It's an incredibly bold lie to just take a famous product, claim you invented it, and then go public with speeches and books about your success as an inventor. In a way, it's congruent to his philosophy as a motivational speaker - "take ownership". He did just that and it worked out great.
The whole thing actually reminds me of the time I invented the iPod. See, I'd always liked listening to music while I ran, but my darn "walkman" kept skipping. So I called up the CEO of the company I was a contract security worker at, and I said "Mr. Jobs, Mr. Jobs, have I got an idea for you!"
It's not that bold a lie. He started at the bottom of a corporate ladder and climbed close enough to the top to be on first name terms with one of the CEOs. The details of how he actually got there and the moderately popular spicy products he actually championed are obviously less exciting than invented version where he's still a janitor when he meets the CEO and he conjures spicy flavours from scratch... but the blagging skills he uses to deliver that story are broadly the same ones that helped him navigate actual middle management meetings at a company he actually did work for. And of course he knows both that the actual details if his ladder-climbing are boring and that Frito-Lays themselves wouldn't mind the interesting... variation. As if you actually designed the charger for the second generation iPod, but...
Much like the Catch Me If You Can scammer who came up a few weeks ago, who turns out to have just been a forger of small checks who clung to people in a really creepy way, but parlayed the same basic lying techniques into being a Hollywood antihero whose criminal genius had the FBI hanging off his every word when they eventually caught up with him
It's certainly an impressive story to start work in an entry level position and end your career as an executive. That's something to be proud of. However, I'd bet that a substantial portion of executives have similar stories. Starting at an entry level is pretty common.
As for the rest, it does all seem to be complete lies. He didn't invent the flavor, he didn't come up with the idea based on his Hispanic heritage, he didn't pitch the CEO as a janitor.
If someone is trying to sell you their strategy for amazing success it matters whether they are actually an amazing success or not. It also matters whether they succeeded by using their own strategy or not. His "take ownership" philosophy might be what drove his success at Fritos, but I'd bet it was more of the typical hard work, creativity, luck, and lying.
> It's certainly an impressive story to start work in an entry level position and end your career as an executive. That's something to be proud of.
His history of lying and taking credit for other peoples' work certainly does cast doubt on the merits of his rise up the corporate ladder. Anyone who has spent time in the corporate world has met people in high-ranking positions who they felt didn't really deserve to be there. I know nothing about this guy's time at Frito-Lay, so of course I can't really say anything about whether his success there was merited. But I'm definitely not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, either.
Starting entry level and climbing to the top is certainly common. But "the bottom" is usually quite a few steps above janitor. It's usually starting out as a page or intern or a secretary. I have heard very few "janitor to executive stories".
If by "bagging skills" you mean relentless bald-faced lying and willingness to take credit for other people's work then that's true. It's easy to imagine that someone so willing to capitalize on a forged biography is likely morally bankrupt to his core and a grade A narcissist.
> It's an incredibly bold lie to just take a famous product, claim you invented it, and then go public with speeches and books about your success as an inventor.
Don't you think such lies are commonplace these days, unfortunately? This one seems run of the mill to me.
Because it's not an inflammatory topic, it might be a useful case to examine and learn how lies like that function.
I am not sure the lie started out that way. He did pitch something and the Flamin’ Hot Doritos came out in his market subsequent to that pitch, so the charitable explanation is that he genuinely thought his pitch influenced the final product.
> I am not sure the lie started out that way. He did pitch something and the Flamin’ Hot Doritos came out in his market subsequent to that pitch, so the charitable explanation is that he genuinely thought his pitch influenced the final product.
Reread the article. It concludes he pitched the concept of a marketing line called “Sabrositas” in 1994. Sabrositas included pre-existing products, including Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which had been on shelves as early as 1989. It also included the pre-existing cheeto flavouring on top of popcorn, which was his only new product in the line. And he was already an exec, having been promoted from a Machinist (not janitor) apparently on the basis of initiative shown in waste-reduction ideas and not cheetos-flavour invention, when he pitched Sabrositas.
Alone, it requires a lot of charity to square this with his version of events. Did he, in picking products for his marketing pitch, somehow imagine the cheetos one didn’t exist before he picked it? Did he forget that he was an exec when he pitched the marketing line, too?
But on top of that you have all the elaborate details of his claim of having developed the flavour profile (in talks, he literally claims to have sat around fucking around with spices trying to get the flavour right) and dunked unflavoured cheetos into it to present to the CEO & execs, when again the article concludes that the seasoning is sourced from a supplier called McCormick since 1989, years before his pitch. His claim of convincing all his family to buy out the test market for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, in California where the Flamin Hot Cheetos test market wasn’t, years after it had already entered general sales. And the secretary remembering that he first spoke to the CEO in 1993-1994, only after he was already an exec, despite his elaborate story of pitching to the CEO (who wasn’t the CEO at the time he was a janitor) as a janitor, which he hadn’t been for over a decade when the CEO joined and he made his pitch.
It requires something well beyond charity to believe he genuinely believes his story when so much of it is based on elaborate details that are well out of line with the bare facts.
Yeah tbh I immediately recognized the name, but I don’t know how well known it is to non-North Americans, who tend to make up the weekend crowd.
If you’re aware of what they do, though, it really further undermines the idea that he’s just misrembering: McCormick does a ton of R&D on seasonings to match the evolution of market tastes, and it makes complete sense that Frito Lay when developing new products to trial does so by buying seasonings that match the market profile they want out of their catalog, and doesn’t have janitors sitting at home mixing Cheeto dust and cayan and other spices for weeks to singlehandedly invent new flavourings to pitch to CEOs, when bulk spice ingredient purchasing and mixing isn’t even the business Frito Lay is actually in.
Not that it probably makes a difference in this case. But even a flavor developed in-house would probably go to someone like McCormick to develop the actual seasoning that can be mass produced and has all the necessary properties like shelf life, cost, etc.
McCormick is a global corporation. While it’s brands in the Americas are certainly the most successful and profitable, it operates brands throughout Europe and Asia as well.
It may be incredibly bold to you because you likely have a reputation to lose. This guy had nothing to lose. If you have muscles you can always get another unskilled job.
In any case, considering how good he is at bullshitting, they should maybe promote him as VP of marketing.
The politician you have in mind, Al Gore, claimed credit for driving funding to develop, among other things, the internet. Which, in fact, he did. He also earned a Nobel Prize for his role in alerting a very large number of people to the now rapidly unfolding disaster of global climate disruption. Had more listened, then, things might be better now.
The whole thing actually reminds me of the time I invented the iPod. See, I'd always liked listening to music while I ran, but my darn "walkman" kept skipping. So I called up the CEO of the company I was a contract security worker at, and I said "Mr. Jobs, Mr. Jobs, have I got an idea for you!"