This article was published on People.com on July 1, 2016 by Jeff Truesdell
The young David Novak had good reason to heed his mother’s advice to make friends fast.
Born in Beeville, Texas, the future inspirational-book author and executive chairman of Yum! Brands – the parent company of fast-food giants KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut – spent his childhood on the move: Every three months, his father’s job relocated the family’s 40-foot trailer home from one small town to another. by the time he was 12, he had lived in 32 trailer parks in 23 states.
But rather than be intimidated as the perpetual new kid on the block, he embraced it. “I did not succeed in spite of my environment,” Novak, 63, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I succeeded because of it. It helped me to work through the anxiety you have when you go into new situations.”
The lessons of those early years go deeper.
Novak’s father, Charles, worked marking latitudes and longitudes for a government mapmaking unit. The Novaks – including his mom, Jean, and younger sisters Susan and Karen – traveled with his father’s co-workers and their families in a nomadic community that Novak remembers as “loving and supportive.” Only much later, after his family put down their first permanent roots in Kansas City, Missouri, did he learn that some people looked askance at trailer park residents.
It led him to dismiss stereotypes. “Don’t look up when you’re dealing with people; don’t look down when you’re dealing with people; always look straight ahead,” he says. “People might have more clout or position than you, but they’re just like you: Look them in the eye.”
“That’s kind of been my motto.”
Early jobs including working as a janitor and, very briefly, as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. He met his wife Wendy in college and married her with only $19 in the bank. With a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, he became the first in his family to graduate but still needed a second job after he found work as an advertising copywriter. So he moonlighting as a nighttime hotel clerk – and felt hurt when, after a famous singer came through the hotel, his extra-mile service didn’t yield a tip.
The experience impressed upon him that everyone deserves to be appreciated. “The more stature you have as a leader,” he says, “the more incumbent it is upon you to recognize just the basic inherent power you have to make other peoples’ day by valuing what they do.”
As his advertising work turned to marketing and then management, he once saw a longtime employee moved to tears hearing for the first time how others valued him. Novak later responded by regularly handing out signed-and-numbered novelty rubber chickens and foam cheese heads for a job well done. Photos of the recipients lined his office floor-to-ceiling. “The most important thing in any business is people,” he says.
He also found strength and inspiration in family.
Wife Wendy, 64, initially told him that her juvenile diabetes would prevent them from having their own biological children. Then her desire changed; daughter Ashley was born 10 weeks premature, and her mother was left briefly blind due to diabetes complications.
“Becoming a father was a miracle,” Novak says. “That’s something I didn’t expect. And I learned from my wife that you’ve got to have courage. If you want it so bad, you’ll do whatever you can to make it possible.”
Today, Ashley, 33, runs the family’s Lift A Life Foundation, which fights childhood hunger and juvenile diabetes and improves childhood education. Novak also created the privately funded Lead2Feed leadership service program for middle and high school students. Now a grandfather of three who lives in North Palm Beach, Florida, he has just released his third book, O Great One! A Little Story About the Awesome Power of Recognition and launched OGO Enterprises to encourage others to share stories of those who make a difference.
Earlier this year, he was diagnosed with breast cancer. The news has sharpened his focus as he recovers.
“When you have cancer, the good news is, you haven’t been hit by a bus,” he says. “You have the time to tell all the people you love, all the people you care about, that you love them. And you get that back. That’s a wonderful thing.”
“That even give me more passion to focus on recognition,” he says. “The real value is to do this as part of your daily life.”