America loves baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and ….. which is it: Coke or Pepsi? In the great melting pot of the USA, it seems only fitting that India-born Indra Nooyi, should find herself as the most influential woman behind the red, white and blue logo of the Pepsi company. Indra is ranked #4 on Fortune Magazine’s list of “50 Most Powerful Women in Business”. As President and Chief Financial Officer of PepsiCo, she is the highest ranking Indian born woman in corporate America. She’s helped engineer over $30 billion worth of deals in the past few years and is taking on the challenge of some fierce competition: a newly energized Coca-Cola campaign. So just how did Indra go from a student in Chennai, India to President and CFO of PepsiCo in America?
Nooyi spent 23 years of her life growing up in India. She earned her M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and worked only two years in India before coming to the United States to attend Yale Science of Management (Yale SOM), where she earned her Master’s degree in public and private managemet. Upon graduation, she went to work for Boston Consulting Group in 1980 and then joined Motorola as vice-president of corporate planning and strategy in 1986. Just 4 years later in 1990, she climbed aboard Asian Brown Boveri as vice president. 1994 marked a banner year for Indra when she went to work for the corporate giant, PepsiCo. She has been instrumental in taking the company to new heights. She played an key role in the company’s merger with Quaker Oats and was instrumental in starting the company’s fast food chains in 1997.
Indra attributes her success to many factors: upbringing, motivation, great employees and lots of hard work. As a child, the schools of India sent home a report card every 30 days. You were rated according to how many students were in the class. For example, in a class of 30 you received a rating from 1 to 30. Indra’s grandfather insisted on academic excellence from his grandchildren and according to Indra, if you didn’t get a top 3 rating you might as well throw yourself in front of a bus rather than face her grandfather. So, needless to say, she studied icredibly hard all her life. Her parents also taught her “if you do a job, do it better than anybody else.” These are the values that Indra came to this country with. When she came to America, Indra had no safety net. If she failed, she failed. In an interiew for Dartmouth’s CEO Speaker Series, Indra said “The end of the month I would have $2 left over and if I had $5 I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had no money guys, I was dirt poor.” While attending Yale, she worked as a receptionist from midnight to 5 a.m. to earn money. She had no money to buy clothes for job interviews and went to summer jobs wearing a traditional sari. In the same Dartmouth interview, Indra stated “You have got to work extremely hard to make it happen in this country for you.” “…If you want to reach the top of a company, I agree that it can only happen in the United States, but you have to start off saying that you have got to work twice as hard as your (male) counterparts.” “I know some of you are feeling tired just listening to me, but hey guys, that is reality. That is how some of us work our way up to the top.”
Indra attributes a lot of Pepsi’s success to it’s great employees. She believes that a company remains great when there is a strong competitor, like Coke. She believes if you have no competition, a company will atrophy. To keep a company running at top speed, you need to attract the best employees. This is PepsiCo’s greatest strength according to Indra. They have created a work environment to attract the best people. At PepsiCo employees can actually balance life and work. She views PepsiCo as an extended family and everybody at the company is there to help in any way possible. Indra says it is not unusual to find her 9-year old daughter in the office doing homework or having an after school fireside chat with 81 year old founder, Don Kendall. When Indra is traveling, her daughter will call the office to ask for permission to play Nintendo. The receptionist knows the routine and asks: “Have you finished your homework? Have you had your snack? OK, you can play Nintendo for 1/2 an hour”. She then leaves a voice message for Indra saying “I gave Tara permission to play Nintendo”. Unheard of in most corporations, but at PepsiCo everybody helps out.
Indra Nooyi has two daughters: one in college and one in grade school. She lives with her husband in Fairfax county, Conneticut. She finds time in her busy schedule to refine her skills on the electric guitar. She is proud of her Indian origin and attends many of PepsiCo events in her traditional sari. She believes that the corporate world appreciates people who are geniune and has made “Be Yourself” one of her life commands. In response to what life at the top is like, Indra has said “It is not easy up there. Just keep that in mind.”
You can be sure we will, Indra!
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