Indra Nooyi: Truths from the Top

[Music] on a relative basis yes I've had it all lots of trade offs lots of sacrifices but I think somehow I've had the strengths to power through all of them [Music] had to work harder to prove that the color and the gender actually should not be counted against me I could do a damn good job too [Music] [Applause] no hello everyone what a great warm welcome I made I'm Margot Brennan of CBS News and this is Indra Nooyi I love that quote I can do a damn good job to Indra actually you did a damn good job for an extremely long period of time when it comes to the average length of a CEOs lifespan at the top of a corporation you were at Pepsi 12 years average lifespan for CEOs about 5 how did you stay competitive for so long so just before I answer that question let me just make a bunch of opening remarks first it's great to be here with the sisterhood so it's just wonderful to be here and you know I looked at the lineup of people you know Priyanka Chopra Oprah Winfrey the glamourous Donovan - I'm an unemployed retired CEO that I'm here with all of them awesome but let me just tell you why I stayed in the job as a CEO for 12 years in PepsiCo for 24 you know way back when we made a decision that we wanted to make PepsiCo the defining corporation of the 20th of the 21st century when people look back and said you know what were the great companies of the 21st century we wanted PepsiCo to be among that list you don't become a defining company just because you deliver good financials you become a defining company because it is something much more than that and to us it was performance with purpose and performance with purpose is something that was a long journey and every year you added a new layer of richness and complexity to this whole notion of purpose so if I hadn't gotten tired after about 10 or 11 years I would have done this for 25 years because I really wanted to build in purpose into PepsiCo in a way that nobody could change it when into its future what do you mean purpose so think about what PepsiCo could do for society rather than just financial returns how do we make sure our portfolio is balanced between the fun products but more better for you and good for your products how do we make sure we create a company that does the right thing by the environment water use plastics recycling reducing the carbon footprint supporting our farmers and more importantly and I'd say most importantly how do we take the employees we have and make sure that when they come to PepsiCo to make a living they can also have a life so how do we allow them to bring their whole self to work what kind of support systems can we provide to them so that they feed like PepsiCo is an extension of their life rather than I've got to go to work parked myself for the door pick myself up again when I leave to go home so we wanted to provide all the support systems to make families women in particular feed like PepsiCo's D plays I want to come to work in so all of these take time I wanted to get that journey read on its way and it's that inner drive that kept me going for a decade for more than a decade well it was your performance that puts you on the map but the fact of your gender and that being unusual at the top also got you a lot of tension and I wonder how you feel about that because I know personally for me when people brought up my gender it made me a little uncomfortable and they oh you're the only female Sunday show host okay you want to be known for your work after I had my son it kind of changed things for me I wanted to talk a little bit more about that experience and I'm wondering what your process was like that thinking as a mother as this fortune 500 CEO look very early in my time at PepsiCo I decided that I was going to be one of the guys but I was also going to be a woman so I was not going to allow them to push me around which you know used to happen quite often and the second thing is I had two daughters my first one was about eight or nine years when I came to PepsiCo my second one was nine months old when I joined PepsiCo Wow and so and I was the middle of this large scale transformation of the company from 94 to 2,000 were 'king 24/7 so basically I decided that come you know like 5 o'clock my kids are allowed to come to work and hang around they're allowed to play they're allowed to sleep in my office do whatever that's the price of having me work at PepsiCo because if I couldn't go home and take care of the kids my office was gonna become you know the place where they would hang out what level were you this is before you were CEO no well before I was see I was head of corporate strategy make it fun your bosses were ok with that did they have a choice look if you want me if you want me that's the price of having me alright it comes down to if you establish a niche for yourself that you're competent and make yourself indispensable based on competence what can they do without you if they and if they didn't want me because any one kids running around so get somebody else get a guy who couldn't do the job as well so then I was ok with that so if you wanted me my kids were gonna be around if my kids school called and said oh your daughter's got a sprained ankle I was gonna leave and go to Sacred Heart yes - look at that sprained ankle that's the price of having me it worked how much resistance did you get to that zero really in fact I'll give you the other side when Steve Randleman became the CEO in 2000 I had a daughter in boarding school at that time and one daughter in Sacred Heart and if the boarding school called and said hey we have a problem we need you to come and my husband was traveling and I had to pick up the little daughter he'd say tell you what I'll go to the boarding school you go to Sacred Heart on the other side and he always helped me out always and when you have bosses like that it's a piece of cake Wow you've said in the past and this is one of these harsh realities that I think a lot of women talk about amongst themselves and don't talk publicly about a lot which is this feeling that their biological clocks are in competition or at odds with their professional trajectories do you think there is such a thing as balance look it's not an opinion what I want to tell you it's fact just think about it having a kid and having to manage through their life those checklists the whole that is a full-time job whether you like it or not is a full-time job I talked to so many stay-at-home parents they are just inundated with the amount of work they have to do going to work is a full-time job whatever job you do because you're working in a pyramid as you move up the pyramid people are eliminated and now with so many technologies that are coming in you've got to be a lifelong student and with productivity people are being shed very fast and so you've really got to double down and work even harder to move up the pyramid that is more than a full-time job yeah now compound that with the fact that many of us have aging parents and we may have to take care of them that has a little bit of stress and on top of that the fourth area is known as stress but it's a fact if you have a spouse the spouse demands attention to and is it not true and as you move up the pyramid they demand more attention and so you know the fact of the matter is how do you balance all of these priorities you know it's like I hate to say this guys I'd go home my first thing I made a beeline for was my old flannel nightgown right okay my kids thought that was great because if mom got into the old Faneuil nightgown she wasn't going anywhere my husband will come in from walking on not that fat night again so at that time you have to choose husband kids how do you do this so always the kids why not because you know what can I say but you know what the good news I'm still with the same husband yeah he's a good man I tell you he's a good man I couldn't be married to me how have you sustained a marriage it's throughout all of this and a good one he's a very good guy I mean just uh gem of a person and something worked well in the selection process I guess but he is just a gem of a guy more importantly he moved and switched jobs when I moved from Chicago to Connecticut so he gave up some of his advancement to help me move ahead which is very unusual but did you know about that that sure yeah we talked we talked a lot at length about it and he said I don't want to hold you back so go ahead and I'll figure out what to do now he did exceedingly well in his career but I think you could have risen even more had we stayed in Chicago but we moved to the East Coast and he has supported me all the way we plan our schedules six months one year in advance we'd make sure we have the right help if one of us wasn't home for the night so the man's a gem now look he's a stickler for other things you know lists an organization which I'm incapable of but the fact of the matter is he's put up with all of that and he's been a great husband and I owe a lot to what he has been for me how old were you when you had your children oh my first one was I think I was 28 and the second one when I was 30 something so 37 38 and so I had two kids and the nine years apart so was that a matter of just staggering it with your career I was in a car crash after I had the first one and she was two so I was pretty banged up and broken so I had to rebuild my body after that and then had the second kid died I wonder you know my girlfriend I sometimes joke like oh did we not get the memo that we were supposed to have had our kids when we were in our 20s hmm because there is that conflict of the schedule that as you talked about the pyramid moving up that the level of difficulty gets higher and I wonder how you counseled some of your employees as an executive but namely think about this well here's the problem if you want to have kids and a job you've got to start thinking about the cohort group that you want to move up with this is a real issue see when you graduate from business school you graduate with the class if you want to stay with the class and move up and you know constantly think about the group you are moving up with you're gonna have to really think about you have to have to do you have your kids before you go to business school or after you come to work because if you have young kids and you don't have a fantastic support system we can talk about what that means a fantastic support system you will end up making some trade-offs Network you will because it is brutal I mean look just when you think everything is going well you'll get you'll get that call saying the kids ill or they want their mommy unfortunately they always want their mom no fortunately fortunately they always want their mommies okay and so I get the number of calls I've got I want my mommy okay fine mommy's coming and I don't tell you guys I live 15 minutes away from work when my kids had the flu even though we had my mother living with us or babysitters I would zip home every two or three hours and make sure that temperature was okay they were given the medication they had a soup or something to eat and I'd sit back so the kids knew that I was always there you know moment's notice I could get to them but I think that if we don't put aside what our normal expectations are for moving up the pyramid and decide how we're going to balance children and work or we're gonna have the children but we're gonna have family living with us because to supervise the daycare worker because leaving children with not highly qualified childcare workers is a challenge by itself that's a whole discussion that you know needs to happen in society for women today and that's affected by economic availability to financial availability well financial availability we don't pay childcare workers enough I was just reading a bunch of statistics today in many cities in the country a childcare worker gets paid $12 an hour but if you work in the local wah-wah market you get $14 an hour okay think about this $12 $14 in the Wawa market you get to talk to adults you know with the child you get to coochie-coo to the child you know it's a whole different ballgame so many care workers are opting to go work and most social environment as opposed to do care for elderly people or children that's going to create a massive cash shortage for us we're going to have a million caregivers shortage in a couple of years what are we going to do between aging care and child care a million caregiver shortage and if we don't come up with some systemic solutions to address this issue there's gonna be a crunch because Millennials in particular we need you in the workplace because if you're not in the workplace productivity of the country is not very good because women are today getting more than 50% the college degrees 57 percent of the top grades so we need women in the workplace but millennial women we also want you to have 2.1 kids per person because that's a replacement rate today we're at 1.6 not a good number to be at now at 1.6 we're gonna have to do something serious to make sure the population has replaced the right way but we can't expect you to have those kids if we don't give you the support system so so one of the things you know I'd like to get to a point where when a woman has a child we actually send her a letter saying thank you for your service to the country because that's what it is thank you for your service to the country so instead it is like oh my god you can do it you can make your checklist you got you've got to figure out a way to have your family and come to work doesn't work yeah so I think this is a real issue that as a country as companies as communities families societies we have to figure out a sensible way to come together and come up with true policy options and start working on this I mean the opposed to that tells you what people's opinion is but why aren't we seeing that reflected where's that supposed to come from is that federal government down is that your corporate CEO on down where does that change and policy shift come from so I think what happens in the past few months since I've stepped down I've had a lot of time to reflect on this issue been reading a lot of stuff that's there there's a lot of books written about all women you can do it you can create your own help systems you can create your own checklists you can do it so it's your problem but it's your problem the family's problem or the woman's problem then there's a whole bunch of books written about oh my god what a dreadful problem we have on our hands and then there's a bunch of solutions which says yes there are solutions but they cost too much money and we can't afford it at some point you're gonna have to bring the three together and say look this problem is not a point problem or a point solution it's a complex problem with a series of solutions which require a bunch of people to come together to address it in a sensible way but we have to do it we have to really fast because every day we have 10,000 boomers retiring 10,000 boomers and these boomers many of them are going to need care going forward and these Millennials are gonna have to care for these boomers because you're the Sandwich Generation so between that and the kids how are you going to make it all work how are we going to redefine what is family how are we going to redefine how we share each other's time to create a more nurturing environment this is going to require a symposium of the kind we've never had to talk about these issues put a cost to it and figure out how we can address it because if we don't guys we are going to be facing a major care crisis which we won't know how to address I'm talking about the next 24 to 36 months and that's what worries me yeah [Applause] so so how do you take that idea and put it to work should we expect you to run for office no no because nothing will happen unfortunately why not one person I tell you what we're trying to bring people together to write something about this and you know to write it in a way that's clear crisp that everybody can understand what the problem is and what the solutions are we've gone so far as to formulate it as a set of equations so you can actually see it very clearly the two sides of the equation how you've got to make it work and now the real question is how do we bring the right tape right people around the table to say okay this is the set of solutions that will work and this is how we can pay for it and the good news is many people in Washington are looking for solutions today there's many child care bills making their way through Congress paid family leave paid family leave you know what kind of support systems we need to have for caregivers at the American Association of aging is really making this a big issue but care for the agent so I think we can bring this care crisis together as an issue that galvanizes action but around that rap a whole bunch of other factors which together can address this issue but it's an urgent issue and believe me in my wonderful retirement years now this is one of the things I'm gonna focus a lot of my attention on how do your daughters feel about this you know they've already suffered through mom not really being there right so they are really happy that I'm taking this on but they're little bit upset because like mom we thought you'd retired what happened yeah I've retired because I don't have to worry about quarterly earnings anymore but I really haven't retired because I don't know what retirement is I don't need to lie on a beach so I don't know what retirement I just try to figure out how to make a difference and pay it forward to all of the women who work so hard all the families that are struggling to have kids and you know make a life and make a living so I think people like us have had an incredible past incredible support systems need to pay it forward so that's really what I'm finally hearing more companies talk like this where CEOs are like I don't know look I'm trying to convene the X women CEOs to say we have to sign up to this I'm going to write and publish on this we convened a whole bunch of X PepsiCo people just a few days ago expects achill women just awesome women we're beginning to talk about this issue in groups stay tuned Tina and I have been talking about this so maybe the next year's women in the world this could be a major issue I don't know it's up to Tina but this is an issue and let me just say in closing guys because I know Margot you're gonna pull the clock yes guys I tell you something we have to stop talking about this as a problem we have to get to what is the solution you should demand answers because we need answers that's where we are

Channel: Women in the World

Views: 225,742

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Keywords: WITW, Work, Motherhood, Indra Nooyi

Id: AS_THnmaQ7I

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019