Indra Nooyi

In another fascinating Sy Syms-sponsored fireside chat, Prof. Laizer Kornwasser, who in addition to teaching at Sy Syms is a member of its Board of Overseers and president and COO at CareCentrix, interviewed Indra Nooyi, former CEO and chairman of PepsiCo on Tuesday, March 22, 2022. In their conversation, they covered topics ranging from the challenges facing women at the executive level to using design thinking to change a corporate culture. Nooyi is an Indian-born American businesswoman instrumental in the lucrative restructuring and diversification of PepsiCo’s brands. Nooyi served as the company’s CEO (2006–18) and chairman of the board (2007–19). Though the fifth chairman and CEO in PepsiCo’s history, Nooyi was the first woman to lead the soft-drink and snack-food giant and one of only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Nooyi’s memoir, My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future, was published in 2021. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

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It’s been said that you’ve gone from madrasa to Yale (where you earned your master’s degree) to Pepsi. And you seem to have broken every possible stereotypical expectation. What advice do you have to others looking to break existing stereotypes?

There was a lot in between from madrasa to Yale to Pepsi, so let me tell you the common denominators across my entire life. First, I worked hard. My brain is wired in a way that I just can’t sit idle, so I just have to keep working, have to keep reading, keep looking for new things. The second is going beyond whatever I was asked to do to figure out connections to other things. If my job was defined in this narrow boundary, I always redefined it to be much bigger to look at the connections of my job to other people’s jobs. Third, I put the company before myself, and fourth, I am just a constant learner—I was looking at people two levels above me and learning from them constantly. Finally, I put my hand up for the most difficult assignments. I said, “Let me take a shot at it.” At the worst, I won’t be able to do it, but if it worked and I proved myself, people would say, “My God, she must be worth something, so let’s see how we can support her and mentor and push her along.”

You talk about encouragement, and a powerful line from your book is about how your grandfather would always stress to you to never be satisfied with the status quo. Can you talk a little bit about that?

My grandfather, a judge, was a very strict but loving man who totally believed in his granddaughters and grandsons. He always believed that younger people have to constantly improve the world—he believed that was our job—and if you said something was good, and you showed it to him, he’d say, “What are you going to do to make it better?” He hated the phrase “good enough”—if everybody had that attitude, we would never progress and move forward at all. All of us need role models like him.

You introduced the concept of design thinking and innovation at Pepsi. How did you begin to drive the change and how did you get the rest of the company to embrace that change?

I would walk retail stores every weekend to look at how our products looked on the shelves, and I realized that while our products had a whole palette of bright colors, they didn’t invite people to pick them up, they didn’t create passion with the consumer. On the other hand, products like Bang and Olufsen sound systems were designed so beautifully—sleek and attractive—that you wanted to bring them home with you. When I talked with Steve Jobs—the one time he gave me the privilege of an audience with him—he told me that if I did not embrace design thinking, I would become a relic of the consumer products industry. So, I read the best books on design, and then I had those who reported directly to me read them. I gave each of my direct reports an empty photo album and a camera and told them to take pictures of whatever they saw as good design and put them in the book and then send the books to me. I immediately discovered my big problem. Of the 14 or 15 direct reports, a third of them turned in the book and they were awful; another third had the spouses do it for them and proudly told me that their wives did it; and of the last third, a couple didn’t turn it in at all and the one person who did a bang-up job hired an agency to do the work. In other words, my people thought design was a waste of time. So, to change this culture, I hired the best designer I could find and told him that he had a blank check to build a team and start showing some proof points of how design can change the company’s thinking. I wanted people to understand that design is not the packaging, it’s everything from the conception of the product to how it shows up on the shelf and how it shows up in your pantry. By the end of the first year, the designers were being invited to every meeting; at the end of two years, no one would do anything without involving design and innovation process. All outsourced design capability was now coming in house, and we won all kinds of contracts because of our design capabilities, even redesigning—re-engineering—the experience of beverages at Madison Square Garden.

Competing in the race to the top is grueling and the victory can sometimes be very lonely. How do you deal with that?

The race to the top is difficult but staying at the top is even more difficult because near the top, everybody’s willing to push you down. At the top, you can’t talk about things with your direct reports because you’re the boss; you can’t talk with the board of directors, because they’re your bosses; you can’t talk to CEOs outside your company because of financial disclosure rules. So, what you end up doing is talking about everything with your spouse—until the spouse, like mine, said, “Can we talk with something other than PepsiCo?” So, a few things you share, the rest you keep yourself. That’s why they say when you become a CEO, you have to have resilience and courage, you’ve got to have your own calming mechanisms because nobody else is going to give you the support you need. I can’t tell you how many times I’d sit down and talk to myself to reason things out and look at things from both sides and give myself different points of view. People don’t realize how lonely that CEO’s job is.

Question from a student: I read about how you wanted PepsiCo to target healthy snacks, a plan I’m sure surprised shareholders. How did you get them on board with this plan?

When I took over as CEO, I looked at three mega-trends that I thought might affect the company over the next 10 years. One was a consumer shift to health and wellness, so I knew we had to transform our portfolio to include more zero-calorie products and products with actual nutrition. Second, I noticed that many of our plants were opposed by local communities because we were using too much water and creating too much plastic, so we had to address that.  And I had to change the image of the company from being an oldline consumer company to one where the best and the brightest of those who might want to pursue careers in tech or finance would come work for us. All this was encapsulated in the words “performance with purpose.” We would continue to deliver great performance but do it while transforming the portfolio to focus on the environment (which would reduce our costs) and focus on our people, which would give us a talent pool to keep this virtuous circle moving. The Board of Directors signed off on this, so I had the support of the board, and I was confident this was the right strategy, so I went about doing it. People criticized me, but after we made it through the financial crisis and the company grew, they said, “Oh my God, she was so prescient,” and suddenly they were giving me more awards than I had cupboards for.

Question from a student: I was wondering if you can discuss the things you would go back and tell yourself about leadership and how we can apply them as we, especially women, progress into the career force.

There are seven skills for leadership. First, you have to have a proposition, and you’ve got to make sure people know what your proposition is. That proposition is based on your competency, and your competency has to be constantly refined by curiosity, which means you need to be a lifelong student. The second is what I would call creativity, the ability to connect dots and make shapes that nobody else can see because when you get to a leadership position and the pyramid is narrowing, you’ve got to better than everybody else and you’ve got to show that. The third is a pair: courage and confidence together. Nobody follows a leader who doesn’t have courage and confidence. The fourth is communication: please invest the time and effort into learning to communicate so that you can learn how to simplify the complex. When somebody leaves a speech, they’ve got to have a picture in their mind of what you said. Number five: have a compass because either you have zero integrity or 100% integrity—there is nothing in between. Your compass  has always got to point true north. You can have all the courage in the world, the confidence, the competence, the curiosity, but if you lack integrity, it’s all over. Sixth is coaching—any good leader develops other people; a leader who does not develop other people is a selfish leader. And seventh is giving back. We’re all housed in societies and communities, and if you don’t give back to those communities and societies, they won’t thrive, and companies cannot thrive in societies that don’t thrive.

I want to end with one last question, and I think you have touched on it a little bit. How is the women’s corporate ladder different than the men’s?

Do we have an hour? The corporate ladder was established by men for men in the past, and that’s the corporate ladder that exists today. But now, you’ve got a whole group of women who are just extraordinary, and not only are they extraordinary, they want economic freedom, they want the power of the purse. We haven’t yet figured out how to create a completely equitable workplace, but when we reach the point where we look at everybody as talent, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, background, and so on, we will have a different sort of a workplace. And I think we need to get to that because today, the biggest competitive advantage of companies or states or countries is talent. You have to look for the best talent and think about human resources, not just men resources. We have been making progress, but there’s still work to be done.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts because your thoughts are so powerful. You are somebody who embodies everything that we ask our students to think about and embrace. Your words have tremendous impact  and will inspire many to be leaders in their own right.

Thank you all, thank you for inviting me.