Hello Reader,
It certainly feels like the year is moving rapidly towards December; seasons are shifting, months feel like weeks, and days blur into one another.
Soon, we'll be seeing tinsel.
Over the last week I spent time with the first cohort of participants in a creative leadership program I've designed. One leadership story we shared was about a young man who responded to an ad, and made one of the world's most popular yoghurts.
The ad arrived in the posts, s these were the days when ads arrived in our letterboxes and not on our screens. A fully equipped yoghurt factory in upstate New York was for sale, and the price was under one million dollars. Hamdi Ulukaya, a young migrant from Türkiye, read the ad twice as he heard the faint knock of opportunity at his door.
He drove out to see the factory—past the diners and empty storefronts of towns the dairy industry had left in solitude for decades— and he found a hundred-year-old factory with a handful of Kraft employees inside, dismantling the machinery for shipment elsewhere.
Hamdi was a Kurdish immigrant from a farming family in Türkiye, running a small feta cheese business. As he looked around the dilapidated factory, he tried to think of creative ways this old plant could be brought back to life, and against the advice of his lawyer, he took out a small business loan and bought it.
That was 2005.
Chobani eventually became the biggest-selling yoghurt brand in the United States, owning more than a fifth of the market, and is now a company valued in the tens of billions.
This is the part of the story we hear often about Hamdi Ulukaya, because it is the part that most resembles the fairytale we're meant to hear. A young immigrant goes from rags to riches, a tale the traditional world around us — the status quo— likes to tell itself is the measure of success. However, the part that matters most to me is the creative ways Ulukaya got the company moving, and working.
He found himself running a business in towns that had been hollowed out by decades of manufacturing decline, and he kept meeting people who had nowhere else to go once factory after factory closed, taking their livelihoods with them. These people were refugees who had resettled nearby. Without transport, without English, without a pathway to another job.
We often think of creativity as the sprinkle at the end; something we bring in to make the serious things the commercial world makes, look nicer, more presentable or more functional. So many rooms of leadership echo with the words 'I don't have a creative bone in my body.' An othering and a denial. A diminishment of creative people so someone can seem more important for a moment.
However, leaders like Hamdi hold the ability to see beyond themselves. To listen deeply and seek meaning in the work they do, in turn developing a consciousness of the world that surrounds them that is creativity in its purest sense; an ability to see the unseen, develop enough empathy for a wicked problem, and the people at is epicentre, and solve it in ways that are novel, valuable and meaningful.
He brought in shuttle buses and hired translators. Instead of screening them them our for lacking experience, he built training programs around people who had never worked a production line in their lives. By the time journalists started asking about it, refugees made up close to a third of Chobani's workforce.
Above all — and this is why this story resonates with me so deeply. This act was never framed as an act of generosity; the very notion of 'giving back' has its own smell of privilege and power. Hamdi Ulukaya framed this as the simplest form of common sense; that a business sitting inside a depleted local economy has some obligation to the people still standing in it.
Not everyone read it that way. Through 2016, as the American immigration debate turned uglier, and Chobani became a target. Boycott campaigns circulated online, accusing Ulukaya of importing 'Muslims to Idaho 300 at a time'. Conspiracy sites claimed he was flooding the country with refugees to keep his factories staffed. The mayor of Twin Falls, Idaho — home to one of Chobani’s plants — received death threats for defending the company.
None of it was true and most of it wasn’t even coherent. It was simply noise that was real enough for Hamdi Ulukaya to do something about it. Instead of walking away from the bitterness and anger he decided to think beyond himself again.
He founded the Tent Foundation that same year turning what had been one company’s hiring practice into a coalition — Airbnb, IKEA, Mastercard, UPS, hundreds more eventually joining — built around a single creative idea: that a job, not a handout, is what actually ends a refugee’s displacement.
“The most important moment for a refugee is the moment they get a job,” he said. “That’s the moment they stop being a refugee” Ulukaya was quoted by PBS News, as then Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed an agreement to boost refugee hiring in the United States.
That is creativity's impact — not an act of 'giving back' but an ability to raise everyone by imagining, designing and creating the infrastructure that enables the change.
It's the difference between charity and stewardship.
In April 2016, Ulukaya gathered his roughly two thousand full-time employees and told them that up to ten per cent of the company would be theirs — shares allocated by tenure, drawn directly from his own holdings, worth an estimated average of $150,000 a person, and considerably more for those who had been there from the beginning.
“This isn’t a gift,” he wrote to them. “It’s a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility” drawing a distinction that mattered more than the amount of money. A gift can be withdrawn or resented. A promise binds both of us to one another.
This was so much more than an employee bonus. Ulukaya was redistributing power, rewriting who the company belonged to, and asking them to keep building it as owners, rather than employees. A sense of inclusion, and a small details that matters. Often missed in our working lives.
A final small detail is in the company’s name. Chobani comes from the Turkish çoban meaning shepherd; a small signal that tells us a little about where this sense of communal leadership may have come from.
Hamdi Ulukaya grew up on a rural dairy farm in Türkiye watching his family tend to animals. A communal sense of leadership, bound tightly to a relationship of care.
It is not a stretch to think of this being the seed of his ability to see the world in new and novel ways. A place and a community that taught him about Being, before Doing. That our decisions can only hold water, if they are built by a simple conviction to see the world clearly, find meaning and think beyond ourselves.
See you next week.