At TaylorMade, a discussion about the next golf driver had become a discussion about shades of black. Mark King later recalled the options with a salesman’s appreciation for the absurd: light, medium or dark. A product manager from the putter business had another suggestion. Paint it white. The following week, he brought in a white driver. A decision that had seemed settled suddenly looked rather small.
King has returned to that episode when explaining how companies get stuck. People become fluent in the choices they already know. Someone from a neighboring department asks a question that sounds slightly ridiculous. Then the customers take a look. In his telling, the white club helped expose a larger opportunity: the business had mistaken familiarity for a requirement.
Golf clubs, sneakers, tacos, burgers. The merchandise has changed through King’s career. His interest in who gets to interrupt the meeting has been more consistent. Now executive chairman and interim CEO of Jack in the Box, he has another assignment in which a famous name needs to earn renewed attention. This time, the scorecard includes restaurant sales, franchisee economics and debt.
The boy who moved the alarm clock
King grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As a boy, he shoveled neighbors’ snow before school, initially working a handful of houses around 6:30 in the morning. He noticed that other children were reluctant to get up. His response was to begin at 4:30 and take on the street. The weather supplied the inventory; the alarm clock supplied the advantage.
That early start survived the snow shovel. Years later, he described mornings that could include half a dozen calls before eight. Coffee mattered. So did talking to people directly. He preferred a conversation, with its pauses and clarifications, to an email that might require another email to explain it. For an executive who talks about speed, the telephone has a practical appeal: you can hear whether the other person understood.
Golf gave him a route into business. He attended Northern Illinois University on a golf scholarship before transferring to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He graduated in 1981 with a business administration degree, then joined the young TaylorMade as a territory sales representative. The future chief executive began with the ordinary work of selling somebody else’s idea.
A salesman learns to change the product
The progression took years. King moved through sales management, spent a stint at Callaway, and returned to TaylorMade as president in 1999. He later added the CEO title. It is a useful correction to the tidy executive biography: the career was built through jobs, customers and a departure, before the big numbers arrived.
The numbers did arrive. When adidas announced his move to its North American business in 2014, it reported that TaylorMade-adidas Golf sales had risen from €637 million in 2003 to €1.285 billion in 2013. Those are two dated measurements of the same business, a better way to understand the scale than a floating claim about growth. Over that decade, annual sales had approximately doubled.
Ten years, twice the business
TaylorMade-adidas Golf annual sales. Nominal euros; figures announced by adidas in April 2014.
King could also make himself part of the show. In 2012 he appeared on Undercover Boss, going inside TaylorMade under an assumed identity. For someone who had risen from sales, the premise carried a pointed question: how well does a boss still know the work once knowing the work is no longer his daily job? Television supplied the disguise. The distance between the corner office and the employee remained a real management problem.
His own tastes were less mysterious. Asked about business in 2011, he named former boss Chuck Yash as an influence and Lambeau Field as a favorite venue. Watching his daughters play softball ranked among his preferred sporting occasions. For a timeless idea, he offered three plain words: “Treat people fairly.” It is a short enough policy to remember without a laminated card.
Portland, and a different kind of competition
In June 2014, King moved into the presidency of adidas Group North America, with responsibility for adidas and Reebok operations in the region. He relocated to Portland. Golf had offered a familiar customer and a product he could play with himself. The new job meant understanding a wider set of American sporting tastes, retail relationships and cultural signals.
He wanted decisions and products to move faster. An early account of his strategy described the need to make a global soccer brand feel relevant to American sports. There was also a small, revealing precedent from TaylorMade: when a potential Super Bowl advertising opportunity arrived by email, he had responded in four and a half minutes. The opportunity involved a visor for E-Trade’s talking baby. Corporate urgency sometimes wears very small headgear.
By the time Taco Bell hired him in 2019, adidas had doubled its market share during his North American leadership and regained the number-two position in the United States. The restaurant company also pointed to 35 percent North American sales growth in 2017. These were reasons to hire him across an industry boundary. He could bring experience in getting customers to reconsider a brand they already recognized.
The chief executive becomes a potato
King took over Taco Bell in August 2019. He was joining an established management team and a business that had already recorded seven consecutive years of positive same-store sales growth through 2018. The assignment came with an unusually delicate instruction: add something without flattening what was already working. A successful outsider still has to learn the house rules.
At Taco Bell, those rules allowed a certain amount of public silliness. In January 2021, King announced the return of potato menu items with his face rendered as a potato. Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes and the Spicy Potato Soft Taco were scheduled to return in March after their removal during the previous year’s menu simplification. Customers had made their attachment clear. Their chief executive answered in the visual language of the internet.
It was an agreeable reversal of the usual executive performance. The boss did not need to look imposing to be useful. He needed to make the announcement legible to people who wanted their potatoes back. There are many expensive ways to demonstrate that you have listened. A talking tuber has the advantage of being difficult to mistake for a quarterly earnings presentation.
An old pizza, a new audience
The Mexican Pizza comeback in 2022 offered a more substantial version of the same lesson. A product with a devoted following had been removed. Its return became a cultural event, involving Doja Cat, Dolly Parton and a musical. King credited the marketing team’s imagination. The product was familiar; the manner of reintroducing it gave people a fresh reason to talk about it.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, Taco Bell’s same-store sales rose 11 percent. For the full year, the increase was 8 percent, while digital business grew 40 percent. The differing periods matter. A strong quarter can illuminate a campaign; the annual result gives a broader view. Neither turns one executive into the sole author of thousands of restaurants’ daily performance.
King received Restaurant Business’s 2023 Restaurant Leader of the Year award. Asked to describe his management style, he chose “Loose.” The word fits his willingness to look foolish on camera, but it also raises a harder question. Giving people room requires a boss to accept that an idea may arrive in a form he would never have chosen himself.
“Loose.”
Mark King, describing his leadership style in 2023
Taco Bell gave that permission a structure through its Internal Incubator. Employees could volunteer to learn creative thinking techniques and work on business challenges beyond their usual duties. Creativity became something a person could practice inside the company, with colleagues, rather than a personality trait reserved for the people who made advertisements. An invitation is more convincing when it comes with time to participate.
Give the idea somewhere to go
Some experiments required more than a meeting room. In June 2022, franchisee Border Foods opened Taco Bell Defy in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Its kitchen sat above four drive-thru lanes, with a vertical lift bringing orders down to customers. The architecture made a customer habit visible: the restaurant was being organized around collecting food in a car.
Credit belongs to the franchisee and its collaborators as well as the corporate organization. That distinction matters in King’s story. A chief executive can encourage an experiment, fund it or make room for it without having invented it. The value of a permissive culture shows up in whether someone else’s proposal survives long enough to become an operating restaurant.
There was another route for ideas to become livelihoods. Taco Bell announced a business school with the University of Louisville in 2022, designed to help restaurant leaders learn about franchising and potential ownership. The promise addressed a different kind of distance inside a large chain: the gap between running a shift and understanding how to own a business.
The teacher gets corrected
At home, King has described being on the receiving end of an education. His daughter Ali remembers a childhood of softball, ambitious goals and close relationships. He remembered her assembling a performance chart to improve her game. Apparently, the dinner table had acquired a small analytics department.
But their conversation also included his acknowledgment that she had broadened his perspective. He credited her with helping him think beyond exceptional professional results toward fairness and a wider understanding of other people’s lives. The father who had encouraged ambition was willing to admit that his daughter had something to teach him about its limits. Listening was becoming a family practice as well as a management preference.
Another restaurant, an unfinished scorecard
King left Taco Bell at the end of 2023, with Sean Tresvant succeeding him. He then led Xponential Fitness from June 2024 until August 2025. In November 2025 he joined Jack in the Box’s board, became chair in March 2026, and took the interim CEO job that May. A retirement announcement had proved to be a pause between assignments.
His stated priorities at Jack in the Box are concrete: execute the JACK on Track plan, improve same-store sales, expand margins and reduce debt. The title is temporary; the operating questions are immediate. Enthusiasm has to make contact with the economics of a restaurant and the experience of a guest deciding where to eat.
In August 2026, the company announced Taylor Montgomery as president, effective in September, with the expectation that he would become CEO within twelve months. King is expected to remain chairman afterward. The latest chapter therefore includes a handover as well as a turnaround. For someone who has spent years inviting other people to shape the future, it is a fitting assignment: help improve the business, and give the next person room to run it.