After a brief flurry of interest in my early 20s, casino gambling lost its allure. It wasn’t because I had it all figured out or because I’d burned through my stack of dimes at the roulette table. Life’s gambles took over. Marriage. Children. Career moves. Companies at crossroads. The wagers kept getting bigger while simultaneously the odds disappeared. No house edges to read, no table limits, no actuarial wizardry. Yet these unpriceable bets are in fact the only ones that ever really pay.
I’m not talking about an underdog beating long odds. Life bets defy all odds. Nobody can quote you a line on a marriage, a child or a career. They defy odds the way music defies multiplication on a calculator.
I can vouch for the music part personally. I met my wife in high school band, where the seating chart serendipitously put us next to each other. She played oboe, quite well. I played saxophone well enough to wear the uniform. We both went to Arizona State, and eventually, the biggest bet of my life got placed without either of us calling it a gamble. Call it a power hunch. There was no way to price what two band kids might compound into across four decades and six children. We bet anyway, and it remains the best decision I never fully calculated.
My first career bet came soon thereafter. Fresh out of ASU with a degree in chemical engineering, I took a job at a brand-new Frito-Lay chip plant at Casa Grande, Arizona. Unbeknownst to me, it was the site of a bold new initiative in people-centered management. I was thrilled, even when I learned that Casa Grande ranked 23rd among Frito-Lay’s core plants. Frito-Lay had 23 core plants! So yeah, Casa Grande was ripe for transformation. But we did not swap out the workforce or gut the lines. What changed was the culture, centered on real expectations, clear scorekeeping and accountability that applied to everyone equally. We climbed to #1. Worst to first. No spreadsheet could have priced the over when we’d started so far under.
Maybe that’s what got me going on being suspicious of anyone who claims to compute the future. Most forecasts are pretty solid a few days out but complete fiction in the middle distance. Since that’s where a lot of big decisions have to be made, what works better is scenario modeling and boundary conditions. Math alone can’t make the bet, though it does help with judgment. So I kept making judgment bets. My career moved from corn chips to ice cream to salads to milk to groceries, on moves I’m sure a few friends and family members called risky. Then again, if a move is safe, 1,000 people would already have made it.
Near the top of not-entirely-safe is the harmonious blend of ice cream and frozen pizza. A couple decades after Frito-Lay, I was running direct-store delivery for one of the world’s great ice cream businesses. We had thousands of routes built for a single frozen product. Business was good with ice cream, but bright minds wondered if frozen pizza could make the ride on those delivery trucks too. On paper, it seemed doable, though not all frozen food ships with the same deep freeze requirements. Minor details, right? The company bet $3.7 billion assuming we could make one great DSD system from two pretty good ones. The human variable was whether thousands of ice cream people and pizza people would learn each other’s products and systems. We did, market by market, over the next two years, and opened up a marvelous new chapter of profitable growth for Nestlé DSD.
So for the big bets without odds, what’s the insider’s tip? People, of course. Whether it’s a marriage, a manufacturing facility, ice cream/pizza trucks and every company at a crossroads I’ve ever said yes to, I was always making the same wager. I bet on people. It offers the best risk-reward possible.
For a business leader, the downside is you invest in somebody and they walk out the door better than they walked in. That’s still a win. The upside is a last-place plant reaches #1 without a tear down. That’s the certainty of putting People First. The best time to invest in people was yesterday. The second-best time is today.
People First is the ultimate no-regret bet.