Leading with Humility and Audacity with Hamdi Ulukaya

I met Hamdi Ulukaya at a business conference, but we connected immediately through the poetry of Hafiz.?In that first meeting, I realized how unique this founder and CEO was, a giant of giants: not only had Hamdi built a multi-billion dollar company in Chobani, but his enormous capability in business was grounded in an infinite heart for the world.??

Hamdi exhibits so many attributes of moral leadership. He walks with a humble audacity.?He believes we need a new CEO Playbook (as do I), one that recognizes the responsibilities of leadership and gives back to the community and to the world.?

Hamdi’s story is deeply authentic to who he is, and it is perhaps his holding on to what is real and true that makes him so grounded, so effective and so inspirational as a leader.?Indeed, those values have guided how he treats his employees and mobilizes businesses to support refugees around the world.

Of course, when I thought about this newsletter on Moral Leadership, Hamdi was one of the first to come to mind.?And once we started talking, we couldn’t stop! For length, I’ve broken up our conversation into two parts (read part II here).

In part I, below, he shares:

• How a Little League baseball field taught him the power of business
• Why he turned down offers to sell Chobani
• Why he kept his mother’s scarf tucked inside his baseball cap for years

You’ve been on a remarkable journey with Chobani. What values have guided you along the way, particularly during hard times?

I grew up in a tribal environment, a nomad in the mountains. We Kurdish nomads tend horses, and for thousands of years, we’ve made butter, cheese and yogurt. We know how to take care of sheep, how to make carpet, how to make a tent. I’m not romanticizing it — it’s rough.?

Up in those mountains, if you have a bunch of money, you don’t know what to do with it. You couldn’t do anything except light it on fire. So you have to pay attention to other things. How bright are the stars, the way the water flowed, how people paid respect to each other — and it was not based on what clothes they had. We all had similar clothes. So why did this one have more respect, why did we listen to this person??

My grandfather was the leader of the tribe. They called him Hamdi agha, or chief in Kurd. In some other tribes in the region, if you’re agha, everybody serves you. You own the land. In our case, it was completely the opposite. As chief, you really were serving people, leading them to safety.?

The leadership values were non-material. I watched my mom welcoming people to our home, and every person who left our home was elevated somehow. She would make me kiss everybody’s hand. I kind of do the same with my son now. Everything I saw was embedded in my DNA.?

When I meet entrepreneurs and they ask me, what is the source of strength, leadership, inspiration and values, I say, Don’t go too far from where you grew up. And remind yourself of all those values you got from it — some of them you don’t even realize — and implement them into your everyday work, and see the magic happen.?

How did you bring those values into Chobani?

When I started Chobani, I had no knowledge of running a business. I had never met anyone who studied business, I’d never read a book about business. But my father would make cheese, and we would sell the cheese in big cities. That was my knowledge of trade and commerce.?

I did not like business growing up. Where I grew up, we blamed businesses and rich people for a lot of damage that had been done in our lives. We believed that inequality was the result of the greed of the business people. I never wanted anything to do with it. If anything, I wanted to fight against it.?

I saw a different dimension of business in Upstate New York. I thought maybe I can make things, and somehow it would be my profession.?

It wasn’t until the early days of Chobani that I saw how powerful business can be. And it was just mind-blowing. A few years into Chobani, we built this Little League baseball field in our town. Children in our town had never had one. It had lights and a field and the families could picnic. It’s still there.?

The reason I did it is because I'm a bit competitive. Cooperstown is half an hour away and has the Baseball Hall of Fame and beautiful fancy places where kids come from all over to play. In our town, our kids were playing in mud and there weren’t even lines. I said I want a better field than the one in Cooperstown.

I said, “I don’t want to build it myself. I want the earth movers, the electricians, the small businesses, everyone to work on this. I want this to be a project for everybody in this little town, whether they paid for it or not.” That’s what we did.?

It wasn’t until the early days of Chobani that I saw how powerful business can be. And it was just mind-blowing.

By July 4, we opened this place. It’s been years, and we’ve done so much since, but I still remember being shocked by the kids’ eyes, their reactions to this field. It was mind-blowing. And I never knew a business could do that. I never knew you could make this happen in people’s lives. I knew at that moment that I was in the right place and I was going to be in it for a long time.?

I’ve been tested many, many times. But once you understand the impact a business can have not just in your life but also out there, you can’t put a price to it. You have one life, and there’s certain things wealth can do. After a certain while, it’s just linear. But with business, you have one of the fastest, most dramatic impact-makers that’s out there.?

It’s really extraordinary. So many people as they get more successful hide the values that made them who they were in the first place. And from the very beginning, you had a confidence that those values that came from a nomadic, tribal lifestyle had so much to offer this very individualistic world in the United States. And that says a lot about you.?

It tends to happen when you start from a place of disadvantage. We started from a small town, an old factory, distant from everywhere else, with no knowledge, no money. Chances of this succeeding were extremely low.?

All you have is your values, your strength, your hard work. And you have to decide that I’m not going to only value what’s mine; I’m going to value yours and yours and yours and everybody’s. It’s not for the money. Of course, it’s important, but money isn’t going to make you elevated. It’s got to be something above and beyond that.?

It only spreads throughout a company if everyone believes in that mission. The selflessness of the leader, the selflessness of the group is under a big microscope. There’s no pretending. And once people are convinced, the way forward is very clear. And everybody comes in, and I’m blown away every single day by what people do. Somehow I get the credit. But it creates this dimension. The combination of everybody’s best comes in and creates this air. And that applies to everything. It’s hard to build, and it’s very easy to destroy. It takes work. Twenty years of being in that dimension is not easy unless you’re really in there because you can’t pretend.?

It’s also difficult because we know that as people become wealthier, more powerful, the majority of people lose empathy. They become less able to listen deeply. They’re told by everyone around them how smart they are, how beautiful they are, and many people buy it. What has kept you grounded and how do you make sure you’re listening to the people you serve now?

For some reason, the success did not cross the skin. It didn’t go inside. I’m not trying to minimize it. I see the numbers. I hear what people say. And two seconds later, it just goes away, and I go out and make my tea and eat my cheese with my bread. And I forget about it. So I’m lucky from that perspective that it didn’t materialize in me.?

The second part is I was very close to nature in Upstate New York. I grew up in nature. And I realized nature has no price to it. You don’t have to be rich or poor. It’s just there, it’s ours. I was very aware early on that life is precious. I think about the wonders of life that I can go on a journey from a nomadic life in Turkey to Upstate New York.?

I was afraid I was going to lose it, because success is a very powerful drug, very seductive. And it can take over.?

And as much as the journey has an effect on the people around you, it’s so personal. The ups and downs and cracks and pains and learnings and anxieties that you go through. Through this journey of business, I value that more than the accumulated wealth or accumulated ego. I just look for the next mountain to climb, and see what that does to me. And I was more interested in that journey than what I accumulated.?

The second year or third year of Chobani, I brought everybody in the factory to a conference room. And I told them, it’s early and there’s a long way to go but it looks like this company has the potential to climb some mountains and change all our lives and our community’s life in a very direct way. It’s going to depend on how we behave going forward as we accumulate this success.?

I said, “if you ever see me act differently than what I normally am, I’m giving permission to every single one of you to hit me, shake me, tell me I’m losing it.” I told them to help me stay the course. I had no wife, I had no kids, I had no mother, I had no close friends, I had no wise teachers. The only people I could rely on to keep me in line were my comrades, the people I work with.?

I was young and early in the journey. I was afraid I was going to lose it, because success is a very powerful drug, very seductive. And it can take over.?

In the first 7-8 years of my journey, I was always known to have a hat. Even people I worked with didn’t know I had my mother’s scarf inside that hat. I carried it with me. I knew any time I did something wrong, my mother would correct me. And she was my North Star.?

And when we gave employees partnership in the company, I said, “You guys think I’m the one who’s making this happen but it’s the person who is my teacher, my North Star.” I took my hat off and showed them the green scarf that my mother had on the day she died. “This is who I rely on.”

It comes down to the people around you. People are going to tell you you’re amazing, you’re this and that. But to have people who truly tell you, “Let’s have a cup of coffee and let’s talk. I have some things to tell you.”?

Those friends, those family members and loved ones will correct you. And I wish everyone has people around them like that to keep them in the right place as they are celebrating the successes that happen.?

Read part II.