Best Selling Books by David Novak

“AN IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT MOTIVATION FROM A PROVEN MOTIVATOR.” —JACK WELCH Yum! Brands CEO David Novak learned long ago that you can’t lead a great organization of any size without getting your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission. But how do you do that? There are countless leadership books, but how many will actually help a Taco Bell shift manager, a Fortune 500 CEO, a new entrepreneur, or anyone in between? Over his fifteen years at Yum! Brands, Novak has developed a trademarked program—Taking People with You—that he personally teaches to thousands of managers around the world. He shows them how to make big things happen by getting people on their side. No skill in business is more important. And Yum!’s extraordinary success (at least 13 percent growth for each of the last ten years) proves his point. Novak knows that managers don’t need leadership platitudes or business school theories. So he cuts right to the chase with a step-by-step guide to setting big goals, building strong teams, blowing past your targets, and celebrating after you shock the skeptics. And then doing it again and again until consistent excellence becomes a core element of your culture.

Rather than explain the power of recognition in a typical business book, acclaimed CEO David Novak wrote a fun story that draws on his real-world experiences at Pepsi and Yum! Brands, as well as his personal life. When was the last time you told your colleagues how much you value them? It sounds like a trivial thing in the middle of a busy work day. But as Novak discovered during his years as a hard charging executive, there’s nothing trivial about recognition. It can make a life-or-death difference to any organization, when people see that someone important really notices and appreciates their contributions. The story of O Great One! opens when Jeff Johnson becomes the third-generation CEO of his family business, after the sudden death of his father. The Happy Face Toy Company had many hits in the 1950s and 60s, including Crazy Paste, but its results have been declining for more than a decade. The board has given Jeff just one year to turn the business around, or else they’ll have to sell it to the highest bidder. As Jeff races to save his family’s legacy by getting the company back on track, he meets downtrodden factory workers and an uninspired executive team. Then a birthday gift from his grandson gives Jeff an important insight into why Happy Face lost its culture of innovation and excitement, along with its profitability. He comes up with an idea that seems crazy… But is it crazy enough to work? Whether you’re trying to lead a small department, a Fortune 500 company, a non-profit, or your own family, the story and lessons of O Great One! can help you make everyone around you happier and more effective.

Acclaimed YUM! Brands CEO and author of The New York Times best-selling leadership book, Taking People With You, David Novak, teams up with Jason Goldsmith, the coach to some of the world’s best PGA golf stars, to bring you groundbreaking lessons on personal growth and professional development. Take Charge of You teaches you the secrets to self-coaching. Everyone could use a good coach to help them reach their full potential. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough good ones to go around, and the ones that exist are often too expensive or sought-after for most of us to even consider hiring them. Your life is too important to leave your personal growth and professional development up to chance. Take Charge of You helps you define for yourself what you want out of life and give yourself what you need to succeed.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States, David Novak traces the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise, an underground music genre combining distortion and electronic effects.

In this book, David Novak conducts an historical, philosophical and theological reflection on the central Jewish doctrine of Israel''s election by God, also known as the idea of the chosen people. Historically, he analyses the great change in modern Jewish thought brought about by Spinoza''s inversion of the doctrine: that it was not God who elected Israel, but Israel who elected God. The development of that inversion is illustrated by the thought of the German philosopher-theologian, Hermann Cohen. Philosophically, Novak explores the ontological implications of the two differing theologies of election. Theologically, he argues for the correlation of election and revelation, and maintains that a theology of election is required in order to deal with two central questions, namely: who are the Jews, and how are Jews to be related to the world? The constructive picture which results leads to a fresh understanding of Jewish modernity.

David Novak—one of today’s most engaging, unconventional, and successful business leaders—lived in thirty-two trailer parks in twenty-three states by the time he reached the seventh grade. He sold encyclopedias door to door, worked as a hotel night clerk, and took a job as a $7,200-a-year advertising copywriter with the hopes of maybe one day becoming a creative director. Instead, he became head of the world’s largest restaurant company at the ripe old age of forty-seven.While David never went to business school, he did learn from the greatest of teachers—experience—and plenty of other very smart people as well: Magic Johnson on the secret to teamwork, Warren Buffett on what he looks for in the companies he buys, John Wooden on ego, and Jack Welch on one thing he’d do over. Now he wants to share with you what he discovered about getting ahead and getting noticed; motivating people and turning businesses around; building winning teams and running a global company of nearly one million people; and always staying true to yourself.The Education of an Accidental CEO is filled with David Novak’s street-smart wisdom:From his formative years...• Walking through your anxieties• Avoiding the poison of stereotypes• Staying “right-sized” • Breaking through the clutterFrom his years as an ad executive and chief marketing officer ...• How not to roll over like Fluffy the dog• Seeing yourself as a brand• When to pull the plug on the Super BowlAs the COO of Pepsi Cola and then as president of KFC and Pizza Hut ...• Why a gold watch can have less value than a floppy rubber chicken• Knowing when “the answers are in the building”• Knowing when to do nothing• What it takes to revitalze a companyAnd as CEO of Yum! Brands, Inc. ...• How to “shock the system”• How to avoid the slow-no’s• Managing two up and two downDavid Novak’s ideas for building an entire culture around reward and recognition—getting everyone from division presidents to dishwashers to buy into recognizing the achievements of others—is studied by other companies and discussed here in great detail. Whether you are the CEO of a global conglomerate or a budding entrepreneur, there is something here that will help you get where you want to go.

The differentiating mindset and habits that help you turn insight into action. When you put learning at the center of everything you do, you grow your career, your leadership, your relationships, and your joy and fulfillment in life. But even for people who are naturally curious and interested in solving problems, being an effective learner who can turn their learning into action takes insight and practice. With infectious enthusiasm and optimism, David Novak shows you how to master active learning. A trailer-park kid who lived in twenty-three states before entering high school, Novak rapidly ascended the ranks at PepsiCo to become cofounder and CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, the global restaurant icon Yum! Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and the Habit Burger Grill). And he credits active learning with getting him there. This compilation of wisdom and practical habits from Novak''s life and from some of the most successful leaders in the world—CEOs from many industries, military and political leaders, sports greats, experts, and coaches—is your active-learning practice manual. Chapter by chapter, Novak and his all-star roster of leaders share how they''ve climbed to the highest levels in their fields. Through stories of wins and losses, missteps and miracle saves, challenges tackled, and problems solved, Novak shows you all the ways, big and small, that you can become an active learner. A leadership devotional for the modern age, How Leaders Learn will inspire you to reach new levels of success in your own life and work.

This book argues that Zionism is only a coherent political stance when it is intelligently rooted in Judaism, especially in the classical Jewish doctrine of God''s election of the people of Israel and the commandment to them to settle the land of Israel.

Covenantal Rights is a groundbreaking work of political theory: a comprehensive, philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring insights from the Jewish political tradition into current political and legal debates about rights and to bring rights discourse more fully into Jewish thought. David Novak pursues these aims by presenting a theory of rights founded on the covenant between God and the Jewish people as that covenant is constituted by Scripture and the rabbinic tradition. In doing so, he presents a powerful challenge to prevailing liberal and conservative positions on rights and duties and opens a new chapter in contemporary Jewish political thinking. For Novak, "covenantal rights" are rooted in God''s primary rights as creator of the universe and as the elector of a particular community whose members relate to this God as their sovereign. The subsequent rights of individuals and communities flow from God''s covenantal promises, which function as irrevocable entitlements. This presents a sharp contrast to the liberal tradition, in which rights flow above all from individuals. It also challenges the conservative idea that duties can take precedence over rights, since Novak argues that there are no covenantal duties that are not backed by correlative rights. Novak explains carefully and clearly how this theory of covenantal rights fits into Jewish tradition and applies to the relationships among God, the covenanted community, and individuals. This work is a profound and provocative contribution to contemporary religious and political theory.

The Jewish Social Contract begins by asking how a traditional Jew can participate politically and socially and in good faith in a modern democratic society, and ends by proposing a broad, inclusive notion of secularity. David Novak takes issue with the view--held by the late philosopher John Rawls and his followers--that citizens of a liberal state must, in effect, check their religion at the door when discussing politics in a public forum. Novak argues that in a "liberal democratic state, members of faith-based communities--such as tradition-minded Jews and Christians--ought to be able to adhere to the broad political framework wholly in terms of their own religious tradition and convictions, and without setting their religion aside in the public sphere. Novak shows how social contracts emerged, rooted in biblical notions of covenant, and how they developed in the rabbinic, medieval, and "modern periods. He offers suggestions as to how Jews today can best negotiate the modern social contract while calling upon non-Jewish allies to aid them in the process. The Jewish Social Contract will prove an enlightening and innovative contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in liberal democracies.

This classic study of the idea of Noahide law traces the concept’s historical development and shows how it is relevant to practical discussions of the halakhah pertaining to non-Jews and to relations between Jews and non-Jews. Individual analyses of each of the seven Noahide laws, drawing primarily on classical rabbinic texts by traditional commentators, are followed by a discussion of the underlying theory.

Over the past few decades, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish -- Christian relations, including signs of a new, improved Christian attitude towards Jews. Christianity in Jewish Terms is a Jewish theological response to the profound changes that have taken place in Christian thought. The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which features a main essay, written by a Jewish scholar, that explores the meaning of a set of Christian beliefs. Following the essay are responses from a second Jewish scholar and a Christian scholar. Designed to generate new conversations within the American Jewish community and between the Jewish and Christian communities, Christianity in Jewish Terms lays the foundation for better understanding. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

Natural law is the idea that our basic moral principles apply to every human being, and are accessible to human reason. Most people have assumed that since Judaism seems to consist of a specific historical revelation and a specific tradition, that an idea such as natural law is foreign to it. This book shows that natural law is part of Judaism, and that it is consistent with its specific revelation and tradition. In this book, not only is the history of an idea shown with great accuracy, but the idea of natural law is presented as a way of conveying some of Judaism''s meaning for life today.

Many studies written about the Jewish-Christian relationship are primarily historical overviews that focus on the Jewish background of Christianity, the separation of Christianity from Judaism, or the medieval disputations between the two faiths. This book is one of the first studies to examine the relationship from a philosophical and theological viewpoint. Carefully drawing on Jewish classical sources, Novak argues that there is actual justification for the new relationship between Judaism and Christianity from within Jewish religious tradition. He demonstrates that this new relationship is possible between religiously committed Jews and Christians without the two major impediments to dialogue: triumphalism and relativism. One of the very few books on this topic written by a Jewish theologian who speaks specifically to modern Christian concerns, it will provide the groundwork for a more serious development of Jewish-Christian dialogue in our day.

Leading contemporary Jewish thinker David Novak has here compiled ten of his essays on a variety of issues in Jewish ethics. Drawing constantly on classical Jewish tradition, Novak also looks at a wide range of modern critical scholarship on the ancient sources. He aims to point out certain common features of Jewish and Christian ethics and the normative implications of this overlapping of traditions; he assumes the reality of a "Judeo-Christian ethic," while refusing to minimize the doctrinal differences between the two traditions. The essays address such major normative issues in social justice as ecology, war and peace, the treatment of minorities, and the approach to AIDS patients. This combination of theoretical reflection and practical application, along with careful and detailed analysis of classical Jewish texts, makes the book a welcome contribution to contemporary ethical theory and normative ethics as well as a work of original Jewish theology.

David Novak, one of the most distinguished Jewish theologians in the world, offers a new interpretation of how the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition talk about God. What does the Torah say about God? How does the God of the Torah talk about Godself? And how does the God of the Torah talk about human beings? The book traces the history and theology of God-talk in Judaism, and how it remains relevant, now more than ever, and speaks directly to contemporary issues such as human rights.

David Novak ranks as one of the great American theologians of our time. Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader offers a representative selection of the philosophical theology and social ethics of David Novak, one of the foremost contemporary Jewish theologians in North America. Novak''s work forges an unapologetic link between Judaism and non-Jewish societies in a multicultural environment. This grants Judaism an active role in public discourse, where it can contribute to the most pressing ethical issues of our day - abortion, war, capital punishment, sexual ethics, and health care ethics. In their introduction to the volume, Martin Kavka and Randi Rashkover present a systematic introduction to Novak''s thought, focusing on the novelty of his method for overcoming the longstanding dichotomy between reason and tradition.