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‘In so many ways, I broke so many barriers:’ Former Pepsi boss Indra Nooyi on life as a trailblazing CEO
Turning a food giant like PepsiCo — whose portfolio includes Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade and Mountain Dew — away from fat, sugar and salt might sound like a recipe for disaster.
And yet that is exactly what Indra Nooyi did when she was the company’s CEO, from 2006 to 2018. During her tenure, net revenue grew more than 80%.
“In the life of a CEO, every day is a challenge,” she tells CNN in her office in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Boards pick CEOs because they’re resilient, they can actually find a way through all of these challenges and transform the company. And that’s what I had to do. I had to make sure our portfolio was shifting to a good blend of ‘treat for you’ products, ‘fun for you’ products, and then add the ‘better for you’ and ‘good for you’ products.
“I had to reduce the environmental footprint. I had to make sure people felt charged and excited to come to work for PepsiCo while delivering performance. That was the single biggest challenge.”
Nooyi was born in Madras (today Chennai), India, and emigrated to the United States in 1978 to study at the Yale School of Management, where she also worked as a receptionist to sustain herself. She joined Pepsi in 1994, aged 39, and served as its president and chief financial officer before becoming CEO — a role that made her the first woman of color and first immigrant to lead a Fortune 50 company.
Indra Nooyi and her husband Raj as newlyweds. - Indra Nooyi
Indra and her second daughter Tara, born in 1993. - Indra Nooyi
Indra, aged 14 (on the left) with her paternal grandfather who she called Thatha and her siblings Chandrika and Nandu. - Indra Nooyi
“I just looked at the assignment and said, Oh my God, I better do right by women, by people of color, by immigrants, by people of Indian origin,” she says. “I wanted to do right by everybody, but most importantly, I wanted to make sure I was a good steward of PepsiCo. And so at that point, I didn’t think of the historic role that I was playing.
“In retrospect, though, I’m realizing now it was very frame breaking. And in so many ways, I broke so many barriers,” she adds.
Happy retirement
Fortune magazine named Nooyi number one on its annual Most Powerful Women in business ranking from 2006 through 2010, and Forbes magazine included her on the list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women from 2008 through 2017, her last full year at Pepsi.
Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images
“When I decided to retire, I was exhausted and I had lots of successes,” she says. “I had been on the job for 12 years, 12 great years, and I actually thought I’d miss PepsiCo a lot. (But) the next day I was a new person and I never missed my old job. Even for a minute.
“I miss some of the people, but not the job, because I had so many things I could do here. Things that ranged from interesting boards to nonprofits to working on issues that always interested me.”
Since early 2019, she has been a member of the board of directors at Amazon. She is also a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum and an honorary co-chair for the World Justice Project, an organization that works to advance the rule of law worldwide.
Nooyi meets Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in New York City in 2018. - Kevin Hagen/Getty Images North America/Getty Images
Nooyi is widely regarded as a visionary in American business history, and says her own definition of the word is “somebody who sees the future but makes change today towards that future.”
But getting there wasn’t easy, and sometimes came at the expense of her own work-life balance, a topic she explored deeply in “My Life in Full,” her memoir, published in 2021. “I worked incredibly hard. This was not a job that just came to me,” she says. “I earned it. I put the company before me. I put the company before me at every point in time. Whatever I did, I wanted to make sure it made a difference for the company.”
Lasting legacy
Looking back, she points to her parents as her initial source of empowerment and inspiration. “My parents allowed me to do wild things like climb trees and fall down and play in a rock band — so everything that a traditional woman in India didn’t do,” she says. “So in many ways, as I always say, I won the lottery of life.”
Today, Nooyi can boast no less than 15 honorary degrees from the likes of Yale, Penn State and Duke, her portrait hangs in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and in 2021 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Married to businessman Raj K. Nooyi since 1981, they live in Connecticut with their two daughters, and a serious collection of guitars. “Many of these guitars are ones that I owned, but when musicians performed for a PepsiCo halftime show or for a concert, our team would give them one of my guitars and say, Could you sign it?,” says Nooyi, who played guitar in a rock band during her college years in India.
“There’s Blake Shelton and Usher. There’s Lionel Richie, Don Felder (formerly of The Eagles). I don’t play them anymore because I just don’t have the time. But I look at them and I think back to all of those halftime show performances or where I met these artists and I live this life where I go, I cannot believe I met Blake Shelton.”
In 2021, Nooyi was inducted into the Asian Hall of Fame at Ben Bridge Jeweler in Seattle, Washington. - Mat Hayward/Getty Images North America/Getty Images
Asked about her lasting legacy, she points at the young people she mentored at Pepsi who are now in leading roles in the corporate world. “People remember you for not just your business contributions, they also remember you for the people you developed, nurtured, mentored,” she says.
“I look at all of them and say, hey, you went through my school of hard knocks and you’re doing great.”
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