Welcome to How Leaders Lead. I'm Kula Callahan, here to bring you another edition of three more

questions with David Novak. David, it's so great to be on the show with you. How are you today?

I'm doing well, Kula, and I always look forward to our conversation. And today, we are debriefing the podcast we had with Alan Shaw,

the CEO of Norfolk Southern, which is a railway company that's been around since 1827.

Now that is a long, long time. It is. I love how on our How Leaders Lead show, you get to learn from expert CEOs

in all different sorts of industries. And I've never known much about the railway industry,

but this episode was super enlightening. And now I know that when I buy something online,

it likely has traveled on a Norfolk Southern train to get to my house.

That's right. You know, you kind of think about that old song, I've been working on the railroad.

You know, that's like you think of the rail businesses as really old line, but man, they make a lot of

things happen today. They really do. In fact, they touch 60% of consumption in our country today.

It's just wild the operation that Alan Shaw gets the privilege of leading at Norfolk Southern.

And David, I'm excited to get your take on some of the concepts that you discussed with Alan.

So for today's three more questions, we're going to be working on the railroad together.

Question number one.

Alan's been at Norfolk Southern for 30 years, and he's held a number of different roles,

from finance to safety, to marketing, and many others in between. I love Alan's explanation

of how he, quote, grew up in the company. Now, David, your real focus before you became CEO of

young brands was marketing. How did you grow up in the company and grow yourself into becoming

CEO? Well, I was very fortunate to work for a fantastic company, which was PepsiCo.

And PepsiCo was famous for developing people, having high standards, the great brands that they had.

And it was just a great place to develop.

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