Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya went from working on a farm with little money to running a billion-dollar business — and he did it without sticking to a plan.
The 50-year-old billionaire said his adaptability helped propel his success on a recent episode of the ReThinking podcast with organizational psychologist Adam Grant. And he recommends that others learn the skill.
“Making plans has never been my thing,” he told Grant. “[When you stick to plans] you’re creating some kind of rigid lines and not seeing the dimension of possibilities.”
Many experts see planning as an essential tool for success, as it can help you stay focused and hold you accountable for achieving the goals you’ve set. But being overly reliant on a plan can also put you in a box, making it impossible to adapt if changing circumstances make your initial plans obsolete.
Ulukaya experienced it firsthand. He moved to the U.S. in 1994 without much money, having come from a “tribal lifestyle” in Turkey, where he was raised in a family of nomadic dairy farmers. He took a job on a farm in upstate New York while attending school to make ends meet. Years later, Ulukaya came across an ad for a fully equipped yogurt factory — and buying it meant he needed a business plan.
“I made my first business plan that I wrote for the Small Business Administration to [get a loan] to buy that whole factory… It was the first time I’d ever done it,” he said. “And no one remembered that plan six months after I launched the factory. It was a fraction of what we had done in the first six [to] seven months.”
Ulukaya and Chobani stayed at that plant for five years, rolling with the punches and adapting to changes like the Great Recession of 2007. He said the company reached $1 billion in sales in 2012.
According to Ulukaya, he didn’t know the ins and outs of business early on in his career — but not adhering to the norm of planning as a business owner actually benefited him.
“Not knowing was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because if I had known all of those things and made all kinds of calculations … I probably would have doubted myself,” he said.
Ulukaya isn’t the only one ditching the conventional wisdom of building a career plan and sticking to it. Apple CEO Tim Cook has a similar outlook.
As part of his MBA curriculum at Duke University, Cook had to write a 25-year plan, he told students and alumni at his class reunion in 2013. Years later, he found that plan tucked away in a box.
“I would say it was reasonably accurate for all of 18 to 24 months after it was written,” Cook said. “There was nothing, a single thing on it, that was accurate post that. Not a single thing.”
Sixteen years since Chobani’s launch, Ulukaya says he now has to have some level of preparedness while running a big company, but he vows to never be rigid in following plans.
“I’m struggling with that kind of stuff, of course, now with me running a large company and I have to make some plans,” he said. “But I never lock myself into it. I never lock myself into that prison.”
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