WINSTON-SALEM, NC – New York Times #1 best-selling author and "2012 CEO of the Year" recipient David Novak, Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM), will speak at Wake Forest University School of Business on October 16th as part of the Broyhill Leading Out Loud Executive Lecture Series.
Yum! Brands is the world’s largest restaurant company with more than 38,000 KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in over 120 countries and 1.4 million employees and franchise associates. Novak has built Yum!'s global people-first culture centered around using reward and recognition to drive results. He is noted for developing and personally training his breakthrough "Taking People With You" leadership program to thousands of mangers and franchisees around the world during his 15 years at Yum! Brands. His book based on the highly successful program, TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen (January 2012) with all of his proceeds are donated to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in conjunction with Yum! Brands’ World Hunger Relief efforts.
Novak will present "Taking People With You" on Tuesday, October 16th at 5:00 p.m. in the Worrell Professional Center Auditorium on the Wake Forest University campus in Winston-Salem. The event is free and open to the public. Students, faculty, staff and alumni will have priority seating.
In his book and training, Novak delivers a battle-tested leadership guide to building great companies by developing great talent. He teaches that leaders will never make big things happen until they learn how to get people aligned, enthusiastic and focused relentlessly on the mission. Sharing his own experiences and exploring other real-life leadership challenges, Novak pinpoints the strategies that led to successful outcomes and explains how they can be applied to a wide variety of business situations.
Under Novak's leadership, Yum! has established itself as a global powerhouse going from approximately 20 percent profits coming from outside the U.S. in 1997 to more than 70 percent in 2011, while driving one of the highest returns on invested capital in the restaurant industry. Today, Yum! is the leading retail developer in China as well as the largest and fastest growing restaurant company in emerging markets with a two-to-one advantage over its nearest competitor. The Company’s expects 2012 to mark the 11th consecutive year of delivering at least 13 percent EPS growth. Novak has been recognized as "2012 CEO of the Year" by Chief Executive magazine, one of the world's "30 Best CEOs" by Barron's for the past two years, one of the "Top People in Business" by FORTUNE and one of the "100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World" by Harvard Business Review. He was recently honored by the U.S. Department of State and World Food Program USA with the 2012 George McGovern Leadership Award for the Company’s global World Hunger Relief effort that raises awareness, volunteerism and funds for WFP and other hunger relief agencies. He is also the recipient of the national 2008 Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship. He is on the board of World Food Program USA and Yum! Brands Foundation and he is a member of The Business Council and The American Society for Corporate Executives.
In April, a team of Wake Forest Master of Arts in Management students participated in a multi-campus competition as part of the TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU Case Study challenge to fight global hunger. The competition was an extension of Yum! Brands' World Hunger Relief effort and was conducted among student teams from leading MBA programs across the country.
The goal was to leverage the principles in Novak's book to provide solutions that address global hunger. The Wake Forest students won first place and a $250,000 donation from the Yum! Brands Foundation was made on their behalf to the United Nations World Food Programme.
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