100 Business Days Out: Day 20 - Vacation Day

It was 1993 on the Friday before the first Saturday in May. I had just been promoted to Director at Frito-Lay. Back then, and for someone my age, that was a big deal. With the promotion, my boss Dave Zemelman (another one of the great bosses), had given me full-access to our new CEO, Steve Reinemund (who went on to become CEO/Chairman of PepsiCo and now is the Dean of the Wake Forest Business School) and Dave had asked for me to work directly with Steve on a number of items. One of them was that I managed the open position requisition process and once a week I had to take all of the open jobs in the company in front of Steve and defend which ones I thought should be filled and which ones shouldn’t. He had final say and approval but I was the process guy to make it happen. The people in the field or hiring managers counted on me to keep the process flowing and to get those approvals as fast as I could. So, that demanded of me to keep my calendar fluid and to be ready to meet with Steve once a week when he could. I didn’t want to miss a week for many reasons. Well, on this week in 1993, he couldn’t meet with me in person at all and we needed to do a phone call to at least talk about a few of the critical open jobs. His assistant Ramona set me up to talk to him at 1:30PM CST. On that Friday, at that time, I was in Louisville at Churchill Downs for Oaks Day, the day before the Kentucky Derby. Now, you need to know that in those early days with Steve at the helm, we didn’t really know how he thought about certain things and how those things would relate to how he thought about you as a person. What I personally didn’t know was how Steve thought about horseracing; how that fit into his value set and more importantly, how might that influence how he thought about me. Funny now all these years later that I was concerned about this, but back then, it was a big deal for this young turk trying to work my way up. Well, I will tell you that I was sweating bullets because the only place I could get to a phone was right under the public address announcement speaker. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if while I was on the phone the bugler would play the call to post or Mike Battaglia would be calling a race. I was sweating bullets. I got lucky, we were on and off the phone in a matter of minutes, it was between races, and he never asked where I was on that beautiful Friday in Louisville. Over the years since, I have done many a work call from Churchill Downs including one year when we had an EA Compensation Committee call on that Friday…I promised I wasn’t betting the company money. J More than one candidate has been offered positions or closed while I was standing in Section 116 Row D and last year, I was up at 6:00AM EST on the Friday before Derby doing a webinar off of my laptop with an IP headset and microphone while I was sitting in a stairwell of our hotel. But this year I went into the Derby weekend with the only calls expected being those of friends who might want me to place a bet for them. No conference calls, meetings, outgoing calls to be made, just The Derby. For me, this is might be the first pure vacation day I can remember and what better day to make that mark than the Friday before the first Saturday in May.