that I think really drove results. Learning to prepare, that's really, really important.

And learn by reflecting and taking the time to seek new knowledge.

What is your advice to somebody maybe earlier in the career or a leader who is trying to choose

the environment for them to become sort of the best senior leader they can be? How do you advise

people to put themselves into a place where they're going to get the most learning and have the

best chance at being successful? When anything starts to be wrote and when anything starts to just be

routine and you're just going through the humdrum of going to work and doing what you know how to do

well, I always say that's the time you want to seek new environments that push you and get you

out of your comfort zone and will help you really grow. And so I think you have to be in tune with

yourself and you have to have a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo. Not only for the

business that you might be working in and where he pushes you to come up with new ideas and make

new things happen, but have that healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo for yourself as well so that

you can really keep pushing yourself so that you grow and you build more skills and you can

make a bigger impact for your company and help the people that you have the privilege of working with.

How do you know when the challenge is right? How do you assess that new environment that you're

deliberating is going to be the right place for you to go next? Well, I think you have to have a real

strong understanding of where you're at in your life and in your career and how people see you.

I used to run marketing for Pepsi Cola company and every quarter I would go meet with Wayne Calaway

who was the chairman of PepsiCo, the holding company. And we always had these great conversations and

finally one day, Kurt, he said to me, what do you want to do, David and your career? How are you

looking at yourself? And I said, well, you know, I want to be a division president and PepsiCo had

KFC, pizza, Taco Bell, free to lay. And Pepsi, I didn't care which one, but I wanted to run a

business. And he said to me, he said, David, you're a really good marketing guy. And I said, well,

Wayne, I want to be in charge of the P&L. I want to be in charge of the division. I want to

really run the whole shooting match. And he says, David, you're a really good marketing guy.

And that gave me the self-awareness that I was going to have to demonstrate to him that I was

more than a marketing person. He even said, David, I'll make you head of marketing for PepsiCo so we

can grow our talent. That's so important to us. That's not what I wanted. So a month or so later,

the chief operating officer job came up at the PepsiCo a company. And I was the marketing person.

I had to demonstrate I was more than just a marketing person. So I went to my boss and I asked

for the new challenge, the new environment. I asked to become the chief operating officer

without having operating experience. Yeah. And knowing that they didn't see you that way.

You know, I actually went to the CEO of PepsiCo who's Craig Weatherup. And I said to Craig,

I understand there's a risk in this. But if I'm not doing a great job in six months,

you can either fire me or you can put me back in marketing. But this is something that I really

know that I need to do. And I think I can do it. Now, why would he even think that I could do it?

Well, I've been put in new environments before. And I had succeeded. And the track record that I had

in doing that was enough to give him the motivation to say, okay, I'm going to give this guy a shot.

You also had the opportunity to go to free to lay, right? And run that snack foods division.

And that technically, based off of what we've been talking about, is something that maybe you

should have done. It would have been the other part of the company that you didn't know very well.

It would have been a new challenge. It wasn't your area. And you said no. And you don't regret it.

How so? Well, I think one of the things I've learned is that you need to focus on what truly

gives you joy. You know, I had worked with free to lay and I had great respect for the company.

And I'd also worked in Pepsi Cola Company. And these are package goods businesses. And they're

they're very different than the restaurant business. I learned that I loved the restaurant business.

I love food. So I love just going down into the aren't when working with R&D themes and just

developing new products. And it was fun and it was relatively easy to do. I loved marketing. There

was no industry I'd ever knew up or had been in where if you could start advertising on on one day

and three days later, you could have 10% mix. It was almost like a direct response. So it was like

the marketing skill that I had was something that I really enjoyed and really had great applicability

to it. And I love people. And the restaurant business is all about people. You know, I love going

out and work with the front lines. And I really love the humility of the restaurant business.

You know, these these are people who just are, you know, they wake up every day. They're great

Americans. They work their butt off. They're you know, I just loved it. And when I thought about

going to free to lay, I just didn't have the same kind of passion for the package goods business.

And so I turned the business down because I really believe you need to follow your joy and

and what makes you happy. And when you can get into a situation where you're joyful about what

you do and you look forward to it every day, you're not really working. You know, you're you're

really pursuing your hobby and your your your love. The only reason why I would have gone to free

to lay, it had been more prestigious, you know, would have been a bigger bigger business. But

that isn't what what really turns me on. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you use the word

passion here to talk about taking on new opportunities that you're excited about. But also

passion for doing, you know, what you like. So you may have those opportunities where

you might be able to learn something new, but you might just might not enjoy it. And you're saying

avoid those and make sure you seek out an opportunity where you can learn and can enjoy it at the

same time. Yeah, I do think that if you have that choice, that always works best. Yeah. But

you have to understand where you're at in your career. Sometimes you have to take on some potential

risk and some potential pain to get the learning that you're going to need to get you to where you

ultimately want to go. And that was the chief operating officer role for me at Pepsi wasn't my

cup of tea. I much preferred everything that I was doing in the restaurant business and running

operations for Pepsi. But I learned so much by doing that that I don't think I could have been

nearly the kind of leader I was at KFC and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and ultimately young brands

without getting that experience. Yeah. So how did you approach that just from kind of a learning

mindset? I think you have to learn to fill your gaps. You know, I was a marketing person. I would

assess myself as a good leader, a good team builder, but I didn't really understand operations. As a

marketing person, I would go into the bottling plants and basically feign interest and be really

thinking about all the marketing things that I needed to be doing. But I didn't really understand

the business from the ground up. And that's probably why Wayne Calloway had questions about me,

because he probably saw me feigning interest and not really being into it that much. So I needed

to learn. And the best way I could learn is to fill the gap of knowledge gap that I had on

operation. So what I did is I brought in all the best operators in the company. And I asked them

what was working, what's not working, what processes needed to be fixed. The other thing that I did

is I went out every week. I would leave like on Monday and come back on Friday and I visited

bottling plants and I met with the front line and I had round tables and I would ask what was

working, what's not working. You have to be able to learn to listen. And so what I did when I was

out there is I'd listen and I really understood what the problems were. And I had a lot of power

in the Pepsi Cola company because of the role I had. And once I realized we had a problem,

I could put the resources on that problem and get it fixed so that we come up with better

processes that would help us, you know, with our route truck loading, our better processes that

could help us make sure we didn't have out of stocks or our better processes to work through

the pricing models that we had. So, you know, the fact that I listened to what the issues were

and then took action, you know, you can be an avid learner and you can become really book smart.

You could learn everything and, you know, be of interest to you. But what you have to do is take

that learning and turn it into insights and action and use it to drive results. So, you know,

I started out thinking the best leaders were avid learners, you got to be an active learner

so that you take the learning that you get and you turn it into action.

As part of your work, you visited a team or somebody who'd been there for a long time was

retiring. This man was named Bob and you were there as they were going around and everybody was

talking about everything that Bob had done for them and how important he was and you noticed

that Bob was at the end of the table there in tears and you asked him about it.

Yeah, I said, I looked, you know, people were heaping all this praise on him and I said,

Bob, people love you. You're the best at what you do. Why are you crying?

He said, well, I've been in this company for 47 years and I'm retiring in two weeks and I didn't

know what people thought about me. I didn't know that I was seeing this way and that hit me in the

gut and it was like, you know, from that day on, I wanted to make sure that the people,

the bobs of the world, you know, were appreciated for what they do and I said to myself that I'm

going to make recognition the number one cultural behavior I drive in whatever team or business

that I lead. So this was, that's an active choice, I guess, is why I'm trying to draw that out, right?

Yeah, I absolutely. I decided I was going to make it the biggest behavior that I would have

as a leader and that if I ever got a chance to run a company, I'd make it the distinguishing

characteristic and behavior that would set us apart and you know, it's interesting when I did

get to become the president of KFC, I started recognizing people by giving out this rubber chicken,

okay? You know, it was fun that I did it but what happened is everybody saw the power of

recognition and everybody on my team, they developed their own individual recognition awards

and then we cascaded it all around the world and recognition became the number one key to our

culture and the reason why we felt like we were able to attract and retain the best people.

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You share then from your experiences and from a lot of the people that you've spoken to and

interviewed, you share a lot in the book and I just want to almost do a little bit of a

lightning round and run through some of the advice that you have, some of these practical tips

that you have. Learning by failure, that's a common thing to hear what's your advice about

learning from failure. Failure is information. Take it, learn from it and make sure that you

move forward with new knowledge. And by the same token, success is information too.

Winning is a great opportunity to learn from. Find the winners, find out why they're

winning and then say, how can I win too? Truth tellers. You write that you want to have those

in your circle of friends and colleagues. Tell us about that.

Pursue truth with everything that you have. Chase it like it's the most important thing.

Make sure people know that you want the truth and that that's so important to you.

And then you're going to get the kind of knowledge and learning that'll allow you to do the

right thing. Snap decisions. How do you see those? Snap decisions can only be made well if you

have the experience that gets you to the right end. I think snap decisions are dangerous.

You got to have enough facts to make make sure your decisions are correct.

Conversely, this idea of slowing down, listening, processing, information is that

undervalued or overvalued. I think you have to slow down to go fast. Too many times people skip

the important steps to get people involved and committed and it ends up taking them longer to get

where they want to go. What about pattern thinking and recognizing patterns?

We'll make you smarter than you ever thought you could be. There's so much information you can

glean by looking how other people are doing things and then taking what seems to be a totally

different category or a totally different business situation and then asking yourself,

how could I take that learning and apply it in my business? And it becomes one plus one equals three.

What's a good example of that? Well, my best example of pattern thinking is when I was working with

free to lay when I was in the advertised agency business. I knew that we needed to bring forward

some new product ideas to help grow Doritos, which was our biggest account. So I took my team

to the grocery store and I said, guys, we're going to go up and down every aisle on the grocery

and see what's growing and see what's happening in the industry. So we went up and down every aisle

and we got to the solid dressing section. At that point in time, ranch dressing was a new flavor

and it had lots of facings, lots of point of purchase, which means that it was very successful

and people were really trying it. I came back with the team. I said, you know, this ranch dressing

is very interesting. I wonder if we could do a Doritos with a ranch flavor. We all talked about it

and I said, that could be a good idea. So I called Dennis Hurd, the head of R&D at free to lay

and said, Dennis, you think we could make a ranch flavor Dorito? He says, absolutely. I said,

well, let me tell you something. It's the fastest growing flavor in the solid dressing market.

And I think it could be a hit for us. And I'll never forget going over to free to lay

and with Dennis and when those ranch flavor Doritos came off the line, I mean, they were like

unbelievably good. They were so delicious. And we knew we had a winner. And then, you know,

we did some pattern thinking on what had made nacho cheese Doritos. So successful. Well,

nacho cheese Doritos was successful because it took a known quantity of cheese. We named it with

the unique image when we called it nacho cheese Doritos. Nacho was the unique image. That's well,

we need a unique image for ranch. And so we came up with the idea to call it Cool Ranch Doritos.

And we launched Cool Ranch Doritos and it was enormously successful. And you'll see ranch flavored

potato chips ranch everything now. But we started that. And guess where that idea came from?

Not by going up the snack aisle. It came from going to the solid dressing aisle. And just by saying,

okay, if ranch flavor is great in solid dressings, could it be great on a chip?

Well, that came from a question too. And you also recommend learning how to ask better

questions and being more deliberate in your, you know, your interrogation of an idea.

The best question that I think you can ever ask is what would you do if you were me? You know,

I think if you want to pick up insights on how you can be a better leader or issues that need to

be solved, you know, ask that question. And one thing I will say, Kurt, is don't ask it once when

you're talking to somebody because they'll say, oh, nothing, everything's great. Then ask it twice,

you know, and they'll say, oh, you know, things are really good. Then ask it that third time,

and they'll say, well, you know, one thing we might be working on is, you know, cutting the bureaucracy

out that we have or, you know, stop being so focused on our food costs because our product quality

is moving. But people aren't going to tell you if you have a lot of power, you know, what needs to

be done unless they know that you really want to hear it. And so I think sometimes you've got to

ask that question more than once to get the answer. Wow. Yeah. What are some of your other

favorite questions? One that I really think every leader should think about or everybody should

think about is what would happen if a hot shot replaced me? If somebody came in and took your job,

what would they do? Well, you usually know what needs to be done and you haven't done it yet.

So you might as well do it so you can keep your job. So, you know, I did that when I was CEO. I

said, you know, if somebody came in and took over the CEO job at Young Brands, what would they do?

I said, well, you're growing, but you know, who's growing faster than you? McDonald's. McDonald's

is outperforming you. Yeah, you're doing well, the stocks going up, et cetera, but you should be

doing a lot better. So what we did is, you know, we went out and we studied McDonald's. We had what

we called a global immersion day on McDonald's where every management team around the world

went in and spent a day at going into McDonald's and trying to come up with the keys to their

success. And then we coalesced around the things that we would do based on that learning to

help us grow sales, like having an everyday value menu or making sure that we had a dessert or

making sure that we leveraged our asset throughout the day because, you know, we didn't have breakfast.

We started doing those kinds of things and sure enough our same-store sales improved.

You know, some of the listeners might be thinking, you know, I'm one of those people who sort of

feels like I've learned what I've learned and I'm an expert and I'm here to basically tell things,

right, or explain things. And I'm not sort of a naturally inquisitive, just perpetually curious

person. So asking questions and, you know, thinking about learning and listening isn't something that

comes naturally to me. Do you have to be an intrinsically curious person to be a good learner,

to be an active learner or is that a behavior you can learn, do you believe?

Well, what I'm hoping that this book does, Kurt, is help people learn how to be an active learner.

You know, because a lot of times people have it within them, but they don't do it. And, you know,

a lot of these people who think that it's there at the point now where they're in the telling mode,

they're going to be the ones that stall out. So they better be happy where they're at.

They better be happy that, you know, this is where I'm at, this is my station in life.

But they also better be aware because there's going to be someone coming up that is learning more

and is uncovering new things and is bringing forward the new ideas that can grow, grow a business.

And you'll ultimately get replaced. I think that if you're able to move up an organization or

be able to, you're able to get a job, you have the learning capacity. The sad thing is, is people

don't take advantage of it because they get so locked in on what they're doing. They're not

looking outside enough so they can learn how to do it even better or make them self better.

So I think it can definitely be taught. But obviously, if you're naturally curious, you have a

big advantage. And I really believe the most successful leaders in the world that I write about in

this book and we talk, there are over 80 people that, you know, we share stories with in this book.

You know, these people are very curious. You know, they have this trait. So, you know, if you need

any incentive to learn how to be a better learner, know that it's a huge advantage for all the

people that have been able to climb up to the top in almost any industry or vocation. Let's say

your middle management and you've been assigned a project that you're supposed to take and drive

action on. I would recommend that whatever you're working on, that you ask yourself, where can I

get know-how that will accelerate my learning and therefore whatever I'm and get us to the best

possible result. So let's say you're working on new products. I would really look at what everybody

else is doing in the world of new products and say, okay, you know, let's say you're at Taco Bell

and you really admire what Adobe is doing, okay? I would get a hold of that middle manager at Adobe

that's working on new products and say, hey, let's share some information together and I'd go learn

from them. I would try to get a know-how map and I'd identify every place where I could potentially go

to build my know-how and my learning on whatever I'm working on and I would start reading the book

that I needed to read, going to see another company that I need to see, go talk to a leader that

I admire, but I would figure out who are the people, who are the companies, who are the authors that

I can learn from that will help me get to where I need to go. HBR leadership will be back next Wednesday

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