Indra Nooyi, former chairperson & CEO of PepsiCo in conversation With Miami Herbert Business School

all right so uh let let's let's get underway so uh ladies and gentlemen i want to welcome you this evening uh to this uh really important event with uh uh the former chairman and ceo of pepsi uh indranui uh and to uh get things underway i want to acknowledge the fact that this is uh the annual cobb lecture so the club leadership lecture was uh established by ambassador susan cobb uh who is with us this evening in honor of uh her husband ambassador chuck cobb who many of you will know as a long-serving trustee of the university of miami and a very distinguished business person in south florida with a litany of achievements that i won't go into this evening but we're very fortunate to have him as a good friend of the school and as the person who always says a few words to uplift us at the beginning of these very important lectures so ambassador cobb please [Applause] thank you very much dean and uh thank you for everybody coming today so we can appropriately honor one of america's most distinguished ceos one of the most by by by any measure one of the the best americas produced in as a woman ceo and so we are we're so delighted and uh and madam uh nuri uh joins uh so many other really top ceos of business uh in government four or five cabinet officers uh governors governor jeb bush spoke to us recently the commissioner of the mba so we've really been blessed with um with a lot of the top ceos and we know we're not going to be disappointed and we're going to learn a lot of leadership from you today so thanks again for coming all right so now just uh just a word about indra i'm calling indra indra because i used to serve on the board of pepsi bottling group when indra was ceo of pepsi and so i i know her a little bit from uh before my time here so first of all there's this wonderful book and everybody here should make sure that they take uh a copy of my life in full uh from uh the uh the table on my right uh so indra was the chairman and ceo of pepsi from to 2019 but she started her career at pepsi many years earlier uh having served previously and boston consulting group and then abb a swiss swedish conglomerate in the business to business industrial space and then after that another stint and then on to pepsico where she served in multiple roles in the strategic planning area rising to chief financial officer and then president and then ceo and chairman of the company so this was of course a fantastic achievement um and i think if i remember rightly she was appointed uh at a time when there were only 10 other ceos on in the fortune 500 who were women so this is a story not just about corporate achievement but also about family achievement and work-life balance as we call it and i'm now going to invite proudly indra to join me on the set and we will have a dialogue for maybe about 35 minutes and then open it up to q a indra [Applause] all right indra so this is this is what they call a breezeway and uh so there's going to be plenty of breeze up here during our conversation um one one there was one four word sentence in the book that um caught my attention actually much caught my attention but there was a sentence which was i believe in companies can you explain to our business school students why you believe in companies i never thought i was going to start that part of the book but you know i go on to say that capitalism has been a glorious thing for the world it's lifted so many people from you know poverty to success uh to prosperity it's fueled innovation entrepreneurship i'm a product of capitalism and capitalism exists when you have companies without companies there's no capitalism so at a time when people are having sort of mixed feelings about the corporate world mixed feelings about whether companies are a force for good in society or really an uh force for uh you know inequality and creating too much wealth for a few i actually believe that capitalism played the right way through the right companies is really a force for good so at the root of my thinking is companies are the right way to think about corporate america the corporate world in total and the margin there is some room for improvement but i in my core believe that companies are forced for good and can be an engine for growth and for doing good in society so last week we had the dean of the yale school of management your alma mater and the yale school of management was a unique concept when it was launched and i wonder if you you knew when you went to the yale school of management that it had this unique sense of social purpose well i went to som because of the public and private management and i retained my mppm degree we had the choice of giving it up or keeping mppm i kept the mppm degree i'd almost say that yale taught me a lot of the things i did when i was at pepsico and today if you're going to create a new business school you'd probably call it the masters in public and private management because at its core companies are rooted in society and companies succeed when society succeed so it almost behooves companies to make sure that the societies which they operate and around the world are successful and all that som taught me when i was there was don't forget that you have a duty of care to society when you're a corporate leader and i thought it was pression then and i think it's even more russian today because the world needs more citizenship in the thinking of corporate leaders so well let's just piggyback on that the concept of performance with purpose i'll just clarify for everybody that when the yale school of management was formed they did not offer an mba degree they offered a master in private and public public and private management and that is the mppm that indra is referring to later they changed that degree to an mba degree for competitive reasons but gave all of their mppm alumni the option of retaining that degree so performance with purpose was really a concept that probably had been gestating for many years but finally you had a ceo position where you could actually activate it um what what what was it about and uh what were the biggest challenges in seeing it through well you know in its core performance with purpose was just a way to future-proof the company because i wanted pepsico to be successful for decades not just for the duration of my leadership a typical ceo ran the company for six years those days so if i was thinking of running the company for six years i could have cut as many of the costs and investments and generated tremendous eps retired and then the next ceo comes in and says that was a lousy ceo take a big charge and then create alpha which is what happens always there's a boom splat i didn't want that to happen i thought my job was to run pepsico for the duration of the company which is for decades which meant that i had to look and see what pepsico needed to do today to be successful into the future so we took a hard look at the future the mega trends into the future and it indicated that we had to make changes today to be successful over the next decade remember pepsico was a very successful company when i inherited it so it's very hard to transform a successful company when you have a burning platform you can articulate the agenda for change and make it happen because we were a successful company i had to articulate an outside-in perspective a future back perspective so by talking about the big changes that were going to happen and then starting to make changes in pepsico to future proof it um i could encapsulate the program in terms of performance with purpose we're going to continue to deliver performance but our sense of purpose was on three planks transforming the portfolio to include healthier products with a real focus on environmental issues because pepsico used a lot of water we had lots of trucks on the road our carbon footprint was not particularly pretty and we generated a lot of plastic one-way plastic so how do we improve the environmental footprint but the one that really touched me in profound ways was what we wanted to do with people we wanted employees to feel like pepsico was a place where they could have a life and a livelihood we wanted them to bring their whole self to work we wanted to treat them as talent not tools of the trade so the three planks of product planet and people combined with performance is what led to performance of purpose and interestingly today you look at it was very logical and sensible but in those days people said if it ain't broke why fix it and somehow the part that bothered me the most when i was doing that every person i talked with investors leaders had all changed their eating and drinking habits to eat healthier or drink healthier they were all worried about the environment but for some reason they didn't want us to make the changes and so when you ask them why don't you want us to change the portfolio we're going to sell more of the old products we're also going to make good for you products they say because if we wanted you if we wanted a company to make good for you products we'll go and invest in a good for you company you keep doing the fun for your products i said wait a second if we keep doing that our growth rate will slow down that's okay you become a cash cow they say nobody wants to work for a cash cow people want to work for a growth company because growth is oxygen and unless you have that oxygen from growth people the best talent doesn't stick around if you tell somebody come and work for my company as a cash cow nobody's going to come work for it so growth was always you know what was required and you know it took a lot of convincing people to say that for pepsico to be successful in the future we had to remain a growth company we had to transform the company and you know the pathway we were on was the right way to go about it so what what are the biggest uh challenges when you're doing these major transformations i mean this required a major culture shift i think the three words used in the book uh nourish replenish and cherish cherish i think is the people component uh was that the toughest of the three to change nourish was the toughest because people kept saying you can't change pepsi hang on i don't want to change pepsi but i'm going to launch diet pepsi i'm gonna do healthier drinks zero calorie products with some nutrition um you know oatmeal drinks tropicana juice with added nutrients so we're gonna think about new products but when it came to core pepsi itself we're going to reduce the sugar in the blue can pepsi you won't know as a consumer that we've reduced the sugar so you can't reduce 25 of the sugar at one shot but if you start inching the sugar down you know a quarter teaspoon every three months you'll never know that we've reduced the sugar so in many markets around the world from the time i started to the time i left the blue can pepsi is something between 15 and 20 less sugar nobody noticed it the frito-lay products were fried in thank you the frito-lay products were fried in a heart-healthy sunflower oil but let me tell you the irony of it sunflower oil is very expensive we had to actually grow the sunflower in mexico make the oil and bring it here it's a high or league sunflower oil which is heart healthy so our team was so thrilled about frying the chips and sunflower oil because everybody feels good about producing a heart healthy oil so they put a big sunflower in front of the package around leis our consumer complaints went through the roof the chips taste terrible okay so the next week we took out the sunflower from the package kept frying it and sunflower oil and they said thank god you changed it tastes great now but you see we had to go through all of these interesting ins and outs because it's hard to change consumer habits uh if you announce it too much but if you sneak healthiness sneak goodness into the products a little bit at a time it actually works on lace potato chips i mean these are factoids which you can pass on to others a single serve bag of lays a small bag of lays has less salt than a slice of bread has less salt than a slice of bread because in bread you need salt as a leavening agent in lace potato chips it's a surface salt so our scientist cut the size of the crystal and applied it sparingly on the chip so they came up with a new method to apply the salt on the chip and so with less salt 25 less salt from where we started you still had the same salty feeling as you did six years ago when we started the project so it was a r d breakthrough in many many ways and uh it was a fantastic r d team fantastic marketing teams and not just us i think the industry came together and said let's reduce the calorie content of our products and as part of an industry coalition the healthy weight commitment foundation we took out four and a half trillion calories from the us diet in three years and six trillion calories in five years not self-reported as measured by the robert wood johnson foundation so i think that that was the toughest project from an r d perspective from a marketing perspective from a consumer perspective from a fear factor will we do something that will make demand drop off fortunately by tinkering with all the levels carefully we manage to keep the growth going i want to ask you about the recruitment of the chief scientific officer because that that story is a great story about patiently waiting for the right person tell us about that well you know pepsico was a development company it wasn't a research company because most of the products we launched in snacks where flavor variations for example we could launch nacho cheese doritos nacho cheesier doritos flaming hot nacho cheesy doritos you know and we could go on i mean i could just keep adding ier to all of these names we would have new products forever but we wanted new flavors new platforms for example when we watched people eat tostitos with salsa the salsa would fall on the ties or the other shirts so our scientists came up with tostitos scoops which is very hard to make because you have to mold each corn chip like a scoop and fry it so that you don't lose the shape then you scoop the salsa so i'm giving you behind the scenes look at the new product development process but for all of this we needed fundamental research fundamental research and operations fundamental research and formulations fundamental research and thinking through new machines to dispense beverages so there was a lot of fundamental work that needed to be done we didn't have that r d capability in pepsico so we had to go out to hire people who could do that and not only just people who could be good at doing this we needed a leader who could attract great talent so we looked and we looked and all the people i interviewed just didn't make it until this person walked in who was head of all of r d for takeda pharmaceuticals pharmaceuticals ran a four and a half billion dollar budget and he understood exactly what we needed to do then he laughed at me and he said look my budget is four and a half million your budget is a fraction of four and a half billion literally a fraction why would i come to pepsico and i told him look memo the reason you should come to pepsico is because in takeda you cannot taste the products you make in pepsico you can taste every product you make and so you can make change on a much broader basis and you're going to be impacting billions of servings every day mahmud khan joined us he attracted an incredible base of scientists to come to pepsico and was perhaps the best hire that i ever made in the company just a phenomenal human being and it took six months of persuasion six months you've waited six months you didn't move on to someone else that that tomorrow when you get hooked on somebody you come at it every other way to somehow get them because in your heart you know this is the right person it's not a money issue he didn't indicate at all that more money would get him over the finish line it was just him trying to wrap his head around four and a half billion dollars and changing lives and saving lives to a fraction how will i be perceived in my pharmaceutical community when i tell them i'm gone from takeda to pepsico yes so i had to give him a good reason to come to pepsico it was an emotional hire i'm sure for both um let's go back in time to uh chennai and um there are a few stories there that catch the imagination regarding uh pop groups and cricket pitchers so you you've been you've been a pioneer since day one and i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about some of those stories and also why you think you you were leading in this way from such an early age well you know i was born in india eight years after india got independence so think of it india got independence in 47 i was born in 55. india had no idea what it was going to be it had been under occupation for 350 years and it had just become a country onto its own and i grew up in the south in a very conservative family at a time when girls didn't really go to college men were educated girls were married off at age 18. parents found you a guy you married you know people lived supposedly happily ever after so i'm born into a family where my grandfather is a judge and my father is a masters in mathematics and they both decide the women are going to be educated and can do whatever they want so in a way i won the lottery of life and my poor mother who never went to college because her parents couldn't afford it vicariously lived her life through her daughter saying i couldn't do it maybe i should let them do it but society said hey you better get them married at age 18. otherwise we're going to shun you so she had one foot on the brake one foot on the accelerator but my grandfather and father basically said perish the thought these girls are going to soar our grandson is also going to do well but these two girls should be allowed to dream should be allowed to soar and i was a middle child you know middle children have it tough because the first child is revered the little child is loved the middle child is sort of confused and i was i was that middle child and i always wanted some attention never got it so my sister and i went to catholic school and one of the girls there was playing the guitar i found another old guitar and the nuns the irish nuns agreed to refurbish it for me and we started an all-girls band which was like the talk of the town in 70s india we were awful in retrospect but then we thought the sun rose and set on us we only knew five songs but we always played to pact audiences and then when i went to college the men all played in cricket teams and i wondered why women shouldn't play cricket my mother was mortified women cricket what's wrong with you i said good now we're going to start a women's cricket team so we started the first women's cricket team in our college and then we played intercollegiate cricket with other women's colleges that had started crooked teams and had a great time playing women's cricket and now come full circle i'm the only woman on the international cricket council so i've come full circle to now sitting on the governing body of cricket and i think back to those days when coming out of the field in my whites uh as the opening batswoman was quite a in retrospect quite a amazing feat fantastic so uh then then you you went through college uh i was interested that you studied chemistry like margaret thatcher um any uh anything special about chemistry that uh bears on leadership potential well you've got to be brilliant to study chemistry no that's a joke um you know i loved chemistry i loved pottering out potting around with chemicals and i always thought i'd be a chemist when i grew up it was either a doctor or a chemist one of the two and i always dreamed i'd be a chemist i had no idea why i love the subject as much as i did so i had chemistry physics mathematics group and you know i enjoyed math i enjoyed physics and you know i think mathematics all science is a great fundamental subject to have in your arsenal because as i came into pepsico without math i couldn't have done my job i'll be very honest with you without chemistry i couldn't have talked to my scientists at all and i would meet with my science leader my r d leaders every three months and i'd give them four or five major breakthrough questions i wanted to answer and then they'd go off and say this is these are ceo questions they'd come back with amazing solutions to these problems i'll give you one example i'm not going to give you all of them because some of them are propriety but i'll give you one you know when we squeeze oranges in uh oranges plants a lot of the fiber stays in the orange peels and they're just thrown away for animal waste the question is how do you reclaim the fiber from the peels and put it back in the juice to create a high fiber orange juice how do you extract that the way the scientists solved it was pretty amazing so you couldn't have understood what the scientists were saying if you didn't understand something on formulation something on chemistry and science so i think all of those early disciplines stood me in good stead later on in life i want to fast forward to your first role coming out of yale with boston consulting group uh what what did you gain from all of that experience i think it was maybe five or six years with bcg six years and um you know with bcg those days as with all strategy consulting firms you know you learn you're taught to go into a company an industry and quickly understand the levels of profitability what drives success in this industry because they don't hire you because you know the industry well they hire you because you have a way of thinking about the industry and bringing frameworks from other industries to bear on the industry you're working on so i'd worked on industries as far reaching as paper chemicals bottling equipment orange juice squeezing machinery think about how prescient all of that was i worked on wills and trusts i worked on air conditioning equipment so the industries i worked on were extremely varied because in bcg we had a rule that if you worked in one industry for a company you couldn't work for another company in the same industry which made sense so you couldn't work for you know two consumer products companies so i worked on maybe 10 or 12 companies that were in 10 or 12 industries i learned so much about how to enter in industry quickly learn what are the value drivers what drives shareholder value and then think about how to advise the ceo on what they needed to do to you know improve the profitability of the value creation potential of the company it was the most amazing experience for six years traveled a lot was away from home a lot but it was a fantastic experience then you decided you needed to join a company and you had a number of different offers and why did you take the one that you went with well i was in a very bad car crash in 86. had i not been in a car crash i might have stayed in consulting for maybe two more years because in consulting you've got to know when to leave if you don't leave at the right time you become a lifer and consulting which is not the greatest but i would have left it about eight years but at six years i was coming back from a client in downstate illinois and i have no idea how i got into the accident i was standing at a four-way stop the next thing i woke up in intensive care and so it took me about six months to begin walking again and i realized that i couldn't travel and do consulting at all and i lost memory a little bit so i had to relearn so much and motorola came and interviewed me while i was in the hospital and said we'd like you to join us in corporate strategy i go can you see the condition i'm in i mean i'm not good for coming to any job they said look when you recover and you will we'd like you to join motorola so i joined motorola in 86 working for this german guy who was considered impossible but didn't care if i was woman or man tall or short what my ethnicity was he hired me for what i could bring to the job and so i thought that was a fantastic kind of a person to work for and i joined in the automotive electronics group now i want to tell you honestly i knew nothing about cars and i studied physics during the valve days and now we were in the solid state days so i didn't know anything about solid state and semiconductors so i hired myself two professors one professor from the local community college who came to teach me automotive and another professor from the local college who taught me semiconductors so four days a week from 7 a.m to 9 00 a.m 9 00 a.m alternatively i would take lessons in automotive semiconductors automotive semiconductors so i learned as much as i could about semiconductors and automotive so that i could do my job i was never going to design circuitry i was never going to fix my card but i had to learn enough to know what's an engine controller what's electronics for abs systems what's a navigation system what's the car multiplex i had to learn all that to be able to understand motorola and the car companies so in every job i had to learn the business from the ground up which means i had to learn the nitty-gritty of the business and then work my way up so when you uh left motorola you left with gerhart and there's a very interesting comment i think from uh george fisher in the book who was if i remember the ceo or the chairman of motorola which was you're leaving an institution for an individual and that's not a good career move that's the only time i left an institution for an individual because gerhard was a very difficult boss an extremely difficult boss but i learned so much from him because you know uh in those days there were hardly any women in corporate america and there were no women in the senior leadership levels at all and many of the women i came across said that they were facing a lot of unconscious bias in their jobs people would talk over them roll their eyes when they talked uh sort of ignore them when they spoke and whenever you strip somebody's confidence you strip their competence and a lot of the women were facing that doom loop gerhard was the opposite he would build up my confidence always by involving me in things that i didn't even want to get involved you'll say it's good for you come to this meeting and sit down and watch what's going on he'd call the sloan school where he was also lecturing and say i can't come now to lecture because i'm busy but i'm sending invite a lecture in my place i'm like in the sloan school you've got to be joking me because you know it was a highly respected place but he'd say you can do it so he built my confidence as opposed to taking down my confidence he was an incredibly special person and so i thought it was worth leaving an institution for an individual on the other hand when gerhard left abb to go to siemens and i was not going to follow him anymore i came to pepsico because i came to the institution rather than go to ge which would have been the individual because jack welch was recruiting me for ge but i said no i'm not going to go work for an individual i'm going to work for an institution i came to work for the culture the environment and pepsico rather than go work for jack welch we should have been closer to my area of expertise i came to work for pepsico so i think i think you talk in terms of uh pepsi as an as an institution that was a talent academy can you say a little bit more about that and how did you get the sense that you could have a lasting career at pepsi when ge at the time i think would have been the more formidable and obvious candidate to most people there was a humility in pepsico that was just unbelievable i'll give you the little story you know wayne callaway was the ceo of pepsico then and he was sitting on the ge board and i had told both jack welt and wayne callaway that i would give them a decision on april 15th which company i was going to accept and wayne was on the ge board meeting and jack welch prematurely told wayne or she's accepted g or she's very close to accepting g so wayne callaway for those who might have known him when i interviewed with him for one hour he spoke for one minute i spoke for 59 minutes not because i wanted to speak wayne never spoke he just said hmm hmm that's all he said people in divisions would say when you go to wayne and say wayne you've set me a 15 target for profits it's too high wayne would listen to them and they would leave with a 17 target which they developed on their own so wayne was that kind of guy who was a strong silent leader never spoke so the day of the ge board meeting i didn't know it was a ge board meeting i get a call on abb it's from wayne callaway and wayne says indra i just came from the ge board meeting and jack says you're going to accept the ge offer you told me that you're going to accept on april 15th and i'm going to take you at your word i want to make pepsico's case to you and he went on for the next five minutes making the case for pepsico to me saying there's nobody like you in the executive ranks i need somebody like you to come to pepsico we commit to developing you we commit that you will have a major role to play in the company and you can make major contributions so i'm not just asking you to come to pepsico i'm actually pleading for you to come to pepsico because this is the place for you he hung up the phone and i said to myself here is a person who barely spoke in the interview his reputation is i don't speak much he spoke for five minutes straight making the case for pepsico with such humility from a ceo that i have never experienced in my life and i worked for many ceos i worked with many ceos at that point that humility factor just overwhelmed me and i said this is the guy i'm going to work for and i left abb that afternoon drove over to pepsico and i accepted the job a week ahead of schedule and i never looked back did you ever hear from jack in fact three weeks after i started at pepsico we had a pepsico senior management meeting where jack was the guest of honor and the key speaker and it was an awkward moment in the tent when both wayne and jack were standing next to each other let me tell you about the humility of wayne jack looks at wayne and says what the hell did you offer her that she took pepsico over g in a typical you know jack welch bravado and wayne in his typical humble way said jack she tossed a coin and that was vain he didn't say oh you know pepsico's the greatest he said she tossed a coin there were uh two two um um stories i wanted you to share with the audience on your way through to the ceo position um one was um the challenge associated with being the vice president for corporate planning and strategy um where there was a feeling among some people to quote you from the book that corporate planning is trying to run the company so when you're in a staff position like that with a lot of uh high ego high octane division presidents how do you manage that as a as a senior staff person you know it's a big game and a big charade because in pepsico you know when you had multiple divisions you have to manage the street and so corporate planning would run the models to sort of decide where the eps was going to end up for the quarter and the presidents would tell us i'm going to miss by 10 million bucks make sure somebody else makes up for it but then when they came to the meetings and they saw their numbers as presented by corporate planning they'd say oh we didn't take our numbers down by 10 million so it was all a big game but at the meeting you felt terrible because i'm presenting and the division president goes corporate planning is trying to run my business by taking me down 10 million in reality he called me the previous day saying just make sure you flash that i'm going to be under delivering by 10 million you do it once it's okay you do it twice it's okay but if you spend six meetings telling every other division president that corporate planning is trying to run you and put you down you've lost me so one fine day i said you know what i quit i don't need this anymore i don't need division presidents telling me that i'm running their business but all i'm trying to do is do my job so i walked into roger enrico's office he was the ceo at that time and i said roger i've had enough of this division president's insulting me i quit i don't want severance i don't want a bonus i don't want anything tomorrow after the board meeting i'm leaving i'm just leaving the company it's been wonderful being with you this was in 97 98. roger looked at me with this look of horror and he said i'll talk to you later i left i went to my office getting ready for the board meeting that day the division president's meeting was delayed three hours and at the end of three hours every division president loved me oh my god they love her they absolutely loved me and roger enrico came to me the next day and said let's get on with life so nobody said i hope you're staying can i give you more money none of that stuff he just said let's get on with life there was another um story around you learning the right side of the decimal point previously you hadn't been looking so closely at that you'd been involved in m a activity and so forth so can can you tell our students you know why the right side of the decimal point is so important for a leading executive to focus on you know when you're doing transactions and transformations you know we did between 1994 and 2000 maybe 50 60 billion dollars of transactions between mergers acquisitions divestitures all of that stuff so you know you could you you get to a point where you can do that in your sleep because you know exactly how these things work work with the bankers structure the deal you write all these offering documents somehow you know it became a routine until steve reinemann was running friday became president of the company and he said you know indra you've been very good at doing everything to the left of the decimal in hundreds of millions billions of dollars but the way the company makes money is small pennies on a bag of chips or a route so we have to think about cost management at a very very granular level so in addition to your job as head of corporate strategy i'm now going to have you re-engineer the frito-lay route system there are 15 000 trucks on the road from frito-lay and he said we need to take a couple of pennies off of every drop the cost you know take our two pennies of course cost sounds simple but it's not there's technology involved there's redoing the whole route structure separating the routes between large format grocery stores and small format convenience stores it's about moving the picking from the back of the truck all the way to the warehouse it's just a massive undertaking i said steve how am i going to do both jobs at the same time he said that's for you to figure it out but if you don't learn the right of the decimal you'll never understand how money is made in pepsico at the very granular level so monday through friday i'd go to dallas i'd work on friday route engineering and friday saturday sunday i'd work on my corporate strategy and cfo jobs i wasn't cfo at that time i'd just taken on some of those jobs but i'd work on that and in between taking my kids and the home but i learned a lot in a way it was a brutal lifestyle but steve pushing me to learn the right of the decimal was the right thing so i think it's time to talk about raj and family and balance and how to achieve all of this balance you know i married for about 42 years and i have two daughters my husband is the best decision i made the choice of my husband best decision i made and he's been you know he has a career of his own was a partner in the consulting firm has done amazing things but he's been with me every step of the way till today i lived in a multi-generational home so any time we needed help with the kids either my mother or my in-laws always came to help multi-generation living is fantastic but it's also got tensions associated with it just give you one example when my mother lived with us and we had one daughter she'd let preetha watch tv until 10 o'clock and raj would say she has to go to bed at 8. mom would say i brought up three kids all of them turned out great i know what to do you go wait a sec raj relax if she walks out we don't have help he'll say but she's ruining our child child's gonna be fine i turned out okay but there was no tv when you grew up you're right but just bear with it you know so you become the diplomat going between your mother and your husband and it has its own tensions but on balance i wouldn't do it any other way the problem was in those days it was a big juggling act between kids and home and family and the work because there was no technology the pager was the most advanced technology even cell phones was this huge dyna tag you remember that you know it looked like a massive machine remember that one it's a brick exactly and um uh we had att calling cards which we used to call people so you couldn't communicate freely with your kids there was no zoom no face time no smartphone the internet was barely there so we traveled everywhere on commercial flights so everything was a big juggle later on as these technologies came in one could balance life a little bit more because if today's technologies were available when i was ceo i would have traveled 50 less i'd have been in communication with my kids a lot more than i was when those technologies didn't exist and i may have been an even better parent than i ended up being i have to be honest with you i didn't miss any mother-daughter liturgy i never missed major lacrosse games or ice hockey games my kids played in i was on school board as a trustee i've never missed a school trustee meeting never missed people who stayed at home missed trustee meetings i never missed a single trusty meeting sister joan mcnetty would always say wherever in the world indra was she would be there for a trusty meeting but my kids didn't notice those things they noticed the fact that i wasn't there for a class coffee on wednesday mornings which is i think a plot against working women pardon me because how can we go to a class coffee on wednesday mornings at 9 00 a.m for two hours we can't do it so it was always mom he didn't show up for class coffee yep i didn't show up so did mrs rag and mrs you know at tabata they didn't show up too how come you don't notice them no but you didn't show up so it was always that knife that went in and turned but you know what uh they turned out okay um no mother is ever perfect mothers are the punching bags i think for daughters in particular but somehow we juggled we balanced we co-opted all kinds of people and we survived and that relates to what you're working on now and what you're passionate about today well the biggest issue i you know i was the co-chair of reopen connecticut when covet hit and i saw two things one while we focused a lot on women in managerial levels and how to bring them to the top levels of companies the bigger problem we had was the frontline workers who had zero flexibility through covid but even in connecticut we would tell people who were working in hospitals or senior centers that they had to come into work because you couldn't do it flexibly or remotely but once they came into work in a senior center they had to be there for two weeks because if they went home every day they could bring the covet with them but when they came in and stayed in the senior care center the hospital for two weeks we never asked them who's going to take care of your kids who's going to take care of the older people in your homes and many of the nurses came from the inner cities in connecticut and they were taking care of the aging parents and that was a big outage in the way we thought about things so we realized that for all the talk we have about child care for the office going executives which makes a lot of sense because a lot of the entry level people need child care to stay in the job we also need to worry about a care infrastructure for the frontline workers who need care for regular hours and for non-traditional hours especially those that are working the second and the third shift so we're doing a lot of work now to figure out how we can bring a care infrastructure to them so that they can have children and still engage in paid work uh supporting the backbone of the life that we're used to and and what what do you spend how are you spending your time these days um 100 on this issue or or a diverse portfolio a diverse portfolio i'd say because you cannot work on this 100 because it's in the political arena so i'm not a political person so i have to work through organizations already working in this area so i have to tiptoe my way gingerly through this issue you know i sit on the board of amazon i said on the board of philips i was teaching at the u.s military academy in west point until last week i sit on the board of memorial sloan kettering mit the national gallery of art so i have a varied portfolio have a i'm having a great time busier than ever but the one thing i don't have is the quarterly earnings pressure which is liberating you know when i was running pepsico for two years ahead i knew my calendar for one year ahead i knew it programmed down to the day now if i want to take a nap in the afternoon i say i'm going to take a nap in the afternoon and i feel guilty that's a funny part i shut my office door or i stay home and i take a nap and i go i hope nobody is noticing that who cares i'm retired i can do whatever i want i haven't gotten there as yet i'm getting there all right so i think we've got time for two or three questions so uh we want to get some students in as well so one thing i never do is ask the first question of the person in the front row because you never know what you're going to get so let's get someone from the hinterlands if we could do we have a student out there who'd like to ask a question quickly yes i see a hand there could you stand up and just introduce yourself here okay hello there we go hello there my name is leah cohen i'm a senior at the university studying finance and marketing with a concentration in sustainable business and i was just curious how much do you believe that corporations need to take a more environmental sustainable lens and responsibility as the main you know producers and uh contributors to carbon emissions these days so let me uh make sure i understood your question you're asking me how seriously are corporations taking the whole environmental sustainability how much of our responsibility do you believe they need to take yeah i think it's still in its early stages i think five ten years ago it was viewed as the esg police coming after us today it's becoming more mainstream because people are looking at the impacts of climate change all around them and i think the young people and companies are forcing corporate leaders to actually change their models now the funny thing is environmental initiatives don't have to cost money they actually unleash cost savings all the environmental work we did we saved about 600 million dollars a year so if you frame it as a shareholder value creating initiative it's much more palatable than if you look at it as a corporate social responsibility which takes costs so i think it's just a lens with which you frame it and if you frame it in a value-creating way people take it very very seriously all right ambassador comp please terrific presentation thank you very much we we learned so many important lessons today particularly the importance of humility and it came through and hoped all the students really appreciated that my question relates and it's a it's a long time interest in how successful people of indian descent have been successful in american business the ceo of google microsoft 30 40 other companies why hasn't that translated to india producing those great companies why are they here like you why are you here as the ceos of important businesses why hasn't india made that transformation that's a great question i think that india has the demographic dividend enormous population 1.2 billion people a lot of young people i think the largest percentage of the population below age 25. so you've got lots of up-and-coming leaders in india the indian companies are all chock full of talent and if you look at the many i.t companies if you look at the big conglomerates in india they are chock-a-block full of talent a lot of the people who've come here and become ceos came 10 or 15 years ago they're not coming today they came maybe even 20 years ago they came here to do their masters and their phds in disciplines that did not exist in india then and there was no seamless flow of talent between the two countries but once they came here remember they understand democracy because they grew up in the world's largest they were now functioning in the world's oldest and second they all had education in english so they came here they could easily uh you know integrate into the american culture but the more important thing is in those days and even today i'd say the us was always looked at as the beacon of innovation invention hope culture the greatest in the world so people came here with a sense of you know the future is going to be fantastic because we're in the u.s sense of optimism and they came here and thrived the young people today are increasingly choosing to stay back and grow and develop there but i also say something to you and if you read it read my book you'll find a reference there i was in checkers which is the camp david equivalent for the british prime minister having lunch with one of the british prime ministers and he asked me he said indra when you went to the united states when you did why didn't you come here to the united kingdom i said to mr prime minister had i come here i wouldn't be having lunch with you and i genuinely mean that only in the united states could somebody like me a woman from an emerging market a person of color come in and run an iconic american company i am a uniquely american story as is the head of google the head of microsoft the head of twitter the head of arista networks you can pick any number i think this corporate environment encourages talent and in spite of all of our self-criticism it is hell of a meritocracy we'll take one last question at the front thank you thank you very much thank you for being here um you know for sharing your your story and your wisdom with us i know that i'm not alone i'm sure and feeling completely inspired by you and on that note um i'm sure many of us business students would love to hear if you have any uh advice or recommendations what would you give to us knowing that many of us here would love to have dreams of having an impactful life an impactful career like you have had what what suggestions recommendations would you give to us um let me start off by saying when you graduate from business school don't say i want to be ceo because the minute you say that you lose all sense of what you have to do because you're so obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder just tell yourself you're going to do the job that you're given exceedingly well exceedingly well surpassing anybody's expectations just focus on that second put your hand up for the toughest assignments nobody notices you because you took something that's running well and kept it running well but if you take on something that has got issues and you turned it around or fixed it people go hey what's your name aaron they say aaron's a good guy we've you know we've got to really watch out for him so put your hands up for the toughest assignments every company has politics understand the politics but do not play in the politics especially women never ever get into the politics because they love to brand women as being political and i say that to men too understand the politics but don't play in the politics and i'll tell you one more thing that uh stood me in good stead through my entire life understand what your proposition is for the company you know people have got to be able to say aaron is the go-to man for this what is that proposition that you're going to present to the company work hard on that because just being another good employee there's so many of you in the company and i'll just leave you with this picture of the math in pepsico if you think of the pyramid it's a pyramid the ceo sits on top right about 15 000 people enter in the managerial levels by the time you get to one level below the ceo there's only 15 people and there's one ceo so if you want to rise to the top you're going to have to do better than everybody else to move up while the world is changing around you so you've got to be a lifelong student and do better than everybody else and by the time you get to about the third level from the top it's either up or out because if you don't move up you're a blocker so the stakes go up so you've got to understand this math and retool yourself constantly for the future with an insatiable curiosity understanding your proposition and fine-tuning it so think of it as a a march but every step has to be deliberately taken but if you start off saying i'm going to skip a few and run for the ceo ship you will just fall in a ditch don't even think about it you'll be out very very fast finally i'll say to you guys don't forget your family your friends and your faith that's my plea to you at the end of the day job can come today and go tomorrow the only thing that stays with you is your family your friends and your faith without that i'd be a nobody so i hope you weren't expecting a shortcut all right so um we're we're at the end of the hour we're at the end of the hour and i've been sitting here for 60 minutes worried that the the palm tree is going to fall on indra but i think that even if you were here in a category 1 hurricane you would be unflappable so we really appreciate the hour and it's been fantastic to have you gracious with your presence and good humor thank you so much thank you john thank you for a wonderful [Applause] you

Channel: Miami Herbert Business School

Views: 14,943

Keywords: University of Miami, School of Business, UM, miami, Florida, College, Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo, CEO, Leadership, CEO Talks, Leadership Talks, Women Leadership

Id: k-60Q7WDmV8

Length: 58min 52sec (3532 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022