Ex PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on what business must do to support women, on her drive, and "the one area where I let people down"

There’s a line in Indra Nooyi’s book, My Life in Full, that made me realize how much and for how long we carry our past with us. Looking back on her path from a middle-class upbringing in Chennai, India, to where she is now, she says: “I still have that fear — an immigrant’s fear — that presses me to try to do well and to belong.”

It was the present tense-ness of that sentence that threw me off. Indra is one of the most successful CEOs of our time. For 12 years, until Oct. 2018, she led PepsiCo through a transformational run, boosting not just its value — adding $57 billion to its market cap during her tenure — but its design and its legacy. Despite Pepsi’s reliance on fast-grab drinks and snack foods, she instituted an internal cultural change focused on using less sugar, less water, and on embracing environmentally friendly packaging. She bought her way into health products and fixed problems instituted by her predecessors. She ran businesses around the globe and was feted by world leaders. And yet, here was someone who felt —and, apparently, still feels —?the fear that she wasn’t doing enough.?

In the latest This is Working, I asked Indra about her motivations, her concerns, and what role mentors played for her along the way. When she set out to write her book, her goal was to deliver a “manual for fixing how we mix work and family.” Instead she published a memoir that explains how difficult it was for her to do just that. Our talk was similarly open, with Indra discussing areas where she felt she excelled and didn’t. What she’s sure about is that if other women?are going to follow her path — or whatever professional path they want to be on — government and business must rethink support for families: childcare, family leave, and skill investments, among other initiatives.

You can watch our full interview here, read edit excerpts below, or download the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Two final asides:

One, there’s something nice about interviewing ex-CEOs who are still active in the professional world. They’ve got all the knowledge without the shadow of the markets or employee expectations that often keep these leaders from speaking their minds.

And two, we had so many questions flooding in for Indra that I had to call for a lightning round, which Indra gamely agreed to do. She nailed it. Now the question is: How can I persuade her to make "Ask Indra" a regular feature?

You can't read this book without marveling at your almost superhuman drive. But you also talk about the role of mentors in your life. Do those have to work together?

While writing the book, I realized I worked incredibly hard, harder than anybody's ever worked in the jobs that they've done. At least ones that I've observed. Funnily enough, when I was working. I assumed that that's what people needed to do to keep their jobs.

Because remember I was an immigrant, a person of color, a woman. I always felt I was in a hole and I had to dig myself out of it. Don't ask me why. That's, how I felt. So I worked extra, extra, extra hard make myself be seen, heard, and counted in the halls of power. I assumed that's how I had to work.?

So that was one side of me. I was just wired that way based on my background and the fact that I was first amongst many to come into the boardroom… Those days, corporations were more sink or swim. There weren’t other women you could look up to or women as peers you could learn from. So you had to learn from the men and hope that one of them stepped up to be a mentor. In my case, I was very, very lucky. Lots of people stepped up to mentor me and I am a product of their mentorship.

Can you talk more about how being an immigrant shaped and shapes your drive?

I always want my family back in India to say, “We are proud of what she did in the US and how she gave back to the country.” I want India to say, “She did India proud. She didn't let India down by doing anything wrong.” And I want the US to feel like like someone like me, who did not flee persecution, did not flee problems, who came to the US willingly with lots of hopes and dreams in my suitcase, also contributed to the United States. And I feel like I have this responsibilities in my head, even though I've been here for 42 years, and this is my home. I still feel like I owe the US a huge debt of gratitude. And I want to make sure I’m giving back all the time. I don’t know what propels me to do that.?

You’re clear in My Life in Full that you believe we need a “moonshot” approach to supporting working families. What’s behind that?

Women are half the population. They get 70% of the valedictorians in high schools. They're graduating from college at a 10-point higher rate than men. In stem disciplines in the top schools, they have one whole point of GPA more than the men. At MIT, they're 47% of the graduates. At Caltech, Georgia Tech, they’re 30- 35% of the graduates.

I'm looking at this and saying, “We have an incredible emerging market opportunity within our country,” which is women.?

And so I come at it strictly from an economist perspective to say, all the studies show GDP grows when we can bring more women into the workforce and keep them rather than bring them in and lose them. So the big question is why do we lose them? We lose them for two reasons: One, we lose them because the conditions inside companies and entities that employ them are not conducive to their success: too much unconscious bias, no pay parity.?

But more importantly, if women choose to also have families, they have to struggle with balancing family and work. With COVID, we've learned how to deploy technology tools to work flexibly and remotely, which is great. If we can now add paid lead to support people who have children, and then set up a childcare network so that we can have a support structure for families to support child-rearing while people have to go to work or do other things, I think we can take away all the stresses on young family builders — especially women — and make families a source of strength. I call it a "moonshot," but it's a moonshot that's doable. A moonshot that's achievable, if you only put our hearts and minds to it.

The original moonshot was a government effort. You talk about this being something companies need to be involved in, too. You're on all kinds of boards; why do you think they’re not leading here?

I'm talking to more and more companies who are looking at putting in these programs or have already put in these programs. But I think it can't be the odd company here and there. It's got to be more systematic across companies, across government, across small- and medium-size enterprises, across every aspect of society. So I don't have an answer as to who should do it because I'm a strategist who can identify problems and say, we need to address it. I think now the policy people have to come together and say, “How do we structure it? How do we pay for it? Who pays for it" And I think this is where we have to bring in people from government, from companies, every aspect of society, to talk about how to make this happen.?

The reason it becomes more complex these days is because in the past, people just left the home, went to the office. So you could think about child care in the community or child care at the office. But now with hybrid working, with flexible working hours, you need child care close to communities because people are going to be working flexibly from home. Maybe child care attached to coworking spaces. So in many ways, the structure of care as we are talking about now, is also linked to the future of work.

But it's important that as we think about future of work, we think about nurturing and supporting families. Allowing women to juggle work and family. How do we make that central to the future of work conversations? To me that needs to happen, and it's not happening to the extent I'd like to see it happen. Even all the future-of-work studies that are being done do not incorporate families and women into the center of the conversation. So, I think a critical mass of voices speaking up on this is badly needed.

Can we talk about pay? Frequently in your book, you tell a story about getting assigned jobs on top of your existing jobs and never getting or asking for a raise. One time you got an indoor parking spot and were thrilled with that.

You know, Dan, this is one area where I let people down because I never asked to be paid more. I never asked for a raise. I never asked for a promotion. My husband and I always talked about it and said, "This is still more money than we've ever seen in our life and let's just keep working. Why go fight for more money?" And we made a decision that we would never ask for more money or ask for a promotion. Both of us followed that rule. Had I asked for it, maybe I'd have done some benefits for the cause of women.?

Did I miss out on some years of raise and options? Yeah, but to be honest, I don't care because I have enough money, and I don't think that I regret not getting that money for the first six years. In today's terms, however, I think it's wrong if people don't notice that for the same job, women and men [don't] get paid the same. Why should they get paid differently? Why should women get paid less in most cases?

I think HR departments have to be held accountable and CEOs have to be held accountable. And rather than publish big scorecards in the public domain, within boards of directors, these conversations need to happen… I think it's premature to publish things which could be interpreted every which way, without having the real conversations within the company for a few years so that you can actually make the required changes that are needed to get to excellent pay parity and work on diversity and inclusion.

You're saying that you think that publishing something will take away from these companies' ability to meet pay parity?

I think those statistics should be developed, boards should review them, company management should scrutinize it, and then decide how best to address this issue.?

An example: If somebody's been in a job for six or seven years and has got tremendous seniority and tenure on the job and is an expert of the job and gets paid $100, and somebody who's newly promoted to the job gets paid $95, the external scorecard would say, and if the second person is a woman, the woman gets paid 5% less. Not true. If you tenure-adjust the whole thing, it's the right number. That person will grow into the job fast, but you can't put in all these caveats when you report it outside. So I like external scorecards, but I'm really, I am nervous about how it gets interpreted.

The CEO role has changed since you left PepsiCo, particularly in how accountable employees expect their leaders to be on social issues.?

Look, leaders today have it tough because they've come through the pandemic, we've never had to manage through a pandemic. They’ve had to shut businesses down, shut many offices down. And people are having to think about, What happens to my office structures? Are people going to work out of home? Are they going to come into the office? What is the corporate culture? How do I create a corporate culture and nurture it? How do I help people develop soft skills? How do you even promote and develop people? All of these questions about what is the core of the corporation is being called into question.?

That's on the one hand. On the other hand, business models got challenged, supply chains [got challenged]. How do you think about cybersecurity? Everything is being challenged as far as today's leaders are concerned.

When it comes to social issues, coming out of the pandemic and before that with George Floyd, clearly there are more social issues today than they were when I was CEO. We had our share, don't get me wrong. And what I observed when I was CEO was that whatever position you take, one-third of the people are on your side, one-third of people are against you and one-third are quiet. So either you can say two-thirds are for you or two-thirds are against you. So you have to be very, very careful as a CEO to determine what to wade into and what not to because whatever you do you're going to be criticized. So keep looking at your value statement and saying, what aspects of my value statement do I have to live up to? And then decide whether you want to wade into a social issue or not. The rest of them, leave it to the employees to deal with it in their personal time. You as a CEO don't have to put out a statement.

Now again, I want to say something. It's easy for me to say it as an ex, retired CEO. When you're in the hot seat, the pressures you face are very different. You get sometimes tens of thousands of emails if you're silent, and you get tens of thousands of emails if you say something. So at that point, you've got to weigh the positives and the negatives of the messages you're getting and decide what's the best line of action for you as a CEO. These are not easy times.

Let’s move into a lightning round, which is a This is Working first. So many questions coming. Let’s start here:

How do you find the right mentor for yourself?

Mentors pick you, you don't pick them. They pick you because they see something in you that they want to hitch their wagon to.

What would be your advice for youngsters who are early in their career path or recent graduates?

Focus on the job you're doing, don't focus on the next few jobs. Understand the company's politics, but don't play in the politics. And put your hand up for the toughest assignments. That's when you'll get noticed.

What advice would you have for single mothers who are trying to balance life as a sole parent and elevating her career?

Build a support structure around you. If it's not your family, your neighbors, your friends, your community. Without a support structure, it's not easy to do, to really pull off this juggling act. And move into a neighborhood where there's very good child care. And as much as possible, work for a company that values you and the fact that you're a single parent and is willing to let you work flexibly.

What are your thoughts on working long hours and trying to prove yourself at a company for future promotion versus finding work-life balance?

It's a personal choice. If you're totally taken with the job and you want to put in the hours because you're enamored with what you're learning and you want to keep doing it, do it.?

If you believe you want real balance and you want to juggle work and family in a much more sensible way than I did, then make the trade-offs. And I say in “a more sensible way than I did,” because I got caught up in my work. I loved my job. I loved my family. So I didn't do things that were leisurely for me. I focused on the job. I focused on the family.

What's on your bookshelf other than My Life in Full?

I read President Clinton's The President's Daughter. I love that book. Love, love, love that book. I read a book about contagion, how do pandemics spread. Somebody just sent me a book about Believe In People. How do you have social entrepreneurship, make change happen in societies? I'm reading that because I think there's a way to use social entrepreneurs to bring about the change we want. So I'm reading an eclectic set of books and trying to figure out this world.

Last question: You were in a band in high school called The LogRhythms — named after math tables you were studying — do you still play the guitar?

I own a lot of guitars, which I didn't at that time. But I just put them up on a wall in my office because I let my nails grow, and vanity takes the better of me these days, Dan. One day I'll cut off my nails and develop the calluses to go back to playing guitar.