# Mastering Leadership Through Active Learning and Strategic Growth

**Podcast:** HBR On Leadership
**Published:** 2026-03-25

## Transcript

Welcome to HBR on Leadership.
I'm HBR Executive Editor Allison Beard.
On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
We carefully curate this feed from across the HBR portfolio, aiming to help you unlock your next level of leadership.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.
I'm Kurt Nickish.
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 her 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 you know, 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 young brands, you know, I've always had to really try to identify the high potential talent or hire 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, you know, when I moved on from Young Brands and I 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 you know, as I wrote this book, How Leaders 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, you know, 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, uh, learning to see reality, you know, 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, you know, who you are and what you need to become.
And then the third aspect of learning that uh I really tried to hone in is is by learning from the experiences that you 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 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 uh 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 rote, 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 you know, so I I think you have to be in tune with yourself, and you have to have a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Not only, you know, for the business that you might be working in, 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 you can really keep pushing yourself to so that you you grow and you build more skills and and you can make a bigger impact for your company and help the people that you have the privilege of of working with.
How do you know when the challenge is is right?
How do you assess that that that new environment that you're deliberating is is gonna 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 in your career and and how people see you.
I used to run marketing for PepsiCola Company, and every quarter I would go meet with Wayne Callaway, 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, in 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 Delay, and Pepsi.
I didn't care which one, but I wanted to run a business.
And he 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 PL, I want to be in charge of the division, I want to really run the whole shooting match.
And he said, 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 PepsiCola 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 Pepsi Cola, who is 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'd been put in new environments before, and I'd I had had succeeded.
And the track record that I had in in doing that was enough to give him the motivation to say, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna give this guy a shot.
You also had the opportunity to go to Free to Lay, right?
And 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 a 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 I had worked with Free to Lay and I had great respect for the company, and and I'd also worked in PepsiCola Company, and these are packaged goods businesses, and they're they're they're very different than the restaurant business.
I learned that I loved the restaurant business.
I loved food.
So I love just going down into the when working with RD uh teams and and just developing new products.
I and it was fun and it was relatively easy to do.
I loved marketing.
There was no industry I'd ever knew of or had been in where if you could start advertising on uh on one day and three days later you could have 10% mix.
It was almost like uh direct response.
Uh, you know, uh so it was like the marketing skill that I had was something that I really enjoyed and 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 working 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 w w wake up every day, they're great Americans, they work their butt off their, you know, I 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 I really believe you need to follow your joy and and and what what makes you happy.
And when you can get into a situation where you're you're 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 you're really pursuing your hobby and your your your love.
The only reason why I would have gone to Free to Lay, it'd have been more prestigious.
You know, it 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 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 gonna need to get you to where you ultimately want to go.
And that was the chief operating officer role for me at at Pepsi.
It 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 the kind of leader I was at KFC and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and ultimately Young brands uh 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 as a marketing person, I I I would go into the bottling plants and 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 Callaway 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 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 or better processes that could help us make sure we didn't have out of stocks or or 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 and you know, it could be be of interest to you.
But what you have to do is take that learning and turn it into insights and action and and use it to drive results.
So, you know, I I started out thinking the best leaders were avid learners.
You gotta 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 where 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.
They're just you're 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 and I'm retiring in two weeks.
And I didn't know what people thought about me.
I I didn't know that I was seen this way.
And that hit me in the gut.
And it was like, you know, from from that day on, I wanted to make sure that the people, the Bobs of the world, you know, were appreciated for for what they do.
And and I I said to myself that I'm gonna make recognition the number one cultural behavior I drive in whatever team or business that I lead.
So this was that's that's an act of choice, I guess is why I'm trying to draw that out, right?
Yeah, I absolutely.
I decided I was gonna 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 uh recognizing people by giving out this rubber chicken.
Okay.
And 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 they developed their own individual recognition award awards, and then we cascaded it all around the world, and recognition became the number one key to our culture and and and the reason why we felt like we were able to attract and retain the best people.
You share then from your experiences and from a lot of the people that you've spoken to and interviewed, you 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 to hear.
What's your advice about learning from failure?
Failure is information.
Take it, learn from it, and and and make sure that you you you 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 know, 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?
Well, 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 uh pattern thinking is when I was working with Free Delay when I was in the advertising agency business, and uh 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 gonna go up and down the the gro every aisle in the grocery and see what's growing and see what's happening in in in the industry.
And so we went up and down uh every aisle, and we got to the salad dressing section.
And at that point in time, ranch dressing was a a new flavor, and it had lots of facings, lots of point of purchase, which means that the it was very successful and people were really trying it.
I came back with the team, I said, you know, this this ranch dressing is very interesting.
I wonder if we could do a Doritos with a ranch flavor.
And we all talked about it, and I said, that could be a good idea.
So I called uh Dennis Hurd, the head of RD at at at Free Delay, and said, Dennis, you think we could make a ranch flavored Dorito?
And he says, Absolutely.
And I said, Well, let me tell you something, it's the fastest growing uh flavor in the salad dressing market, and I think it could be a hit for us.
And I'll never forget going over to Free Delay and with uh Dennis, and when those those uh ranch flavored 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, cheese.
We named it with the unique image when we called it Nacho Cheese Doritos.
Nacho was the unique image.
I said, 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 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 salad dressing aisle.
And just by saying, okay, if ranch flavor is great in salad 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 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 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.
If 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 should be working on is you know, cutting the bureaucracy out that we have, or 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 got to ask that question more than once to get the answer.
Wow.
Yeah.
Um, what are some of your other favorite questions?
One that I 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 could keep your job.
You know, so you know, I I 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?
Well, 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 stock's 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 uh global uh immersion day on McDonald's, where every management team around the world went in and spent a day at uh going into McDonald's and trying to come up with the 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 uh having an everyday value menu or 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 our same store sales improved.
You know, some some listeners might be thinking, you know, I'm I'm one of those people who sort of feels like I've learned what I've learned, and I'm I'm 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 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 uh 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 they've it's they're at at the point now where they're in the telling mode, they're gonna 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 and you'll ultimately get replaced.
I I think that if you're able to move up an organization or 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 themselves 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 it's a huge advantage for for all the people that have been able to climb up uh to the top in in almost any industry or or vocation.
Let's say you're middle management and you've you've been assigned a project that you're you're supposed to take and and 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 working 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 you're at uh you're a Taco Bell and you really admire what Adobe's doing.
Okay, I would I would get a hold of that middle manager in 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 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 where I need to go.
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