Chapter 6
In 2022, Yum! Brands marked its twenty-fifth anniversary with a leadership meeting and celebration. The leadership team asked me, as cofounder, to speak. When I thought about what I would say, I went back to the very beginning.
By 1997, the restaurant division at PepsiCo had failed to meet expectations for five years, and Wall Street wanted the company to jettison it. So PepsiCo did, by spinning it out into its own company; that’s how I became cofounder of Yum! Some doubted Yum! could stand on its own. It didn’t help that we started off with a tense relationship with our franchisees, nearly $5 billion in debt, and a junk bond balance sheet.
The doubts were unfounded. When I left two decades ...
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