BY INDRA NOOYI
5.0 out of 5 stars
An autobiography with a majestic beginning and a noble ending
The book opens with the story that, in a gathering of US and Indian business executives in the White House in November 2009, the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh and the President of the United States, Barack Obama, both claimed that Indra Nooyi, then CEO of PepsiCo, “… is one of us”. I doubt there is another autobiography that has a beginning as majestic as this.
Indra Nooyi, of course, is the author of “My Life in Full – Work, Family, and Our Future”. She was one of the persons profiled and interviewed in the book “How to Lead” by David Rubenstein which I read sometime ago. Rubenstein put her in the category of “Transformers”, which also included Tim Cook, Eric Schmidt, Melinder Gates and Ginni Rometty.
The book is organized under four parts. There is no index which makes it hard to look things up.
Part I, Growing Up, tells the story of her childhood in India. She grew up in a large house in Madras, built by her paternal grandfather. Her parents, older sister, younger brother, as well as her grandfather, all lived there. It was a big loving family. She went to Madras Christian College, graduated with a degree in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics in 1974. She then left home to study in Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, obtaining a Postgraduate Diploma in 1976. The sad episode during this period was the passing of her grandfather. Regrettably, she did not arrive in time to say goodbye.
She landed a job at Mettur Beardsell and was doing very well. However, many of her friends and classmates went to the U.S. to study. A friend convinced her to apply to the Yale School of Management. She got admitted, with partial financial help consisting of loans and scholarship. At the same time, she got a big promotion at Mettur Beardsell. When she asked her Boss, a fellow named Norman, he encouraged her to go, even though he was disappointed at losing her. Although her father was supportive, her mother was reluctant to let her leave home. In the end her father won. Shortly before she embarked for America, her father had a serious car accident and was badly injured. Fortunately, he recovered and was able to return to work. Her plan of going abroad was not affected.
On the lighter side, this reader learned in Part I that the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” contains all 26 letters, from A to Z.
Her account of leaving home to study in the United States would undoubtedly invoke resonances and memories in many readers. I was surprised that in her Pam Am Flight, there was a Lounge in Economy class. I also could not help comparing her twenty-hour flight to New York to my 18-day boat trip across the Pacific, and her having a place in a dormitory upon arrival in New Haven, Connecticut to my having to look for a place to rent in a strange land, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Part II, entitled “Finding my Footing”, described her experience of working as a Strategy Consultant for Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and then as a Vice President and Director of Corporate Strategy and Planning at Motorola. This was also the period when she met Raj, got married in 1981, and started a family. She described in detail various aspects of her work: frequent travels, both domestic and international, meeting all kinds of people, dealing with an essentially all white-male environment, writing reports etc. To this reader who spent all his career in academia, the business world is complicated, a lot more difficult to navigate than Maxwell’s equations, although perhaps less difficult than dealing with professors who regard themselves as prima donnas.
Part III is entitled “The Pepsico Years”. She joined Pepsi in 1994. She worked under three CEO’s, Wayne Calloway, Roger Enrico, and Steven Reinemund. She served as President and Chief Financial Officer, beginning in 2001. It was interesting that, when she returned home to try to break the news to her mother that she was appointed President of Pepsi, her mother asked her to go out to get some milk first before hearing it. “Leave your crown at the garage”, said her mother. This may sound cruel, but it illustrated that all her life, her mother had been performing the balancing act of encouraging her daughters to pursue their dreams (crowns) but reminding them of their duties as wives and mothers.
In 2006, Ms. Nooyi was named CEO of Pepsi, the first non-white female CEO of a global company. She served in this position until 2017. Her major innovations, under the banner “Performance with Purpose (PwP)”, included making the food and drink products healthier, protecting the environment (e.g. saving water in the production process), updating the IT system, and incorporating design as a core activity in the company. The data showing the success of PepsiCo under her leadership is documented in the book.
Her success did not come about without a great deal of effort. As she said more than once in the book:
“Doing well at work is, by definition, a full-time job.
Being a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law can also be full-time jobs.
Being a CEO is at least three full-time jobs.
So, while I devoted every drop of my talent and time to it all, my success was actually a bit like winning the lottery.”
What she won in the lottery included an extremely supportive family, a soul mate husband who sees eye-to-eye, generous and helpful bosses, and her excellent education. She did not elaborate much on her leadership skills in the book, but she does reveal that vision, listening, and empowering the people you work with are essential elements for success. There is one leadership skill which this reader learns only in her book, which was also singled out in David Rubenstein’s “How to lead”. It is the idea that, when a person worked under her did good work, she wrote to the person’s mother praising her son/daughter and thanking the mother for her contribution to the company by providing the service of her son/daughter. The positive reaction of this simple gesture was just amazing. As I said, no other leadership book mentions this. I wish Ms. Nooyi’s book was published before I retired.
Since being a CEO is more than a full-time job and there are only 24 hours in a day, something had to give in the family life. This experience, and her suggestion of how our society can move forward in “three interconnected areas: paid leave, flexibility and predictability, and care”, account for a good portion of Part IV, entitled “Looking Ahead”. She ends the book with the sentence: “And I will also do all I can to help us build the future of care for all the families that don’t have this kind of support. This is my promise.”
A noble ending worthy of the majestic beginning. Don’t you agree?
Link to Amazon Review:
Top Review among 3833 ratings 4/6/23
Comments