The Australian Financial Review.
Do a superhero pose, whatever that is, it could be Superman or Superwoman.
Feel confident in yourself.
Tell yourself, I've got this, I'm good, I can be amazing today.
And then that's 30 seconds to 60 seconds for that reset.
And you'll be amazed what that'll do as you go back into a challenging situation or back
into a big meeting.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review.
And welcome to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything
And along the way, we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Kyle Faulkner, chief executive of PepsiCo in Australia and New Zealand.
Hi, Kyle, are you well?
Thank you for coming in.
Yes, doing well and fabulous to be here with you today.
Now, Kyle, as I said, you're the CEO of PepsiCo in Australia and New Zealand, PepsiCo being
a food and beverage company and home to some well-known brands such as Pepsi Max, Gatorade
and Doritos, Smith's Chips, Red Rock Deli Chips and Crackers, and my favourite, Twisty's.
You employ around 1700 people in Australia, about half of whom work in the manufacturing
And a fun fact I have to add is that in order to produce all those potato chips and Twisty's,
you partner directly with more than 35 potato growers across Australia.
That'll keep you busy.
They're the lifeblood of our business.
Okay, Kyle, we've only got 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
My first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
Well, it's a little bit different every day and a lot of it depends on where I'm at in
If I'm office based and if I'm in Sydney, I usually am up pretty early.
Around 5 a.m. is when I get started.
I like to get to the office by about 6.30 and that's my quiet time.
So it gives me a couple hours of peace and quiet before everyone else gets in.
I spend a lot of time, a little bit of research time in the morning, getting my day or week
And then usually by 8.30, I'm off into meetings for the rest of the day with the team.
So do you have a coffee at some point?
I am not a coffee drinker.
So I was raised on tea.
The other thing I tell a lot of my team members is it's never too early for a Pepsi Max in
What time do you have your first Pepsi Max?
Sometimes it is before 10 a.m.
But usually I have a tea in hand by about 5.40 if I'm up at 5.30.
So it's I'm pretty quick to a tea.
And are you a breakfast kind of guy?
It's usually a yogurt with some muesli, just something to get started.
And then I don't eat a lot of big meals.
It's usually a lot of small snacking occasions throughout the day until I get to the end
I like to have a proper meal back at the house with my partner when I'm home.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that shaped you as a leader or changed the
whole trajectory of what you were doing.
I had gotten to middle management at PepsiCo.
I was working in Dallas and had done a couple of different executive roles and was really
thinking about how do you get into senior management?
And was just struggling to break through.
And I went to a mentor and a senior vice president of the company asked, why am I not breaking
And what he said was, Kyle, it's performance.
And performance is really important.
And you have amazing performance.
But people don't know really who you are.
If you want to be a senior leader, people have to know you.
So I reflected on it.
I didn't react in the meeting.
I came back to him and said, hey, here's the reality.
I've got a partner.
His name is Eric.
I'm spending probably 30% of my time, in essence, covering up to you and not letting you see
And that's probably why I'm not being as productive.
And so there was an opportunity that came up.
There's a large customer in the US.
And once again, I was nervous.
I didn't see anyone like me.
I didn't see anyone out of the customer.
But I thought I could do a good job.
And so I said, I'd love to do it.
I went and talked to the actual hiring manager and said, here's the reasons why.
I think I could be strong in the role.
I've also reflected on some of this feedback.
And I want to be honest.
If I was going to take the role, I want to start day one.
But I'm going to bring my whole self to work.
And it was amazing.
It was a really deep conversation.
I didn't know that he had a son who was also part of the gay community.
And it was a pivotal moment for me, but also for him, saying, I should be more open.
I should talk about my family.
We should all think about more, we're people.
And to get the best for the business, you have to get the best from the people.
So long story short, I got the role.
And on day one with the team, I went in and said, here's who I am.
I had pictures of me and what I've done at the company.
But I also put all the personal piece in there.
My partner, what we do on the weekends, we're big outdoors, we love hiking, just all those
things that make you a human.
And it got an amazing response.
For me, that was my pivotal moment because I was able to really then connect with people
on a different level.
And that's what's accelerated my career to this point.
And was it a scary thing to do?
Yes. When I went into that conversation with my mentor and decided I was going to be out,
I had made the choice at that point.
If it doesn't go well, it's been a good 10 years.
I'm thankful for what I've learned.
But I can't keep doing this.
It's time for the next chapter.
It was very risky, but you have to take calculated risks if you want to achieve your goals.
OK, now we're going to do another question from the chatterbox.
What is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
All right, so I'll give you two.
The first plays to what we were just chatting about.
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
And so are you really thinking and spending a lot of time about people, nurturing them,
developing them, creating talent?
When you do that, people will give you a lot of their effort.
I spend over 50% of my time on team or partners, really thinking deeply about them.
And how can I really support them?
The other one that I'm a bit competitive is play to win.
So play to win is play offense and really try to take calculated risks, take big bets.
Some areas only play defense.
So they're worried about what happens, what if I fail, what if I make a mistake?
If you go down that only playing defense, you'll never score.
And so it's play to win.
OK, so you've got to always play offense.
So coming back to your first point, when you say that you spend all this time with your
staff and developing them, like, do you have very long meetings with your team members
every week to try and get to know them and really help them personally and professionally?
Yeah, and what I've really learned is I think about my leadership philosophy as I'm not
the leader that's going to stand at the front and tell people where to go.
That's not my style.
I'm more the have great people, empower them to do amazing things and then help them remove
The way I know how to do that is deeply understanding what they're working on, where they need support
and how I can help.
On that note, Kyle, don't go away.
We are going to take a short break.
When we come back, we're going to open our highly famous, most famous chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Kyle Faulkner, the chief executive of PepsiCo in Australia and New Zealand.
Now Kyle, this is our section called the chatterbox.
In front of you is our very beautiful super lo-fi chatterbox.
I'm going to ask you to pick out a few questions and we'll continue chatting.
So have a forage around.
Tell me about a time where you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
It was actually when I first came into Australia.
So when I was leading our largest global customer out of the U.S.
And who was the client?
The client's Walmart in the U.S.
One of the things we thought about a lot was kind of disruptive spaces we could go partner
And one of those spaces we were thinking about was what's the future of kind of multi-occasion.
So think about different pack sizes.
We thought we had an amazing idea based on human-centric insights.
We spent a lot of time and R&D developing it.
We launched it, Sally, and it just didn't work.
So it was a particular type of cheap or cracker?
It was a type of product with different products inside of it.
So we're trying to think about today chips come in bags.
What if they came in a different format?
Yeah, you're right onto it.
So a box, something more sustainable.
How could you get different varieties in there?
And the challenge was we had changed a bunch of the shelf and the way the shelf was designed.
So imagine you go into your store and what you're used to seeing, we changed quite a
And we knew we were changing it together, but it was a – what I'd say is the outcome
was that probably cost us probably $30 million of opportunity that we lost in the air.
And a lot of people would say, how did you not get fired?
On the scale of you only had Walmart, I didn't have any other customers, you had made that
big of a mistake.
And what happened though is we learned a lot.
We learned that certain people did like the product, but it was actually the execution
of the way we had created it.
So it was one of the key lessons that you didn't do enough customer research and you
should have listened to not what they said they would do, but what you thought they would
So what the key lesson was, we tried to get to perfection over progress.
So we wanted a perfect plan.
We spent a year and a half building it, all of this research, but there's still that
say-do gap that happens.
We actually went and worked with a tech company and learned how they do rapid prototyping.
Prototyping went a day.
Things that would take us months.
And it was fascinating.
It was get a minimum viable product, get it to your actual consumer, get immediate feedback
and ideate over and over and over and over again.
And that cycle of progress versus perfection will get you to an outcome much faster.
That's actually a product people really do want.
And so it really changed the way we think about our innovation process.
So is that what you adopt now when you're innovating new products?
I'd say we really try.
Sometimes we're still that we want perfection.
But a lot of the areas, especially when we're thinking about new spaces, we're doing this
agile progress model that we might take stuff to clients.
I might bring you a sample of something today that's in essence in a baggie and say, tell
me what you think and give me your feedback and we'll see what we get and continue to
put that in with our R&D teams.
That's really interesting.
Thank you for the advice.
How do you make tough decisions?
So what I found on how to make tough decisions, I have a couple of pieces that I do, right?
Especially as you're a senior leader is making sure you're not you're not in an echo chamber.
So how do you get differential points of view and you have to seek those out?
Because sometimes if you're if you're not careful, you can seek points of view that just reinforce
what you already believe.
So A, find differential points of view.
The second that we I do a bit and different people, some people like it, some people don't
is actually thinking about let's have a debate.
I'll debate aside or point of view, counter me.
What would be the opposite of that?
Often there's something called the third way.
There might not either might not be right or wrong, but there's something in the middle
that could be in between.
So that's two processes that I use quite a bit.
And how do you balance seeking all those youth with you need to make a decision quickly
because you haven't got three months to make it.
Yes, I have something I call a board of directors.
So I'd say on my board right now, there's three people in the company, one person that's
retired from the company, two external and then two family members.
And you think of them as your board.
And so I think of them as a board and, you know, and just like in a normal board at a
company, each board member has different strengths they bring to you.
I use that and I use them regularly because one thing you'll find is sometimes leadership
can be lonely and you've got to make sure that you're not a leader of one.
You have to be have many people around you.
So do you point that board knowing or hoping that they just won't confirm your own biases?
Don't seek people out that just tell you you're great or you've done a good job.
That's not valid feedback.
You need people that are willing to challenge you and and tell you where you can be better.
And all of us every day are learning, developing, growing.
So someone on the board is not doing that.
You can quietly move them off and you find another person to fill that spot.
Get someone else on the board.
Do you have coping mechanisms for high stress situations?
I have two that I use pretty regularly.
So the first one is I love to get an early start.
I am very pragmatic and also very planful on exercise.
Now that could be as simple as in between calls, taking the dog for a nice long walk
around Surrey Hills.
Other days I like to go to high intensity interval training and I even do that while
The second one that I was given advice is think about like a high performance athlete
doesn't train for 12 hours a day, yet sometimes executives will go into meetings for 12 hours
It's you're never your best for that long.
And so how are you putting in micro breaks?
Take five minutes in between meetings, go to a quiet place, have a cup of tea, enjoy
a beverage of your choice.
So those are my two is regular physical activity and then taking micro breaks.
Let your brain reset.
Let your emotions reset.
Have a personal connection with someone and then come back into it.
You'll be much better.
Is there anything else that you do or recommend during a micro break?
So this will be a funny trick and some people laugh, but the easiest thing is go find a
space where it's quiet or just you or maybe no one's around because you don't want to
be seen and actually do a superhero pose.
Whatever that is, it could be Superman or Superwoman, but that gives you enough time
because you have to think about what you're going to do as opposed.
Then you actually strike the pose, feel confident in yourself, tell yourself, I've got this.
I can be amazing today.
And then that's 30 seconds to 60 seconds for that reset.
And you'll be amazed what that'll do is you go back into a challenging situation or back
into a big meeting.
So is that particularly appropriate for people who say suffer from imposter syndrome or who
are lacking confidence in any way?
That's where we usually train it.
So a lot of our team members that have imposter syndrome are are worried about what are other
people thinking of me?
It's a quick skill, a quick technique that really helps them reset that mental framework
of doubt to strength.
And then you'd be amazed when they come back out and how confident they are in themselves
and the performance that they'll have.
I'm going to try that striking a hero pose.
OK, on that note, you have passed with flying colors the chatterbox.
I now have one last question, which we ask everybody, and that is if we were the holiday
gods and we could give you 12 months off and you could come back at the end, what would
You could do anything you liked.
So I am fascinated by the world of startups and smaller companies for two reasons.
I work for a very, very large global company.
And there's amazing things that come from that.
But it can also be lots of governance and we can be a bit slow at times.
And I'm truly fascinated by in the startup to smaller size companies, just the speed
at which they can create and innovate and drive value for all of their shareholders,
their employees, their consumers and their investors.
And I would love to go spend a year, honestly, learning from them.
The second piece of that is one of the things I've been really fortunate is I've had amazing
mentors in and out of the company.
And so finding a good match where I could go, what are the skills that I have that are
on my resume that would be really beneficial for a smaller organization where I could help
and really lean in.
Well, you say that you would work for a startup.
Do you have any ideas?
Would you try and set up a company yourself in that year?
I think I'd actually start with someone.
There's I've had an opportunity to do some mentoring with a couple that are just amazing
that are what's already created, but very early in one or two years into their process.
So I think I'd more join just because knowing if I'm going to come back in a year and that
there's that return ticket, how can I really add value?
But then also let them then flourish afterwards.
On that note, sadly, our time is up.
Kyle, thank you so much for coming in and spending some time with us today.
I really love the way you learned to be honest about yourself rather than wasting time and
energy about trying to be somebody else and how that has allowed you to thrive.
I really appreciate your lesson in failure and Walmart and what you learned.
And that is to iterate products fast and gradually and throw perfection out the window.
I love your saying that people don't care about what you know.
What they want to know is how much you care.
And those micro breaks, I agree, we should think of ourselves like athletes who don't
train for 12 hours a day, take micro breaks and do some of them in the mirror in a superhero
So on that note, thank you so much again for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
This was wonderful.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton and produced and edited by Lapfan.
Video and audio assistance and our music theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer
The Australian Financial Review.