Ulukaya Quotes

There are many ways to earn the love of employees. Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of multi-billion dollar yogurt maker Chobani, made headlines when he awarded his two thousand full-time employees stock worth up to 10 percent of the company’s value when it goes public or is sold. Ulukaya said in a letter to staff, “This isn’t a gift. It’s a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility. To continue to create something special and of lasting value.”3 Apart from making instant global news, the stock award was also a shrewd business move. Research from The University of Pennsylvania shows that employee-owned companies — even ones in which employees are minority owners — outperform their competitors.4 It is true that Ulukaya now has a slightly smaller stake in Chobani. But it is likely worth a lot more, especially when you consider this research and how employee owners are incentivized to work harder toward the success of the business.

Most of the world’s most successful innovators see problems through a different lens from the rest of us. Why didn’t Hertz come up with a Zipcar-like product first? Kodak came close to creating a kind of Facebook product long before Mark Zuckerberg did. Major yogurt manufacturers understood that there might be a demand for Greek yogurt well before Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya launched what is now a $ 1 billion business. AT& T introduced a “picture phone” at the 1964 World’s Fair, decades before Apple’s iPhone. Instead of looking at the way the world is and assuming that’s the best predictor of the way the world will be, great innovators push themselves to look beyond entrenched assumptions to wonder if, perhaps, there was a better way. And there is.