From fangirl to boss – the many dualities of Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi ”“ the former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc., who spoke at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry on Monday, May 1 ”“ is a woman of fascinating dualities, a word that served as a motif throughout her “fireside chat” with Eva Fernández, the college”™s provost and vice president of academic affairs. (On a cool spring day, the two were ensconced in a cozy setting ”“ blue backdrop; blue and purple hydrangeas; and a monitor with a roaring fireplace reminiscent, at least to some of a certain vintage in the audience of 250, of WPIX-TV”™s “Yule Log,” which was originally filmed in Dobbs Ferry.)
On the one hand, Nooyi is a fangirl ”“ a self-professed child of the 1960s and ”™70s, who grew up listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Creedance Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Jimi Hendrix and played guitar in an all-girl rock band in her native India. Attending a talk by Beatle Paul McCartney at Yale University, this graduate of the Yale School of Management ”“ the first woman to endow a chair there ”“ couldn”™t believe it when she found herself eating pizza with him at Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven.
“I don”™t think there”™s a single Beatles song I didn”™t know,” she said.
Her love for the Fab Four is perhaps only exceeded by her passion for the New York Yankees, which is such that this cricketer ”“ she sits on the board of directors of the International Cricket Council ”“ can”™t bear to read about her beloved Bronx Bombers lest she discovers that they”™ve lost a game. Happiness, she said, is a Yanks”™ win.
And yet, Nooyi remains very much the strong-minded global leader, one whose name has regularly appeared on Forbes”™ annual list of the world”™s most powerful women, peppering her remarks with her “P” words ”“ “performance” (what you bring to the job day-to-day); “purpose” (your long-term civic values and responsibilities); and, above all, “proposition.”
“The most important thing each of us has to know is our proposition to the company,” Nooyi said. “Always ask yourself, How am I going to be a lifelong student so I can learn everything around my job, so that I can offer a proposition to the company which I keep improving?….Expand the scope of your job and push to make it better. It”™s a very unselfish thing that you have to do.”
She once demonstrated this while she was climbing the corporate ladder at PepsiCo, whose world headquarters is in Purchase, by canceling a glamorous overseas company trip to stay behind to collaborate on improving a project in another division. What you don”™t want to be, she said, is a “safe hand” ”“ someone who knows his/her job, and nothing else.
And while she understands that Covid has created flexibility in the workplace ”“ flexibility that should afford men as well as women an opportunity to serve as caregivers, she added ”“ she said that those who work at home shouldn”™t expect to be “on the same proposition” as those who put in the work and face time at the office.
Clearly, this fangirl was one rigorous boss.
“She was tough, terrifying, fun and interested in everybody”™s lives,” said Mercy Chief Advancement Officer Bernadette Wade, who worked for Nooyi at PepsiCo and served as master of ceremonies for the event. Working for Nooyi, she added, was all about “being present and getting the work done.”
Daughter of India ”“ and America
The duality of which Fernández and Nooyi spoke ”“ and which threads Nooyi”™s book, “My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future” ”“ has been present since her early days.
“I see through the persona of an Indian,” Nooyi said. “Every aspect of me, I got from India.”
At the same time, she added, “my story could only happen in the United States. I owe my success to what the U.S. offered me.
“I belong in both worlds”¦I”™m true to both. I never tried to be someone else. Never put on a persona.” And indeed she made it clear at PepsiCo that she was never going to be one of those CEOs who golfed and fished.
What she called her “improbable life” began in Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India, where she was born Indra Krishnamurthy eight years after the country”™s independence from Great Britain in 1947. It was a world in which not much was expected for women in the workplace, although she said her father and grandfather stressed education and her becoming whatever she wanted. A devout Hindu who neither drinks alcohol nor eats meat, Nooyi was educated in a Roman Catholic convent school, Holy Angels Anglo Indian Secondary School, before earning bachelor”™s degrees in physics, chemistry and mathematics from Madras Christian College at the University of Madras and a postgraduate diploma from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.
In 1978, Nooyi moved to the U.S. to attend the Yale School of Management where she was a classmate of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and earned a master”™s degree in public and private management. By then, she was already on her way to a starry corporate career with executive stints at Johnson & Johnson and Motorola, among other companies, before she joined PepsiCo in 1994. Working her way up the corporate ladder, she became the fifth CEO in PepsiCo”™s history in 2006, two years before the Great Recession. It did not stop her from implementing “Performance With a Purpose” ”“ a company redirection that saw the advancement of healthier subsidiary brands and more sustainable packaging. Out went KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell; in came Tropicana, the Quaker Oats Co. and its subsidiary Gatorade. (A mention of the power drink led to an amusing anecdote about Nooyi”™s encounter with a Gatorade consultant, who said he could also improve Nooyi”™s wardrobe and invited her to a style makeover at Saks Fifth Avenue the next day. Intrigued rather than insulted, Nooyi met him and bought a half-dozen ensembles, keeping his fashion playbook to this day. At the event she looked chic in a white-striped black blouse, black pants and black ballet shoes, donning a jewel-toned wrap when she left the building.)
“Performance With a Purpose” was about doing well on the ledger while doing good, Nooyi said. By the time her tenure ended in 2019, the company”™s sales had risen 80%.
CEO and mother in chief
Mercy is a school known for its commitment to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) throughout its community,https://westfaironline.com/featured/reaching-out-to-mercy-colleges-community-and-beyond/ and Nooyi also talked about the struggles she encountered as a female Indian American executive ”“ being in a room where no one looked like her, having male colleagues interrupt her or give her the eyeroll. But there were also mentors along the way, including a German boss who had his driver chauffeur her at times when she was pregnant with her second child. (Nooyi and her husband, Raj K. Nooyi, president of AmSoft Systems, live in Greenwich and are the parents of two daughters.)
It was clear from listening to Nooyi that some of her greatest challenges ”“ and the ones she spoke most emotionally about ”“ were those involving work and motherhood. It was she and not her husband who got the call if anything went wrong at school, something that will resonate with many working mothers.
But there was pride and passion in her voice as she spoke about never missing one of her children”™s events or a school board meeting, and when she went out of town on business, she left a letter for each daughter each day she was away, festooned with Pikachu and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stickers. In essentials, Nooyi said, she was always there, adding that “a lot of people who stay at home with their kids are not present.”
She was, she acknowledged, “no saint.” But then, she added, women in particular have to get passed that:
“”¦Unfortunately, women are born with this perfection gene. We want to do everything perfectly. So we sacrifice everything about ourselves, which I did. There are struggles all the time, a lot of juggling. You just hope you juggle all these priorities, and the most important ones don’t crash…If you have the courage and the resilience, you can power through.”