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David Novak    

Entrepreneur, Author, Philanthropist, Founder and CEO of oGoLead, Co-Founder and Retired Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of YUM! Brands Inc.

David Novak is Co-Founder, retired Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, the world’s largest restaurant company with over 45,000 restaurants in more than 135 countries and territories. After retiring in 2016, he became Founder and CEO of David Novak Leadership, a leadership development company that teaches Novak’s proprietary method of modern team leadership through online courses, books and live workshops. Novak is also the host of the top-ranked business podcast, How Leaders Lead with David Novak.

Novak’s passion is to make the world a better place by developing leaders at every stage of life through David Novak Leadership, How Leaders Lead, his family’s Lift-a-Life Foundation, Lead4Change, Global Game Changers and the Novak Leadership Institute at the University of Missouri.

A renowned expert on leadership and recognition culture, Novak is also a bestselling leadership book author. His highly referenced and critically acclaimed books include The New York Times bestseller Taking People With You, The Only Way to Achieve Big Things Happen; O GREAT ONE! A Little Story About the Awesome Power of Recognition; and his latest book, Take Charge of You, How Self-coaching can transform your life and career.

During his tenure as CEO, Yum! Brands became a global powerhouse, growing from $4 billion in revenue to over $32 billion.

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, 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 received the Horatio Alger Award for his commitment to philanthropy and higher education, and the 2012 United Nation’s World Food Program Leadership Award for Yum! Brands World Hunger Relief.

Speech Topics

Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen

Why are Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, Jeffrey Immelt and so many other top leaders praising David Novak’s upcoming book? Novak, recognized as one of the best-performing CEO’s in the world by Harvard Business Review, runs Yum! Brands—the world's largest restaurant company and parent of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell—with a staggering 1.4 million employees. He learned long ago that you can't lead a great organization of any size—from a tiny startup to a global giant—without getting your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission. But how do you accomplish that?

As Yum’s chairman and CEO, and as the author of TAKING PEOPLE WITH YOU: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen, Novak has personally trained thousands of managers with his leadership guide—which has been 15 years in the making and tested on more than 4,000 managers—and is an action plan that challenges leaders to rise to higher levels of performance.

Novak knows that managers in the trenches don't need leadership platitudes or business theories. With a focus on corporate culture, customer relations and employee empowerment that enabled him to grow Yum! Brands globally, Novak cuts right to the chase and shares the secrets of the unique leadership program he’s developed in easy-to-follow steps: setting big goals, getting your people on board, blowing past your targets, celebrating together after you shock the skeptics, and doing it again and again until consistent excellence becomes a core element of your culture. Highly engaging and motivated, Novak inspires teams—from front line to front office—while delivering a specific process to help organizations achieve growth.

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