Welcome to Howl Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. My guest today is Don Hudson, the former president and CEO of Pepsi Cola North America and former CMO of the National Football League. Now look, you don't work for Pepsi unless you love competition. And Don absolutely has that competitive drive to keep pushing for better ideas and bigger impact. But she's also passionate about helping leaders build cultures that allow everyone to win. You know, we may not even realize the ways we've allowed assumptions and bias to shape our team's culture. But they're real, and if we aren't intentional about eliminating them, they can really hamper the growth of your people and the growth of your organization as well. Like every great leader I know, Don understands the power of a strong, diverse culture where everyone can win. And this conversation is full of practical ways you can build one. So here's my conversation with my good friend, and soon to be yours, Don Hudson . Don, I understand you just went through this 100 year birthday celebration. Tell us about it. In October of this year, my husband turned 75 and our daughter turned 25 within four days of each other. So we thought, let's take her to Europe. And she's about to get married next year to a guy she met at the Culinary Institute in New York. And she works for a YouTube chef as a kitchen producer, and he works at Miche lin Star restaurants, and they love food. And her fiance had not been to Europe, and she had only been to London in high school. So we said, okay, how many days can you get off? They got off eight days, and we said, all right, we can cover three markets. We'll go London, Paris, and Copenhagen. And we ate our way through all three, and I am still paying the price of having to exercise especially hard this week, trying to get the pounds off. That's fantastic. And you know, we both worked at PepsiCo together, and I remember that you were just known for being super, super competitive. I mean, you are very competitive and a very good athlete. And as I was doing my research, I learned that you do whatever it takes to stay competitive, to beat the younger people, whether it's paddle ball, tennis, or our golf. How's that going? Not on the youngsters, or how are you faring? All I can say is, I'm still playing in the regular leagues for tennis. So I compete against 18 plus, and I do that in paddle tennis as well, and I do that in golf. So I have to. At some point, maybe I'll do the 50 plus or whatever, but I'm not there yet. So as long as the knees keep moving and I keep running, I'm going to keep doing it. I am the oldest of three daughters born to a father who is one of four boys. And a number of them were semi-professional baseball players. So I became the son he didn't have. And I got groomed in sports from the get-go and love sports. And I am convinced that the success I've had in business is related, and the competitiveness I have to sports, sports analogy. You're on the tennis court. You're trying to, it's only you out there. You've got no complaints. You can't have any excuses. I sort of learned. But sports is a big part of my background and a big part of my leadership. I'm really curious to know on the business front, what's a story that would highlight how you've evolved to stay competitive as you've grown in your career? Well, you cannot work at Pepsi with Coke in the backyard and not inherently be competitive. The whole nature of the industry, as you know, is it's them or it's us. We try harder and we move faster and we come up with ideas more quickly. So definitely be a competition. I believe that you learn and grow as a leader, as an employee, when times are tougher, more so than when times are easy. It's easy when things are going well to come out with some more, put some more money behind it, success, breed success. It's harder when things aren't going well. And I can think of one story in particular that you will have an appreciation with with your background where when I was the CEO Pepsi, our largest food service customer after Yum was Subway restaurants. And my team in food service was working on renewing Subway and we had all the right meetings and the right things. And you can learn a lot around making sure that you're listening completely, but we thought everything was going our way. And then we got a call and they had selected Coke. And that was a dagger to the heart. You're the largest customer in food service. You lose. Now you guys, young were happy because it stepped up to be our largest customer . But at the time it was a lot of volume and it was very visible. And I would say the tendency there is to kind of hide and how terrible and you know, we'll get on with it and let's go someplace else. But my reaction was nobody signed on the line yet, deals not done. I'm going to resurrect it. I want to understand why. I called up the CEO of Subway, tracked him down, talked him. I knew he was a fan of ours. There were a lot of politics going on. Said let's have another meeting. And I think I tried. I got about two weeks of meetings and came close to reversing the decision. Didn't succeed, but came close. And so leaning into problems, not running away from them is something that I think makes for great employees and great leaders. And I think one of the biggest compliments I've gotten in my professional life was by Steve Reinemann, who was my boss and the CEO of Pepsi at the time. And he said, Dawn, he said, you are a person I want in my foxhole with me. You're the number one person I want to jump in the foxhole with me. And I married an army guy. I lived through military analogies, but he was really saying, you know, when the going gets tough, I want you on my team. And I thought that was a great compliment. Absolutely. And, you know, speaking and leaning into big problems, you just wrote a new book called You Should Smile More. Now, how to dismantle the gender bias in the workforce? What drove you to write this book? And what's the big idea behind the book? The big idea is little ideas, but I'll get to that. So you interviewed Indra Nui. And Indra Nui has a wonderful ability to pull people who have worked at Pepsi women and gone on to other interesting places to work back together to break bread, to have a glass of wine. And it was at one of these events in Greenwich when a number of my associates, former associates at Pepsi got together and we were talking and we were, this was in 2019. We were kind of laughing at the things that happened to us 20 years ago at PepsiCo and somebody might have been me made the comment, boy, thank goodness there's more women in the workforce today that doesn't happen. And people laughed and said, yeah, because we're all laughing, but some of these situations weren't so laughable. And that caused someone else to say, you know, I just read an article recently. It actually suggested that while the numbers of diversity, women and people of color in the workforce is significantly higher, the culture and the feeling of inclusion is not changed much. And so a few of us that were challenged to, you know, go learn about it and continue the conversation. So we did, and I was say Katie Lacey and Angelique Belmer and C. Nicholson and Mitzi Short and myself and Lori Marcus, we googled and we read and we actually came back together and said, you know what, it's shocking. But there really is a problem here that the numbers are increasing and the culture isn't. And at the time, it was very much me too. Everyone was talking about big, big sexual issues in the marketplace. We weren't talking about those. We were talking about these little things that happen every day that drove us nuts. And if we'd made a big deal of any one of them, we would thought we were really making a mountain out of a molehill. But they were important. So in that summer, somebody heard that we had been talking, this group of us, and they said Adweek was doing a festival in New York City. Would we come and talk to some of the employees and advertising about our experience? And we've got some pictures drawn up by a young art director to capture in a humorous manner, some of the situations we wanted to talk about. And it went well. It turned out it was the most engaging thing. People could really relate to it and ask questions. It brought men into the conversation because it wasn't trying to point the finger. It was trying to say, "Hey, if you're in the room, you can help out. Let us educate you around the things that make us feel uncomfortable." And so many men that read our book and maybe you did say, "I didn't know that. Geez, that's a new perspective for me." Now I understand why you almost called the book still because the stuff that's in the book just continues to happen, right? Yes. The reason we call that you should smile more is so of the six of us, I'm the only one of the six that's never been told in a personnel review that they should smile more. And that's a very personal comment to make to somebody that's not about their performance. And it's not very men I've met who've been told that they should smile more in a review of their performance. And it's particularly told to women of color. So when the book was named, you should smile more. And you tell a woman that's worked in business, they kind of chuckle. And knowingly that this is something that they're often told. I've had many a guy, I feel badly for them to say they see the cover of the book, "Oh, you should smile more." And they pause and they say, "That's nice. I should probably smile more too." Not understanding. So again, that's the purpose of the book. It's not to point fingers. The purpose of the book to say, "Let's educate you. You should know this. Think about it." And that there's lazy language that's sometimes used in the workforce that can be misinterpreted. Give me another example of lazy language. You know how brutal those PepsiCo personnel reviews were when all of your peers are in a room and you're discussing somebody that worked in marketing and hearing what the sales perspective was on it, which is really great? Well, sometimes often when referring to a guy working in one of the departments , somebody would say, "He's a really great guy," which is kind of code for he part of the club. We like him. We hang out with him. "Yeah, he's going places. It's a judgment based on potential. You don't hear the corollary. She's a great gal. You tend to hear for the women, "What has she done? Has she proven that?" It's very performance oriented. So when some of us are in those meetings, you hear, "He's a great guy." I said, "Okay. What did he do this year? What do you think he can accomplish?" And the purpose is that let's be more descriptive. And also, let's give the benefit if we're judging people on capability, let's make sure we're judging everyone and giving them the benefit of the doubt and that one group doesn't have to over-prove their ability to perform, to get promoted, where the other one gets a message of we believe in you. So we're going to give you, even though you haven't proven you can do it, we're going to give you the shot. So that's just an example of sort of general language. These are little teeny things and one would think that when the ranks of women and diverse people have grown so much in corporate America, that just by sheer virtue of there being more of them, that some of these things wouldn't happen. But I think that's why it's still happening surprised us. And yet as we dug into it, it didn't because you have to pretty overtly try to change some of these very subtle, some people call them microaggressions. That feels very aggressive to us. So we call them these micro moments. They're moments that are important for one person in the room but may not be noticed by the others. So, you know, if you walk in on a Monday morning and the room is talking about Sunday night football, I'm going to love it. I'm going to participate. But there very could be somebody else who doesn't participate, doesn't know football. And if you see that person looking down at their phone during email or whatever during the meeting, you want to engage them. So say, "Hey, what did you do last night?" Or try to change the subject. And also we advise women in that situation, don't disengage and look at your phone because that opportunity for camaraderie and discussion is really important to get to know people and don't just, you know, fade into the corner. You know, this book is all about gender bias, which, you know, obviously it exists. But you rose to be the CEO of Pepsi Cola Company. How'd you break through the clutter as a female leader? I mean, how'd you do it? First of all, I didn't set out to do that. I set out to do my job as well as I could to have fun and to have impact. And I was lucky along the way to have people that recognize this and gave me an opportunity. I've had one of the book talks about mentors versus sponsors. I've always had a lot of mentors. It's easy to get in business, people that you, you know, have lunch with, you ask questions of, but sponsors, people that will really go to bat for you, I've been lucky to have female and male sponsors that really advocated for me. And I will tell you one of the, you know, one of the breakthrough things I think that propelled my career was getting the national sponsorship of the NFL for Pepsi. At that particular time, I was chief marketing officer and you know in the beverage business, when it's unaffordable for either Coke or Pepsi to put money on the table to win every single deal. So you figure out which ones you go into to be a spoiler for the other guy. I'm going to go in and bid to make Coke's price go up. And which ones you're really going to get in there and try to win. And the NFL was one. I think that the PepsiCo thought we didn't have a shot at and we would just go in and be a spoiler. But I don't like to be a spoiler at anything. I want to go in and go for it. So I took the naive point of view that we're going to go win this and we're going to bring better ideas. And so working with the sports group, the marketing group and working with our outside agency, we had a pretty simple premise that, you know, football is about entertainment and Pepsi's entertainment brand and there should be things that we could do uniquely together and took it to them. And it was a matter of three weeks and won the deal. And I think Roger Goodell at the time was head of sponsorship among other things. And he was looking to show that he could do things differently. And so it was good timing. Anyway, we got the deal done. And I think that they were so incredulous that Pepsi was actually the sponsor of the National Football League for the first time ever that I think that factored into a decision to elevate me when the president's job opened up. You talk about your sports background with your family earlier. How much did that help you moving up the ladder in the corporate world? Did it make men feel more comfortable with you that you could sit and chat with them about what happened on Sunday night? And was that a big factor? I think it absolutely helped me. I grew up playing competitive tennis and I subsequently have learned about paddle tennis that I love playing it outside in a chicken coop. But I also took up golf when I married a golfer. And golf has turned out, as you well know, to be a very effective way to spend four hours with somebody and really get to know them. And when you're running a bottling organization of largely men and they're privately held at the time, separate from PepsiCo, going out and playing golf for four hours was a great way to get to know people personally in addition to professionally and it allowed you to use your relationship when the tough questions came up to get through the hard. But sports teaches you that and sports gave me that opportunity and I'll add one more thing. If you can take money off of a bottler in a golf round, you automatically get respect. So five bucks is five bucks. And I do believe it helped me. No questions, sports helped me. One of the things I really enjoyed about your book is it provides tangible examples of what you should do as an employee, as a boss, and as a witness, someone that's just watching what's going on. And you talk about each of those three things. That's why I think the book is so practical and I really love passing it on to my daughter Ashley. But anyway, when you look at the workplace, what's something that's going on in the workplace right now that absolutely drives you crazy, you know, that men are oblivious to ? I think one of the things that gets me right now, and I'm going to slightly answer the question differently, David, is we are in a time in America where people seem focused on, am I going to make people go back in the office three days a week, four days a week, what days of the week are they going to be able to be totally virtual? Am I going to let them stay where they move to or not? A very transactional thinking about how the workforce is going to evolve as the result of COVID. What kind of drives me crazy is that the conversation is not at the same time about how do we create in light of how we're going to do our work, how are we going to create the culture that is going to bind our people if they are remote and make sure that we're building a strong culture because that's what retains employees. People have a lot of options today and people are very quick to say, I'm going to go do my own thing, I'm going to jump ship. What drives me nuts is the culture discussion isn't heightened right now. It's actually reduced at a time when I think it's critical for corporate America. We may not even realize the ways we've allowed assumptions and biases to shape our team's culture, but they're real. And if we aren't intentional about eliminating them, they can really hamper the growth of your people and the growth of your organization as well. I talk a lot about how important it is for leaders to have a high level of self -awareness. I mean, without self-awareness, you really don't know yourself. And if you don't know yourself, then you can't grow yourself. And you know, that's really what this podcast is all about. My most recent book, Take Charge of You, How Self-Coaching Can Transform Your Life and Career is an excellent resource for anyone looking to increase their self-awareness. The book walks you through a process of how to really understand yourself, to figure out what you're good at, what builds your joy, what blocks your joy, and tons more. And by going through this process, you'll get a deep understanding of what you can do to continue to grow and get better. The book is jam-packed with simple exercises that will increase your self- awareness and keep you connected to your personal growth and development. The self-coaching process was a total game-changer for me, and I know it will be for you too. Get your copy of Take Charge of You Today on Amazon or wherever books are sold. There's no question that culture, every great company and every great leader I talk to, they make it their top priority for exactly that reason. You've got to have that culture to drive results. One of the things you talk about in the book is office housework, which is like where when it's time to take notes, you have the woman in the room takes the notes. And one of my really great friends was the late Brenda Barnes, who I'm sure you knew. She was the CEO of Sarah Lee and also Chief Operating Officer and President Pepsi. But she always told me that she thought it was a big advantage for her because she was asked to take the notes because she was able to be at the center of the room, synthesize everybody's points of views, and be much more than a note-taker and it's separated. What's your perspective on it? I loved Brenda. I followed in her footsteps in a way. People say, "What was it like to lead Pepsi Cola, a largely male organization?" I said, "Well, I wasn't the first." Brenda was the first. But where I would differ from her is, "Yes, I think when you take the notes, you actually don't participate as much in the conversation because you're having to note- take everything." And I think also that there's an added amount of work for you to do after the meeting is over to summarize the notes and send them out. And yes, there is power in what she said in the ability to articulate what exactly was happened at the meeting and direct. But there's also the negative is more time and you maybe can't fully participate. But I think it's more than just taking the notes in the meeting. When I started at Compton Advertising, I was doing well. So what's the first thing they asked me to do, not, "Would you participate in our task force to see if we can grow the Procter & Gamble business?" That'd be great. Would you participate in our task force to try to get more business in besides Procter & Gamble? Would it participate? No. "Would you run the company's Christmas party?" I'm 24 years old and they're going to ask me to put together an outside party for a thousand people. I guess it's a compliment to my organizational capability that I was asked to do that. But that took a tremendous amount of work and yet at the end of the day, the fact that I had run a successful Christmas party had nothing to do with whether I got the next promotion or not and in fact it took a lot of time away from me. And that's what we say is office housework is just as a leader, make sure that you're giving that responsibility evenly across everyone. Because if you're asked to throw the party and you're asked to take the notes and you're asked to participate in this Diversity Council and participate in this Diversity Council, in aggregate it's a lot of your time. It's taking you away from doing your job and it might not result in you're getting that raise or getting promoted. You might get an attaboy, pat on the back or add a girl, but not as meaningful as participating some other types of extracurricular work for the company. I talk about one thing you said which is really important to us that we weren't going to tell women this book was written to help people like your daughter figure out how to navigate these circumstances they find themselves in. And because they're six sisters, every situation has two or three of us offering our perspective on what we do because you might relate to, you know, Lori using humor or see using facts. But one of us you might relate to, so there's multiple points of view. But that's saying the problem is women and women have to solve it or learn how to suffer through it. What we run to do is change culture. So what you have to do is ask the other people in the room, the men and the women to come in and help. You can sensitize bystanders, witnesses who are there to actually do something. It's really easy. There's a meeting going on. This happens a lot of times to women and sometimes men. And there's a discussion going on. There's a problem in the business. You say, I have an idea. What if we did this? And the discussion continues and few other people say things. And then Joe articulates what I just said, slightly different words. And everybody says, oh, Joe, that's a great idea. Let's go do that. Well, all of a sudden I feel badly. Why didn't you hear me? And how easy would it have been for Joe to just say, I want to build on Don's idea? Or for someone in the room or the boss to say, I like that idea. Don had a similar idea. Let's all talk about it. So by having a point of view of what if you're in the room you can do to help the situation. Or if you're a boss, is that collection of people that actually can change culture? I also got a kick out of reading about the Zambuka Patrol and how it impacted your thoughts on business meetings. And I have to admit, the Zambuka Patrol for everybody that's listening was Roger and Rico's former chairman of PepsiCo, he loves Zambuka and he would stay up all night drinking Zambuka with whoever would do it with him. And I have to admit, Don, I took advantage of that as a male. And there are many times when we were the last to leave a restaurant. But you really talk about the adverse effects of that. Talk about that. So, first of all, just to be in the presence of Roger and to be part of his Zambuka Patrol was like a rite of passage of PepsiCo and something you really wanted to be a part of because Roger in those moments, as you know, would tell stories. And there was folklore that was history about the company that would really help you understand both the culture and the DNA of who PepsiCo and Pepsi was. So you wanted to be there. But in my particular case, I was seven months pregnant and not able to drink. And so trying to stay up seven months pregnant till four in the morning, well, everybody else is laughing and getting more and more drunk and stupid and having a great time. And I'm like, I'm not having that great a time. I want to listen and hear the stories. I'm trying to participate, but my water just doesn't taste really good at four in the morning. That was just the sort of flip side for me if it was bad timing for Zambuka Patrol for me. So what do you do if you're Roger and Rico? Do you not have the Zambuka? You go to bed at 10 o'clock. You don't stay up. So Roger and Rico starts earlier. He starts telling those stories when there's more people around the table, not less. Everybody wants to stay up till four in the morning. Go for it. You know, I'm not saying don't stay up till four in the morning. I'm just saying start the folklore, start telling the stories sooner when there 's more people there. And the second thing is Roger loved that. I would never take that away from him. But there were one or two of the senior leaders could have if they saw some younger employees that weren't as engaged. They could have said, you know what? There's a bunch of us packing it in. The rest of you guys stay. But they could have left with a group to give a group permission to leave that wanted to leave and not make the junior person feel awkward, you know, having to be the only one leaving. Before you were the CEO of Pepsi Cola, you were the chief marketing officer. How would you say your background in marketing has equipped you to be a better leader? What skills in marketing have you really applied to how you lead people? And to be a good marketer, you have to listen to your consumers. You have to hear what they like. You have to hear what they don't like. You have to listen to how younger people are interacting different than older people. You have to be a student of people. So when you're a leader, you have to listen to your organization. You can't just say, I'm always right all the time. And you have to bring out the best. I think leaders are champions of their people to bring out the best. So I think listening is an extremely important skill. You know, one of the things that I was curious to see was that, you know, you were the CEO of Pepsi Cola, and then you go be the chief marketing officer at the NFL. Go from being a general manager back to a functional leader. That seemed like an interesting move to me. What made you want to go back into the functional route versus pursuing another CEO type job? So a little background, I left Pepsi in 2008 when the soft drink business had gone from being the darling of PepsiCo growing a lot of fun to grow at a lot of fun to come up with innovation to being perceived by people as not healthy for you and declining at 7% per year. So my job turned from being an innovator. You just couldn't innovate the non-carbonated business fast enough to make up for the decline in carbonated. So anyway, I left and I was going to go be a CEO of another type company. And I came very close to CEO for Dunkin Donuts, but it took a long time. And after I had left PepsiCo and I spent more time with my girls, I made a decision that I didn't have anything to prove that I didn't need to go be CEO of a bigger company. What I needed to do is find ways to get fulfillment in my professional life in a way that worked with my kids. So I made the decision to go and join corporate boards as a board director, but also to be a leader of a consulting firm in the consumer practice where they had a big practice in education, Parthenon, and they didn't have a big consumer practice. So that was my personal decision, so that's where I stepped off, if you will, the CEO path. Never thinking I was going to go back to being a chief marketing officer, thinking I was going to use my general management experience to help people in the consulting world and to help in my board a director role. We sold Parthenon to Ernst & Young in 2014. I was thinking about what I was going to do and I was probably more going to do entrepreneurial things and continue doing my boards of directors. But I was sitting at my desk one day and my phone rang and it was Roger Goodell . And I hadn't talked to him in a, he was a neighbor of mine, but I hadn't talked to him in a few years and I've been very careful that once he'd be his named commissioner, I didn't try to hang on his coattails. But he said to me, "Don, look, I want to bring a woman into my senior team and I want someone who knows sports but who has an outside in perspective." And he said, "I know you know us really well. I have no idea what you're doing. Would you consider coming to the NFL?" And the role would be head of marketing and running the events business, throwing the Super Bowl, taking games around the world. And he said, "And if you're not available to do it, will you help me find the right woman?" So I said, "Of course I'll help you find the right woman." I said, "But you know right now I'm in the process of selling and you know it's an interesting time for me. Can I have a couple of days to think about it?" He said, "Take a couple of days to think about it." I think that cell phone was down on that desk. Not 10 seconds. I'm like, "Wow, that would be a really fun job. I love sports. I know the NFL. I have time." And so I think I yelled down at my husband downstairs and it's a friend and they all said, "Oh my God, that'd be like the perfect next job for you in your career." So it was more about the moment. That's by the way how I've worked my career. I don't plan it out that much. I see an opportunity and I think it through and if it feels right, I go do it. And so I never said it was a challenge to go from being a general operator into being a Chief Marketing Officer again, I have to say, but good learning. But it was fun to be part of sports and the NFL is the biggest sport and being on the inside was a gas. I know one of the things that you're really well known for is just being a student of consumers and I was just curious how you looked at the generational shifts. What's going on with how consumers are acting these days versus the NFL versus Pepsi, for example? What did you see going on with the consumer? So David, I mean you point out to Pepsi, when I joined Pepsi, Pepsi was still riding the wave of the baby boomers, campaigns they'd done in the 70s and they had kind of lost out with Gen X that followed the boomers because they didn't really market to that group and Coke got a bigger share of that generation. So I immediately turned my attention to the millennials, the kids of the boom ers and what do we need to do to make sure we connect with that generation? Because as you well know, younger people drink a lot more beverage than older people. So for soda, it was really important. It sort of got me to be a student of generations and how generations change their involvement with certain categories. So I couldn't help but when I went to the NFL, start to study and I had access the research team work for me to looking at how were millennials interacting with football and how was that the same and how was that different than their parents? And even Gen Z coming up, how were they starting to react with football? And it was pretty clear that there were some big fundamental changes that every bit is passionate as the parents but where the parents tended to be very team-centric based on where they grew up, they followed, wherever they moved around the country, that team was their team and they followed the team and they tended to follow their team on television. And have to buy things like Sunday Ticket if they moved someplace that didn't have that team. But that the younger generation, which must more into playing fantasy into knowing about the individual players, yes following a team but often following a few teams and following players as they move from team to team. My older daughter's favorite player was Darryl Rivas. When he moved from the Jets to the Patriots, she shifted her allegiance. Who would do that from the Jets to the Patriots? But that's how she thought. We would consider him a traitor. We would consider a traitor. She said, "No, I'm a fan of Darryl Rivas and I'm going to follow him where his career takes him." So that caused me to work from an NFL standpoint of what could we do with our digital content, insight into what was going on behind the scenes to let our fans, our younger fans actually see because they're much more interested in the things that other people don't know. What is going on? You see the TV screen. What's going on behind? Half-time. What goes on when they're in the tunnel about to come out for the Half-time show? And so that created a lot of marketing opportunities. And that as I just learned led to the formation of a new company that you're involved in the startup on, which is called the draft network, it's a digital platform, tell us about that. No credit to starting it. Smarter people than me, younger people than me, started this business. But when I left the NFL and I was asked to get involved with this business, it 's a digital platform that has former scouts for college in the NFL right about the players in college that will be likely entering the NFL and offering their perspective on how they will influence what team they go to and which teams they might fit better with. And there's also it had a game called the mock draft machine where you can actually act like a GM and do a draft. So I started to love being involved with a company because it was really an insight to how younger people were interacting with football. And so I'm an owner. I don't run anything. I don't hold any positions. And yet as an owner, I interact with the CEO and some of the staff and I can't help but try to offer some wisdom, hopefully not too much when we hit opportunities or bumps in the road. I want to get back to the NFL for a second. You mentioned the Super Bowl. What's it like to market the Super Bowl as the head of marketing for the NFL? I mean, what's it take to really make that event even better each year? It's a pleasure to market the Super Bowl. David, I would tell you one of the things that I had the most fun with that I did not appreciate. I really didn't understand the job I took when I joined the NFL. Roger said, "Oh, you'll have the events department." All right, all right. So I'm going in as chief marketing officer. What I didn't realize is the events department was 24 people and their job was to throw the Super Bowl, throw the Pro Bowl, produce the international games in the UK and now Germany to remove the draft out of New York and made it a festival around the country. I would tell you the creativity involved in an event and then how you use the things that happen in that event. Again, think young people want access, special access to different things going on. It's really not about tune into the Super Bowl. It's more get behind the scenes of the Super Bowl, find out what fans are experiencing, who's going to the special concert. It's a myriad. It's a tapestry of things that go on around event. That was what was really fun to market and honestly through events to create a lot of those moments. You mentioned that Roger calls you up and said, "I really would like to have a female on my staff. I think you'd be terrific at it." There are a lot of times, I'm sure, when you're in these meetings at the NFL where you're the only female in the room. Did you ever find that to be an advantage or was it always something you had to overcome? Oh, no, no. Definitely at times an advantage. You would stand out. The bigger advantage wasn't just being a woman. The advantage was being a woman with the vantage point of a former sponsor, a vantage point of the fan in a room of people. If you think of diversity more broadly than just male/female, I was such a diverse perspective in that room because I didn't have a shared experience with most of the people. I didn't spend 20, 30 years in sports. I didn't play professional football. I didn't live and breathe it and therefore my perspective was fresher and I used that. The fact that I looked different in the room stood up. People noticed when I spoke, but it was definitely an advantage, definitely different. I will tell you one of the tougher things was think about that Monday morning meeting when you're on the senior staff, Roger's staff. He's talking about the football game and invariably they're talking discrat ically about some of the calls that caused a lot of fan issues. Now I've not played football. I've tried flag when I was there because I never had a chance growing up to play football. So it's the closest I got to playing football. If you have a couple of professional football players around the room and Roger Goodell's there, you choose very carefully how you're going to offer your opinion on the call or the play. That's just not how you engage in that conversation. So what I would engage with is how the fan reacted to something that happened the night before because that was in an area of expertise for me. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Don Hudson in just a moment . In her time at both Pepsi and the National Football League, Don worked along Roger Goodell, who's the commissioner of the NFL. And just like Don, Roger never stops pushing to make things better. In my conversation with Roger, you'll get plenty of wisdom on how to keep your culture from complacency. The biggest risk we have is the NFL going forward is complacency. And it was probably a little bold to say that to people who were enjoying a great deal of success. But I really do mean it. And in fact, that theme has been intertwined with most of my comments to the ownership over the years, but most specifically and most recently at our annual meeting this year. Because I really do believe the NFL is at a level of success that we've never been before. But I think our opportunities are so great right now that it's on us to seize that and missing that opportunity would be a failure for all of us. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Roger Goodell, episode 101 here on How Leaders Lead. You say that you need to be your own person. You will not succeed if you're not leveraging what makes you you. Tell me how you learned that lesson. In my career early on, I'm an idea person, build teams. I'm a cheerleader for people, probably not the best at quick follow up in emails and the written word, even though I learned how to write clearly. So how I think I learned it is people tend to focus when you're younger on how you can get better in this area. You're not as good in this area. You need to do this better. But then I observed over time that when I get promoted, I most often got promoted on the things that I did well. Being able to command presence in a meeting. Being able to win business by bringing in a big idea. So I learned over time that I had more success leveraging my strengths than spending my time trying to mitigate my weaknesses. That's not to say that you don't have to make your weaknesses better. But if you focus on that, then you're not leveraging and bringing forth what really makes you succeed. I think people win in life based on leveraging their strengths, not erasing your weaknesses. I did a podcast with Jenny Rometty, the former CEO of IBM, who I'm sure you know. And Jenny said when she was asked to be CEO, she didn't think she was necessarily ready for that kind of job. And her husband said, "Of course you are. Do you find that women have a tendency to think that they don't have all the eyes dotted and the teeth crossed to really take on jobs?" I mean, most men I know you get offered a promotion. You go, "Absolutely." I mean, whatever you don't know, you'll figure it out. But how about women? Is the trait that Jenny exhibited there? Is that a female trait that's pretty predominant or is it? How would you describe it? Well, not 100%, but I definitely agree with you that in general it's a female trait. I do want to tell a story because when I was promoted to President of Pepsi, I had 11 direct reports and nine of them were met and two were women. And over the course of the next year, PepsiCo does what they do. We have an opening for a strong senior person in finance. We're going to take your CFO. We need a new sales leader and it was the right time for them. So in the course of my first year leading that division, I went from a staff of nine men and two women to six men and five women. So about evenly balanced. So when I went through the personnel review phase for the first year as CEO, I had an observation not dissimilar to what you're talking about, which is I found that the men tended to come into my office, telling me that they're ready to be promoted, telling me that they need more money, focusing on that sort of can do attitude and what they done well, but very self-promoting and good for them. The women more often came in my office talking about where they thought they could do better, what they could learn and what we're work on. So a self-betterment point of view and they would not bring up salary as much, would not bring up ready for promotion. They'd ask me when they thought they would be ready. So I did notice that husband that positivity around personal potential men had and I often have advised women to come in with that too and not to do things that are false for you, but think about when you go into a personnel review, all the positives that you accomplished in the last year and be prepared to talk about them. And do say, I think I'm capable of this if you think you are. Not everybody, I think most people when given a job have not done every aspect of that job before they're given the job. They have the capability to learn, they've proven that, they have the talent to lead and they're given the opportunity. So I try to advise women to come in to an interview or to advocate for themselves more and quote unquote in our book, Be Like Greg. Greg self advocates, you can do that too. You know, you talk in your book and you highlight Steve Reinemann, former chairman of PepsiCo as an outstanding leader, advancing the cause of really attacking gender bias. What do you do that others should emulate? Talked about it, put goals against it, did research to find out what it was, what are our numbers. I don't believe when he first started when we did an employee culture survey that we actually broke it out for the first time we broke out diverse women separate from diverse men. And then we even worked at Hispanic versus African American versus Asian. That hadn't been done before. So he used data. He looked at turnover rates by different population groups. He asked his senior leaders to mentor a particular group. And when I sat and saw the research and I saw that women of color had the worst experience of PepsiCo and we're leaving at twice the rate of white men. I raised my hand. I said, I'm not a woman of color, but I would really like to lead this group. I'd like to understand what the issues are and try to help, which we made a lot of progress on. But I think what Steve did is first, what leaders do, give a vision. He identified and put his finger on the fact that the PepsiCo at the time he took over was a little bit of a male, white male fraternity. And from a business standpoint, recognized that the talent pool, the future was not all white men from high end Ivy League schools, that he had to change the culture and he had to change the representation. So first, create the vision. Secondly, create very simple roadmap of what we need to do. We're going to increase our representation. We're going to get the turnover rate to be even across groups and I'm going to ask my senior leaders to lead. And he just followed it and I think he made it one of the tenets of his, I think new CEOs, you would know better than me of corporations say, this is what I want to be known for. This is what I think I can really impact the company on and he made diversity his number one goal besides obviously driving performance of the company. And speaking of driving performance, I know at one point Steve told you while you were at Pepsi, this exercise, he really do you want to do it. I wanted you to think through the business by saying, pretend your division is going to be acquired by a private equity fund. Tell me what they would do. What did that experience teach you? Overall, what the exercise was designed to do is to say, step back, take away your blinders, get out of the moment you're in and all of the assumptions you, without thinking about make and look at it from the outside in. As somebody who said, I'm going to look at your business and where are the levers to create more top line growth, more profit growth. And can you look with a new clarity at what you should do? You're a very sought out speaker. You're an aspiring speaker and you talk about innovation and the impact it can have on business growth. What's the big lesson that you share? A couple of things. I think everybody, most people agree you need to innovate and that good ideas don't have to be necessarily new, that you could take an idea that you've had somewhere else and improve it. I think my biggest lesson is fewer, bigger innovations. A lot of people think innovation and they make small tweaks to a lot of things. Versus do one thing really well and make sure you're completely aligned. I had a boss once, Phil Marano, that went on to be CEO of Levi's and I remember him saying to me and it really stuck with me. He said, Don, he said, I will take a 75% idea, executed 100%, rather than an idea that's 100% and gets executed 75%. And that stuck with me to say, one, I believe that innovations have different scale and if you're worth really changing the trajectory of your business, make sure your innovation is a big one. Secondly, make sure that you have the planning time to really execute behind it and get the organizational line behind it so that you get that significant lift. There's been a lot of fun and I'd like to have some more with my lightning round of Q&A. Are you ready for this? I don't know. Let's try. All right. The three words others would use to describe you. Plastic, driven, warm. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be and why? Billie Jean King, because I had a great tennis career and it's changing the world. What's your biggest pet peeve? In business, probably people trying to do too much. That was a weakness of mine. I always tried to do too much and what I learned through being a leader is you cannot do a lot of things and doing a lot of small things well doesn't add up to impact. Do less better. What's something about working for the NFL that you'd only know if you'd been on the inside? The feeling of being down on the field, being right on the edge of the field, when those players are warming up, how large they are, the cacophony in the stadium, the powerful, you feel the competitiveness, you feel the strength, the athleticism. It is unbelievable. It's the single experience I remember the most and I miss the most. You have a wide open Saturday. How would you spend your time? My ideal Saturday, I would get up and go kayaking. Then I would go play tennis. Then I would have some lunch and then I would go out and golf with my husband. And then I'd take the dog in a long run and then have dinner with friends. And then go to bed. What's your favorite book on leadership? I really don't have a favorite book on leadership. I don't think there's one. I take tidbits out a lot of things and weave them together. What's one of your daily rituals, something that you'd never miss? A cup of tea in the morning before I get going. If you turned on your radio in your car, what would we hear? Seventies music. What's something about you that few people would know? They wouldn't know that I went on a tour of the Middle East and ended up in Saudi Arabia at a men's drinking club, drinking with bottlers. That had to be a one of a kind experience. What's the most powerful thing a leader can say to someone that works with them ? I believe in you. Fantastic. That's the end of the lightning round. As we wrap this up, I hate to ask you the general PAP question. But I'm going to ask it anyway because I think you may have a unique perspective on this. How have you balanced the challenges of work and home as an employee and as a boss? Do you have any insight that you think is really valuable in that front? The advice I gave to my organization at Pepsi, I give to myself, I give to my daughters constantly is when you're dead, nobody's going to write in your tombstone. I wish I'd worked an hour harder every day. You're going to write on your tombstone, I wish I had more time with friends and family. That's not to say to leave work, to spend time with friends and family. It's about making sure that you have the balance that works for you. There's no such thing as completely doing it all and being a superwoman. It's doing the right thing for you at the right point in your time and your career. The thing I've learned and I advise others to do is don't separate the two. You do not have a list of to-dos for work and a list of to-dos for personal. It's just never that simple. When your daughter needs to go to the doctor, it's during the day. And now, at night, you have to respond to the email from somebody in business. So it's integrate the two and make sure, I was used to say to people, "Just tell your boss. You've got to go and take your parent needs to see a doctor and you want to go with them. You're not going to take the day off. I'm going to be gone for two or three hours. I want to make sure I'm not missing. Is it okay? Integrate and be honest. People respect that." And I think, again, bring your whole self to work. If you can't be open and honest about what's going on, you don't feel comfortable. It's really important in your culture that you have to be home for dinner every night and be part of making the dinner and you have to leave. You can say, "I'll get back online at nine, check things, but I've got to leave at 5.30." Just being able to do what's right for you and integrate the personal priorities with the business priorities. I mean, I have a list of to-dos at Pepsi and the NFL and it would be like get with CBS to change how they talk about concussions, make an appointment for Morgan to go to the doctor, all the same list because they're all important to me personally. Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to aspiring leaders? People come out of college and more likely business school and they say, "This is the job I want." My advice, life changes too much. What you set out to do and what you will end up doing would be quite different and the world is changing so quickly. There are so many opportunities you don't know that will come ahead. My advice to you is to not look far into the distance, look today at what you want your impact to be and where you could have impact and spend your time focused on what you can accomplish in your current role and if there's things that you think you can accomplish outside of your current role, you can participate in task forces, whatever. But don't try to think two and three steps ahead. Build yourself into the best leader you can be today and those new opportunities will present themselves. Don, you're a classic example who really walks a talk on what you just said. I mean, what you've done with the book that you've just written I think is going to have a huge impact on so many people. I have to tell you after reading the book, it opened my eyes up to a lot of things. I felt pretty good about myself overall as I read the book, but there are some things that I read that I said, "You know what? I've done that before. I could handle that better." I think what I loved about the book is it is not just for women, it is for men too. I encourage both women, as I mentioned, I gave the book to my daughter and I'm glad I read it because I picked up a few things that hopefully will make me a better leader as I go forward. So thank you for taking the time to write the book. It's not easy to do, but you did it and it takes courage and congratulations. It's been fun talking to you today. Thank you. Don has so much energy and I absolutely love her drive. And boy, she is using that drive to make sure the cultures we're building are getting better and better too. Your culture is your top priority, but we really hamper it when we allow either ourselves or the people on our teams to make assumptions about each other and let bias creep in, even in ways that may appear very small. So this week, ask yourself, how does your culture need to evolve? Maybe you need to pick up Don's book and be more aware of those small language changes we can make to reduce gender bias. Or maybe you need to shift the conversation about remote and in office work to be less about the details of all of it and more about how your culture is going to grow in this new workforce model. Carve out time this week to consider how your culture can evolve. I promise you, whatever time you invest in building a better culture will always give you a good return. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders keep evolving their culture. Coming up next on how leaders lead is our best of quarter one episode, where we take so much of the great wisdom from the last three months and highlight the most impactful takeaways for you like this one right here. Well, I think it depends on your philosophical approach to people. Are they an investment or are they an expense? I think they're an investment. And if you invest in people, they're going to give you great customer service and deliver great results. And I've certainly seen that in spades here at UPS and I saw it at Home Depot too. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't constantly look for opportunities to optimize your organizations and drive productivity through technology and other innovation. But if you invest in your people, they'll do amazing things for you. It's a huge bang for your time, so be sure to come back again next week. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]