Indra Nooyi

Tyler Mathisen:

Welcome to Enduring Excellence, a podcast from the University of Chicago Graham School. I’m Tyler Mathisen, your host. In each episode, we speak with remarkable leaders who have built lives of purpose, impact, and meaning across every chapter of their personal and professional journeys. Join us as we explore what it takes to lead with purpose for a lifetime.

Today, I’m deeply honored to welcome Indra Nooyi, one of the most visionary and values-driven leaders of our time. Born and raised in Chennai, India, Indra came to the United States in 1978 to study at the Yale School of Management. After earning her master’s degree, she began her career at the Boston Consulting Group before taking on senior leadership roles at Motorola and ABB. In 1994, she joined PepsiCo as senior vice president of corporate strategy, and just 12 years later, she became PepsiCo’s CEO. At that moment, she was one of only 10 women leading a Fortune 500 company.

Throughout her remarkable journey, Indra has exemplified what it means to lead with both head and heart, combining strategic brilliance with deep humanity. Her story is one of persistence, of courage and conviction, and for so many, especially women balancing ambition and family, she opened the door to what’s possible.

In our conversation, Indra brings forward enduring ideas, lessons on leadership, character and purpose that have defined her extraordinary career. She reminds us that excellence is about building the backbone, not just short-term success, investing in people, culture, and processes that create enduring value. She also shares that character shapes organizational excellence and that a leader’s personal standards and integrity set the tone for the entire enterprise. We explore how leadership requires courage and persistence, from her journey from Chennai to Yale, to the moments when she stood alone in defining what was right for her company and her people.

She shares the philosophy behind her signature idea, performance with purpose, proving that profitability and social impact not only can coexist, but can strengthen one another. And finally, Indra reflects on the sacrifices that come with excellence, the personal trade-offs, the late nights, and the steadfast belief that courage and purpose carry us through.

Indra, it’s a privilege to have you here. Welcome. Now, I know from reading your memoir, My Life in Full, that you’ve lived a life of enduring and abiding curiosity, and I think that spirit is at the heart of enduring excellence, so let’s start there. You once told a story in the book about preparing for a speech at a bowling convention of all things and having never bowled before. So what’d you do? You decided to go learn on your own. Tell us about that.

Indra Nooyi:

Oh, boy, that’s a funny way to start. But what happened was the Bowling Association of North America wanted a beverage partner, and it was not PepsiCo at that time, it was that red beverage company. And what happened was I met the head of the bowling association and he said, “Come and address the bowling association members.” There’s, I think, seven or 800 of them in Las Vegas or whichever city it was in, “And make the case as to why PepsiCo should be the partner, and give me your suggestions on how we could improve the game.” And I’m like, “Okay, how much time do I have?” He said, “The convention’s in two weeks.”

Now, I was going to get that account, whatever happens, so I decided that I couldn’t talk to bowling owners if I didn’t know much about their business. So I took three days off and I said, “I’m going to go visit as many bowling alleys that I could. Old-fashioned, new, integrated with sports centers, standalone, understand their economics, the trials and tribulations of the owners. I’m going to learn to bowl. I’m going to talk to other people in the bowling center to see what they thought of bowling.” So I just did an immersion in bowling. When I came out, I was an expert, at least I felt that way.

Tyler Mathisen:

Did you break a hundred?

Indra Nooyi:

I was an awful bowler, but I got to tell you something. I knew so much about bowling, and I understood. It was not to show off. It was to understand their pain points. It was to understand how they could drive their business with beverages and snacks to get more revenue that they can put back into bowling to create a better experience, so I was trying to look at this as a big flywheel. And when I went to the bowling convention, they actually thought I was an expert on bowling and … Really, it was amazing.

Tyler Mathisen:

The reason I raise this as an example is that throughout your career, it seems to me that you did something that I think lots of leaders fail to do but the best leaders do, and that is really get into the details of every part of the business. You would go to stores and look at where things were positioned on the shelves and ask why. You would look at packaging and look at the bold colors and the designs and the graphics and ask why, and what can we do better? It’s that attention to detail, it seems to me, that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of good leaders from the enduringly excellent leaders.

Indra Nooyi:

Well, my belief is that if a leader wants to be a really good leader and have followership, you have to understand the business at the micro level, not micromanage, micro understand to be able to manage the business, because whatever you do at the top has to land. As my boss, Steve Reinemund used to tell me, “It’s not enough that you know everything about the left of the decimal. You’ve got to know everything on the right of the decimal.” Because when you’re in strategy, you’re dealing with billions of dollars of transactions or hundreds of millions of dollars of bets you’re going to make as a company. But when you start to look at a route system in Frito-Lay or Pepsi, you’re talking about how to take a penny out of a route. How do you take-

Tyler Mathisen:

Because if you multiply that penny-

Indra Nooyi:

It’s hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tyler Mathisen:

Across the enterprise, it’s going to add up.

Indra Nooyi:

And so learning the right side of the decimal is very important in order to manage the left side of the decimal and get the benefits. So I decided that I know how to do the left side of the decimal because that’s what I was trained for. I was going to micro understand the right side of the decimal so that nobody in the frontline would say to me, “You really don’t understand my business.”

Tyler Mathisen:

If it had been a cricket company as opposed to a bowling company, you would’ve been in a better place, because you understand cricket. I don’t understand cricket.

Indra Nooyi:

Well, I think so. I think I would claim that I understand cricket better than bowling for sure. I wouldn’t have had to go to bowling alleys.

Tyler Mathisen:

Right. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. You wouldn’t have had to go to bowling.

Indra Nooyi:

It would’ve made my life easier.

Tyler Mathisen:

So the topic of our series here, as you all know, is enduring excellence, and I like to start at the top with the people I’ve had the privilege of interviewing with a definitional moment. How would you define enduring excellence and how would you distinguish excellence from simply being successful or high performing in a particular moment?

Indra Nooyi:

I think success is a short-term thing. Success is a tailpipe metric, not an in process metric, and success can be gotten without excellence. You could just be lucky, you could get success. Success also gets you a lot of compensation if you’re a CEO, and success gets you a lot of airtime on CNBC. Okay, I’m being honest with you.

Tyler Mathisen:

No, no, no. Right, it’s the numbers.

Indra Nooyi:

It’s only the numbers. Not the numbers, only the numbers. Excellence will not get you even one minute on CNBC because nobody understands it, because excellence doesn’t happen.

Tyler Mathisen:

You said you can have success without excellence. Can you have excellence without success?

Indra Nooyi:

You build excellence for success. If you build excellence which does not result in success, it’s immaterial. It’s irrelevant. So my point is … I’ll give you the best example. I was doing an investor visit when I was president of the company. I went to Singapore, Hong Kong, and these are how the meetings went. “How is your R&D pipeline? How do you invest in R&D? How do you think about innovation? Tell me about your succession planning. Tell me about how you develop talent. How do you bring people from the outside?” These were all the questions for the on week that I was roaming around all the big investors in the far East. Then I land in Boston. The first question was, “How’s the quarter looking?” You see the difference?

Tyler Mathisen:

Yes.

Indra Nooyi:

One was a success metric, which is fine. I’m focused on the quarter two. The other was talking about how are you building the backbone of the company? How are you building excellence so that you can sustain the success over periods in time? And to put it in Chicago booth school terms, because you guys have either educated us or polluted us. I don’t know which one it is. One of the two. When you look at a DCF, there are three parts to the DCF. There’s short term cash flows, medium term cash flows, and the terminal value. In most businesses, the terminal value is 80 to 100% of the valuation of a company. That’s the truth. But when we look at success, we only look at short term cash flows, when in reality, most of the value is in medium term and the terminal value.

So we don’t think about how do we build the backbone of the company? How do you build talent, capability, processes, passion and people to say we want to have repeatable success, not a flash in the pan success, repeatable success? In order to do that, you have to invest. In order to invest, you have to intelligently trade off level and duration of returns. There’s no point thinking just about level of returns. We’ve got to think about the duration of returns, and that takes a lot of unselfishness on the part of the CEO, it takes a knowledgeable board, and it takes investors who are educated enough to say, “Hey, it’s okay that you deliver a couple of great quarters. Do you have the backbone and the infrastructure to replicate this quarter after quarter?”

Tyler Mathisen:

So let me pull on this same thread a little more. I sense that a lot of people think of success as performance. In other words, did I hit the number? Did I make my mark? That the performance is what matters. But my sense is that you think that excellence is not merely and maybe not mostly performance, but it also infuses that excellence infuses a lot of character. So the question is how much of excellence is what you do and how much of excellence is who you are?

Indra Nooyi:

So I want to correct you on this. Excellence has to lead to performance, no question about it. Without performance, I mean, what company are we running? A nonprofit? Not interested, okay? So excellence-

Tyler Mathisen:

It will be a no profit.

Indra Nooyi:

It’ll be a no profit. Excellence has to result in performance. The question is performance at what level? It’s the easiest thing for a CEO to put pedal to the metal and deliver extraordinary performance for three to five years. Cut the cost, cut investments, and let the next CEO come and pick up the carcasses of what you’ve done. To me, that is not success. That is fleeting success. I’m talking about excellence should lead to enduring success. You’re actually building a corporation that’s going to be around for the ages.

You know, I was always inspired by a poem by Lord Tennyson. It’s called The Brook, and the refrain of that poem, it talks about this brook flowing in England and he says in the refrain, “For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.” Remember that poem? For men may come and men may go. To me, a corporation, CEOs may come, CEOs may go, but this company has to go on forever. That’s the way you should run the company. Not to say, “Hey, I have to make a hundred million dollars. I’ve got five years. How do I structure my compensation that way?” Pedal to the medal and then get the hell out. That’s the wrong way to run a company, but it’s very successful, but it doesn’t build excellence.

Tyler Mathisen:

But it doesn’t build excellence over time, over a period of decades.

Indra Nooyi:

Excellence requires an unselfish CEO who’s willing to work hard to develop people, build the processes, ask the right questions. It actually takes a CEO of character to actually put in excellence in an organization while creating excellence as an individual. To me, unless the CEO is driving for excellence himself or herself, you cannot put excellence in the company. Because one of the things we all found out in PepsiCo was that the distance between a number one and a number two is a constant, so if you want the organization to be lifted, you have to lift yourself up.

Tyler Mathisen:

I want to explore a little bit where you learned about excellence, and in your book, which is, I recommend to everyone, My Life in Full. It is a beautifully written book. It is deeply personal and it tells great business stories and as well as great family stories. And your family, you grew up in a multi-generational household in Chennai. Did I pronounce it correctly?

Indra Nooyi:

Madras for me.

Tyler Mathisen:

It’s Madras.

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

It’s the modern name for Madras. Stable and comfortable, you weren’t rich, but my sense is that excellence in your household was not merely an aspiration but an expectation. Tell me whether I was right or wrong about that. Who set the standards in your household? What were the consequences if you didn’t live up to those standards? And what did you learn from your parents and perhaps particularly from your grandfather, whom you loved, Thata?

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. My paternal grandfather lived with us, and he was a task master, but a wonderful, loving task master.

Tyler Mathisen:

He was a judge, right?

Indra Nooyi:

He was a judge, and his statement to us always was, “If you can’t do it well, don’t do it. Don’t do it at all.” And so we’d look at him, my sister and I. We were very close in age to each other. My brother came eight years later. We’d say, “Whose standard?” He says, “I don’t care. I’ll decide the standard, and then you’ve got to push yourself to a higher standard.” So everything, he judged, and he’d say, “Not good enough.” If you came home, and this is very common with Indian kids, especially these South Indian nerdy kids, if you came home with like a 95 in geography, his first question was, “Why just a 95?” “Grandpa, it’s 95, the highest mark in the class.” “In a class of dunces, you got 95.” It was never enough. Nothing was ever enough. It was, “Do better, do better. You can do better.” But he also said, “I will teach you. I will help you. I will coach you to get better.”

And then if you read a book, he would’ve read it already and marked it up. He’ll say, “Which page are you at?” “Page 250, grandpa.” He’ll say, “In page 200, there are these three words. What’s the meaning?” Holy cow, go back to page 200, some, big complicated words we just skipped. He said, “Tell me the meaning. Use it in a sentence.” And if you got it wrong, he’ll say, “Go back and read three more chapters from the past, and I’m going to ask you questions.” So it was this constant driving us to be better and better and better, because he believed we were capable of it.

Because my parents said, “If you don’t get good grades, we’re going to get you married at age 18. Just don’t think about it. But if you get good grades, maybe you can keep studying.” That was a threat. Oh God, was it a threat, and so my sister and I decided that’s not going to happen to us. We’re going to keep doing well. So my grandfather pushed and pushed and pushed us. My mother had a foot on the brake and a foot on the accelerator so she allowed this to happen, my dad watched the fun, and before we knew it, we’ve now tried to do that with our kids.

Tyler Mathisen:

Well, I was going to ask you, the standards that you applied with your two daughters who are now grown and off on their own careers and succeeding were the standards you applied in your household, and for some of that time, your mom was living in your household, and much of that time.

Indra Nooyi:

Yep.

Tyler Mathisen:

Were the standards you applied as hard as those that you grew up in, as demanding as those that you grew up with or a little less? These are different eras, different societies, different cultures.

Indra Nooyi:

Well, it didn’t work-

Tyler Mathisen:

Were you as tough as your mom?

Indra Nooyi:

I tried. As my grandfather, I tried gently. I got hauled in by the school psychologist who said, “That’s not the way to parent.”

Tyler Mathisen:

Yeah.

Indra Nooyi:

“What do you mean is not the way to parent?” “When they come home with a B, you should say, ‘Good job. You got a B.'” If I had gotten the equivalent of a bee in school, I would wonder whether I should go home or jump off a bridge. I mean, not literally, but you understand what I’m saying. But here, I have to say, “Good job,” and then say, “How can we do better?” It’s a different style. I must say, it’s a more gentle style, which I actually like, but I literally got hauled up by the psychologist a few times to say, “I think we have to have a little session with you as to how you talk about these issues and how you’re pushing your kids, because it’s not fair.”

And I’ll tell you something, it is contextual. I grew up in a society where you couldn’t complain to any other kid or a psychologist because everybody was being brought up that way, so if you went to somebody and said, “My grandfather or my parents are pushing me,” they’ll say, “So is mine,” so you can’t complain. But today, when my kids were growing up, they had a lot of people to complain to and I was the odd one out. So I think it’s contextual, so I have to be sensitive and conscious of it. I was not with my first one. With my second one, oh man, I was sweetness.

Tyler Mathisen:

Yeah. Is that right? Really? Wow.

Indra Nooyi:

Brilliant [inaudible 00:18:11]-

Tyler Mathisen:

So I got to ask your advice here. My wife and I are going later tonight, our son is at Indiana University. We’re going down to visit and they’re having a parents weekend, and I don’t know whether to say, “That 75 you got, that’s really nice and good,” or, “Why didn’t you get an 80?”

Indra Nooyi:

No, don’t talk about grades.

Tyler Mathisen:

Don’t talk about grades.

Indra Nooyi:

Just talk about him, talk about how wonderful he is, be supportive. Grades are irrelevant. That’s what the psychologist told me.

Tyler Mathisen:

Let’s fast-forward a little and talk about how you … Not that I want to leave that subject. Let’s fast-forward a little and talk about how you came to America, what brought you here, what you had to go through to get here. In your book, you describe the process of getting your student visa, and that episode showed me among other things that you are one persistent person.

Indra Nooyi:

When you have no choice, you have to be persistent. So I graduated from Madras Christian College with an undergraduate degree in chemistry majored, physics and math minors. I was 18 when I graduated from college, a little too early, and right from college, I got admission to the Institute of Management in Calcutta after writing a very competitive exam. And the IM only had 10 dorm rooms for women, so they had 200 guys and 10 women, five in each class. So I managed to get in. When I graduated from Core Business School in India, I was 20 years old, and way too young in retrospect, but that’s how it was. And I worked for two years in India. Then all my friends said, “Look, you’re going to stagnate here. Your brain works at a different clockspeed.”

Tyler Mathisen:

You’re working for a fabric company.

Indra Nooyi:

I

Was working for a british-

Tyler Mathisen:

And Johnson & Johnson was in there.

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. I was launching Stayfree Maxi, but I was doing great work, don’t get me wrong, but people around me said, “You’ve got to go out and go to a place where there’s creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship,” and a lot of my friends had come to the US at that time. This was in the 70s we’re talking about. And so I said, “Look, I cannot repeat the MBA.” So when I went to the US library, US Consulate Library, there was a Newsweek article which said Yale had just opened a school of public and private management, which integrated public sector, private sector, and the nonprofit sector, and it sounded like a wonderful writeup.

And this was something that touched me because I cared deeply about society and what happens to society, and so I applied thinking I won’t get in, and even if I got in, I didn’t have the money to go to Yale so I’ll just do it for the heck of it. I wrote a very pathetic letter about how I don’t have money for application fees, because those days, you had to pay like 50 or $60. That’s a lot of money those days, so I wrote a beautiful tear-jerker of a letter saying I can’t pay. They waived the application fee, and then in retrospect, if I’d applied to Booth, I wouldn’t have gotten it. I just wanted to know.

So Yale was just in its third year. It’s a brand new school, and I got a letter saying I’d gotten in. So I took it to my parents and they said, “Yeah, put it away because there’s no money to send you there.” Okay, fine. Two weeks later, a letter comes saying, “We are going to give you a loan for half the amount which you have to repay, and the other half is a scholarship but you have to work for it. You have to work and earn the money.”

Tyler Mathisen:

Pay off the-

Indra Nooyi:

Pay it off.

Tyler Mathisen:

The other part of the tuition.

Indra Nooyi:

It’s not the loan. Yeah. It’s a work for scholarship. So I took it to my parents and they surprised me and they allowed me to go. I didn’t think they would allow me to go because a single woman going off without getting married was just unheard of. So I came to the United States, came to Yale. It was transformative. I credit my entire success to the Yale School of Management. But the year that I-

Tyler Mathisen:

Is that right?

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. Thank you.

Tyler Mathisen:

Is that right?

Indra Nooyi:

Totally. But to get a visa at that time, only 50 visas were given every day in the Chennai consulate, Madras Consulate. James Todd, the consular officer, I still remember him. I’ll tell you why. But you had to stand in line starting at 8:00 PM the previous night, and you stood in line outside the embassy, the consular office all night, and in the morning, they gave you a ticket to go in and he interviewed you, and he accepted 20% of us and rejected the rest of us.

And it was a painful process because everybody in line, you knew who they were. And what was touching is that I was working for a British textile company in India. The CEO of the company and the head of marketing at the company brought me flasks of coffee every two hours when I was standing in the line. They came personally and delivered the coffee. I thought it was very touching.

Tyler Mathisen:

Yes.

Indra Nooyi:

That I wasn’t even working for them at that time, but they still did it. But those are all feel good stories. But I got my visa and I came to the US at a point when there were no international students at the School of Organization Management. Nobody knew how to support international students, so we were all outcasts, the small group of us. We dressed badly, looked … Oh God, it was terrible, but somehow, we did well. We did well in school because we had no social life.

Tyler Mathisen:

I’ve heard that about Chicago, by the way.

Indra Nooyi:

No, we had zero. We had no money, we had no social life, nobody invited us to anything because we looked so bad, so what do we do? We worked to get money, we played bridge because that’s a good nerdy game, and then we studied. That’s all we did, three things. And guess what? One thing led to another, went to Booz Allen for my summer, BCG for the final placement, and the rest is history. But what Yale did for me, the oomph it gave me and the legitimacy it gave me, and wherever I went, it opened doors. People say, “You went to Yale SOM. Let’s talk about it. I’m a Yale undergraduate. I’d like to talk about Yale SOM and your experience.” And I was the third group to graduate from Yale School of Management. So we just had our 45th Union-

Tyler Mathisen:

So you wrote of your coming to Yale that at the time, “The US was welcoming to students like me.” Is it now? Is it harder today to write a story like yours?

Indra Nooyi:

Well, I think it’s still welcoming. Okay, relative to every other country in the world, more international students come to the US. I’m looking at all of you. So we should not be too hard on ourselves. This is still the greatest country in the world and it’s still most welcoming of international students. On the margin, things have changed, yes, but it’s still the most welcoming country.

Tyler Mathisen:

You were no overnight success. You spent a lot of years learning at ABB, at Motorola.

Indra Nooyi:

At BCG.

Tyler Mathisen:

At BCG as well. And then in, what was it, 1994, you went to Pepsi. Why did you go to Pepsi? You were being courted by a very, very persuasive guy I used to work for, Jack Welch, to go to GE. Why did you choose Pepsi and not GE?

Indra Nooyi:

So I will tell you my career, BCG, six and a half years in Chicago. I had a great time at BCG, and sometimes things just happen. I was in a dreadful car crash so I had to leave consulting, otherwise I’d have remained in consulting because I loved it. I was in the hospital and I’d just come out when Motorola approached me to join them, and a German chap at Motorola interviewed me. I’m still on crutches and can’t walk, and he interviews me and says, “Come to work for me at Motorola in the automotive electronics division.” And I’m like, “I don’t know cars, I don’t know electronics. What am I going to do in Motorola?” And he says, “Don’t worry about all that. Just come to work for me and we’ll take care of the rest.”

So I say, “Boy, this guy sounds like a yellow German. I’m not sure I want to work for him.” So I say to him, “You know what? I’d like to have dinner with you and your wife because I want my husband to get a sense for who you are.” So we had dinner, the four of us, and my husband said something profound. He said, “If you ever want to work for somebody who doesn’t care if you’re male, female, Black, blue, white, with red hair, whatever, just cares about the quality of your work, go to work for Gerhard.” So I went to work for Gerhard, and here and now, I want to leave a lesson for all of you, very important. In the early part of your career, work for an individual.

Tyler Mathisen:

Work for an individual.

Indra Nooyi:

Work for an individual. In the later part of your career, work for the institution. Because in the early part of your career, the way the individual mentors you, supports you, pushes you adds so many years to the trajectory of your career. Gerhard did that for me. He was an impossible boss. Talk about striving for excellence. If the product was not excellent, his ears would turn red, so I would just grab it and say, “I’ll be back to you with a revised draft.”

Tyler Mathisen:

You could watch his ears and you knew.

Indra Nooyi:

[inaudible 00:27:22] And I could just see him saying, “I don’t know how to tell her this doesn’t meet my expectations.” So I’d just say, “Gerhard, I’ll redo it. I’ll take it away and redo it. ” People would come to me and say, “Can you check this work before we go to Gerhard? Because if I tell him that you approved it, then he’s going to be okay with it.” So this is how I built my credibility with Gerhard, worked with him for eight years, and then he went to Germany and I said, “I’m not coming to Germany.” And PepsiCo called me and said, “Could you come and work at PepsiCo?” And GE called me, Jack Welch called me, and Wayne Calloway of PepsiCo was on the board of GE. So now I had these two offers and I told both of them, “I’d give you an answer on April 15th.”

Wayne, who doesn’t speak at all in my interview. When I interview with him, he spoke for a minute, I spoke for 59, not because I wanted to. Because Wayne just says, “Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.” That’s all he says. He’s very effective. He makes you talk. So he never talks. And then on April 10th or something, I get a call at ABB from Wayne. My secretary goes, “Somebody called Wayne Callaway is on the line.” So I pick it up and it was Wayne Calloway, a good Texan. He says, “I just came back from the GE board meeting and Jack Welch announced that you are likely to join GE.” He said, “GE is a fine company and Jack Welch is a fine leader. I know why you might want to join GE, but I want to explain to you why my need for you is greater than that of Jack Welch.” And he proceeded to tell me why PepsiCo needed me more than Jack Welch needed me, and what I could do at GE.

I listened to him for about 10 minutes because that’s the longest I’ve heard Wayne speak. Really, he doesn’t speak much. And I listened to him saying, “The humility of this man. He could have sent one of his minions to call me.” The humility of the man to call me, speak for 10 minutes straight, explain why I should come to PepsiCo, I decided when I’m leaving this individual, Gerhard, I’m going to work for this institution called PepsiCo. So that afternoon, I walked up to PepsiCo and I said, “I accept.” That’s how I came to PepsiCo.

Tyler Mathisen:

That’s how you came to PepsiCo. And when you came to PepsiCo, it wasn’t as though you instantly became CEO. You were there 12 years in a variety of strategic roles, ultimately COO, CFO as well, masterminding the spinoff of the restaurant business that PepsiCo owned, correct?

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. Did a lot of deals, a lot of deals, yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

Did a lot of deals. Did a lot of deals.

Indra Nooyi:

Billion dollars.

Tyler Mathisen:

Billion dollar deal. Gatorade, right?

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. Just, they went on and on and on. The thing with PepsiCo is, again, I did a lot of deals, a lot of strategy, got deep into the operations of every business. Restaurants, when we own restaurants-

Tyler Mathisen:

There’s that thread again of details.

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah. When we owned restaurants, we used to go eat our way in restaurant row, and I still remember Roger calling me. Roger Enrico was the CEO after Wayne. He was an impossible boss. I don’t know why I was stuck with all these impossible bosses, and he was gruff, he wouldn’t talk much, he was moody. And he and I were flying, I don’t know where, for a week and he didn’t talk a word to me. At the end of the week, I decided I have to break the ice. So I leaned over to Roger and I said, “Roger, I want you to read this horoscope, the forecast for Scorpio. I’m a Scorpio. It says you will be traveling with somebody very difficult who will make your life impossible.” So I circled it. I gave it to him. Remember, it’s a private plane. The two of us are sitting there. I give it to him. He reads it, he looks at me and says, “I’m a Scorpio too.” I go, “Okay, good. Let’s go.”

Tyler Mathisen:

Two birds of a feather traveling together.

Indra Nooyi:

And with him, we crawled through restaurants, we figured out front of the house, back of the house, and decided that’s not a business we want to be in. So it was not financial decision. We wanted to unfetter the restaurant business from PepsiCo. The reason I say this to you is at every point in time, my mentors in PepsiCo made me learn the right of the decimal. When I was doing Quaker Oats integration, Steve Reinemund says, “I want you to go to Frito-Lay and work on the distribution system restructuring.” I said, “Steve, I have two kids, I’m working this job six days a week. How can I go to Dallas and work another five days a week? There’s only one week.” He looked at me and said, “This is your one opportunity to learn right at the decimal,” so I went.

I went to Dallas for four days. I worked on corporate work for nights, because when you’re in Dallas, nothing else to do, so that’s what I did. Then, I’m talking then. Now it’s a different city. So I did that and guess what? I knew the route system down to every penny. I knew exactly the levers of the business.

Tyler Mathisen:

So you, to put it mildly, were not a conventional choice to run PepsiCo, if I’m not mistaken.

Indra Nooyi:

Definitely not.

Tyler Mathisen:

There had never been anyone other than a white male as CEO.

Indra Nooyi:

White male who’d done armed services and was Christian, as somebody reminded somebody.

Tyler Mathisen:

You are a female, person of color, non-native born American. How much harder did those factors make your ascent to the top job? And then once you were in it, what did you have to contend with or do differently that a male CEO would not have encountered?

Indra Nooyi:

Well, I was an unusual choice. It was a surprising choice. I did not think that my predecessor was retiring and I didn’t think I would be the choice at all, because I was against the grain so I didn’t think I’d be the choice. In retrospect, I was the right choice, but that’s many years later. I think the board basically said, “What does this company need? Not how do we just replicate the kind of people we have? What does the company need for the next few years? And who’s the right person to lead us through that?” First, Second is I don’t think there was another person in PepsiCo at that time, including the CEO, who knew every part of PepsiCo like I did. I knew every joint venture partner, every bottling partner. I knew everybody because I had crisscrossed the world getting to know them, and so I think in retrospect, it seemed like a very logical choice.

So when I took over, the biggest problem was I got too much attention. I hated it. People will say, “We’re going to write a story …”

Tyler Mathisen:

Too much attention because you were a curiosity or because-

Indra Nooyi:

Everything. The press painted me as this bizarre person who wears saris for-

Tyler Mathisen:

Who wore saris.

Indra Nooyi:

I’ve never worn a sari to work. Okay?

Tyler Mathisen:

But they said that.

Indra Nooyi:

They said that, and they said that I walked barefoot in the office and sing songs. That’s what they said. In reality, after 5:00 PM, because I’d work late till nine in the night, after 5:00 PM, try to walk with heels the whole day, my feet are swollen up. So everybody’s gone, so I’d kick off my shoes and I walk barefoot on a carpeted floor. What’s the big deal? Second, in the night when I’m really stressed out, I’d hum a tune. “Singing CEO in a sari walking barefeet,” so that’s the picture they had of me and they said, “We’re going to write a story about you, whether you like it or not. Better if you cooperate.”

So what happens is people think you’re out to get publicity. Exactly the opposite. I would have liked to have crawled under a rock and kept working. So there were expectations from women, from people from India, people of color, everybody’s saying, “I want to see if she’s going to succeed or not.” Because if I failed, you could say, “See? I told you women shouldn’t be CEOs, or people of color shouldn’t be.”

Tyler Mathisen:

That leads me to the next question. How much harder, or is it, how much harder is it for a female to be perceived as excellent? Is it?

Indra Nooyi:

Thet truth.

Tyler Mathisen:

You just said something really revealing, that one of the reasons you, I guess, got the CEO job, and I believe you got it from a person who worked at IBM who gave the announcement, he told you, I told you, was the chairman of the board, you said a moment ago that it was because you knew every detail of everything better than anybody else. So I’m asking, how much harder is it to be excellent? Do you have to work twice as hard to be perceived as half as good because you’re not a white male Christian from Texas?

Indra Nooyi:

I don’t know about the white male Christian part. All that I’m going to tell you is that when a woman is being considered for anything, the immediate assumption is she cannot be very good. That’s the immediate perception. A woman, really? God, how could she do this job? Then you have to explain or have a whole track record to show that you are pretty damn good. So two pieces of advice to all of you. In the past in my time, and I want to remind you, I became CEO when the iPhone wasn’t invented as yet, so it’s a long time ago, right? In my time, women had to be at least twice as good as the men to get any job. Dead serious, that’s how it was.

Today, I think things are getting better. People are beginning to accept that women too are excellent at what they do. In fact, they’re excellent in the core skills and then they have empathy too, which is really a twofer, if you want to call it that. So the environment is changing, but if we all think it’s a level playing field, think again. It’s not yet there. We could get there, but we are not there as yet.

Tyler Mathisen:

Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit-

Indra Nooyi:

Do any of you have a different perspective? No, okay.

Tyler Mathisen:

No.

Indra Nooyi:

No. It’s not yet there. It’ll get there. It’s not yet there.

Tyler Mathisen:

Excellence comes with a cost. There are sacrifices that you have to make along the way, and you made them many a time. You were a mother, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a granddaughter, a wife. With all the demands, the emotional luggage that comes with that, somehow you did it all, but looking back, was it all worth it? And I remember in your book a letter that your daughter wrote you and it tugged at my heart. “I will love you again if you please, please, please, please, please, please, please, seven times please, come home.”

Indra Nooyi:

She did, and there are many more letters. I’m cleaning up home and I’m decrapifying my home as we call it. I’m finding so many more of those letters. Here’s the point, Tyler. I was driven to a level of performance that my kids should be happy I was working, because had I not worked, I’d have driven them bat shit crazy. I’m not joking, because I’m wired that way. Why is it after retiring, as Seth mentioned, I’m still running a full-time schedule? Why?

Now that my daughter has a daughter herself who’s six or seven weeks old, a little baby, I was doing night duty and I’m up with the baby all night. And she says, “Mom, that’s really amazing that you’re doing this all night.” I said, “Don’t forget, when you were born and your younger sister were born, I did night duty and then I went to work in the morning in consulting or ABB or Motorola. I went to work in the morning, and you kids wanted mom all night. You slept on me or stepped next to me, so I was up.” “How did you do it?” Don’t ask me how I did it because I don’t know how I did it. I think God gives you courage, gives you the ability to carry it through, and I had a very supportive husband anyway.

Tyler Mathisen:

You had a husband who was there.

Indra Nooyi:

Oh, he has his own full time career.

Tyler Mathisen:

Carried the ball.

Indra Nooyi:

That’s going too far.

Tyler Mathisen:

Okay.

Indra Nooyi:

He was. He didn’t carry the ball, he shared the ball.

Tyler Mathisen:

He shared the ball.

Indra Nooyi:

Because he had his own job. He had a full-time job. He never did night duty because he’s not a night duty kind of guy.

Tyler Mathisen:

He’s not a what?

Indra Nooyi:

He’s not a night duty kind of guy. He needs his eight to 10 hours of sleep.

Tyler Mathisen:

Yeah. And you do not.

Indra Nooyi:

I don’t.

Tyler Mathisen:

You do not. You’re a four or five hours and you can get up and go.

Indra Nooyi:

Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

Yeah.

Indra Nooyi:

A genetic malfunction. Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

So I think apart from the metrics and the numbers at Pepsi, one of the things I learned about PepsiCo is … How many billion dollar brands do you think PepsiCo has in its portfolio? Billion dollars. 22, right?

Indra Nooyi:

It’s upwards. It should be 25 now. Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

25 billion dollar companies.

Indra Nooyi:

Over a billion dollars, yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

And you grew shareholder value, enterprise value by 50 some billion dollars. I mean, it was amazing.

Indra Nooyi:

We did okay.

Tyler Mathisen:

You did pretty damn well. But your legacy at Pepsi, apart from those from the scorecard, seems to be the cultural change that you brought about there. Apart from the path you trailblaze as a female executive, your performance with purpose initiative, which was really a rethinking and remaking of a sugar beverage and salty snacks company from the inside out, it fused a mission, a quest for a higher form of excellence to the core goal of a company, which is, I don’t have to tell people at the University of Chicago, is to make money. It’s to make money for shareholders most especially. What were the elements of performance with purpose? How did you make the business case for it to your board, to your executives, and especially to people who probably thought that this was anything but enduringly excellent?

Indra Nooyi:

Well, they thought it was enduringly excellent, but it’s not leading to short-term success at the levels that they would have liked. So it’s definition issues-

Tyler Mathisen:

You were going to hurt their short-term performance, their bonus-

Indra Nooyi:

Short term performance at the level that they liked, okay? Because we were delivering pretty good numbers, but not at the level that they liked. I think the key thing is, goes back to what we talked about earlier, if you’re running the company for the duration of the company, for men may come and men may go, but I go on forever. If you’re running the company for the duration of the company, you have to think about what are the big trends that are going to impact the company going forward? That’s an exercise we did back in 2006 when I became CEO, multiple teams. There were 10 megatrends that are going to impact the company massively. One of them was a shift to health and wellness, and our portfolio was not purpose built for that, so we had to pivot the portfolio. And that’s when we did the Fun for You, Better for You, Good for You.

Better for you was reducing salt, fat, sugar in the core products, and good for you was dialing up the nutritional credentials. But making the pivot is not just announcing it. You’ve got to put the capabilities, you’ve got to hire new people. We had to do all that and that took time and money, because you bring people in and tomorrow, you’re not going to get new products. You have to work the whole system. You have to rebuild the innovation pipeline, in the middle of a financial crisis. So we had to do all that, and then performance picked up big time and when I left, we were on a high.

Now here’s the problem. The first six years was miserable because the board was solidly behind me, but investors, correctly so, said, “Where is the short-term performance? Your competitor is performing better than you.” I said, “My competitor is a one trick pony. He’s a beverage company.”

Tyler Mathisen:

And you have activists coming in.

Indra Nooyi:

Activist, but all my friends now.

Tyler Mathisen:

Yeah. They’re all your friends now.

Indra Nooyi:

All my friends now, but here’s the point. You’ve heard the statement that no two species can successfully coexist making a living the exact same way. That’s a Darwinian statement. If I played the same game as red beverage, I couldn’t have been successful. So we had to find a different game to play, and the different game was move away from just a focus on sodas to liquid refreshment beverages. Diversify the portfolio. Think of share of stomach for beverages, don’t just think of share of sodas. So it required reframing, making the acquisitions, new products, everything, new manufacturing technologies. That was the first few years, and boy, if the investors could have fired me, they would have. Activists came into this talk. I went through hell, a lot of criticism. The board stood by me.

The next three years, everything started to perk up. All of a sudden, investors are going, “Boy, she was prescient, because all the things she said are now coming to pass. What is she saying? Let’s make sure we write it all down.” And then the final three years of my time in PepsiCo was like, “What awards can we give her?” There isn’t a single award out there that I haven’t gotten. As I said in some meeting, I am in the National Portrait Gallery for performance with purpose, and I didn’t even know there was a portrait gallery. I thought it was a joke until they told me, “This is the portrait.” So I’m saying this to you not because-

Tyler Mathisen:

It may not be there for a lot longer.

Indra Nooyi:

The portrait gallery, you say?

Tyler Mathisen:

The portrait gallery.

Indra Nooyi:

Oh, it’s going to be there. But the reason I say this to you is that it just took a while because nobody else was talking about performance with purpose, and mine was not a corporate social responsibility, because corporate social responsibility is about giving away the money you make. I wanted to make money a different way. That was the difference. Performance with purpose was about making money a different way, not giving the money you made away, so very fundamentally different.

Tyler Mathisen:

There were elements, there was nourish, replenish, which was about better packaging.

Indra Nooyi:

Environmental sensitivity.

Tyler Mathisen:

Environmental, using less water to create your goods, and then cherish, which was about treating people correctly. Now that you are, what is it, eight years removed from the top job there, how would you say performance with purpose has stood the test of time? And what would you have done differently?

Indra Nooyi:

It goes back to this question of excellence. In fact, we should revisit your first question from a more theoretical perspective. As a CEO, I could build excellence. Excellence does not reside in bricks and mortar. Excellence resides in people, in the mission of the company, the passion of the people. It’s in the people. So when I stepped out of PepsiCo, I was confident that between that board and the new leadership, performance with purpose will continue. COVID happened and performance with purpose went out the window because consumers went back to eating and drinking whatever they could lay their hands on, because they were miserable. And coming out of COVID, all of a sudden, people went off to do things that were not consistent with performance with purpose overall. Parts of it sustained itself and there was a huge churnover in PepsiCo, and so a lot of that excellence walked out the door. New people came in, don’t get me wrong.

Tyler Mathisen:

Why did they leave?

Indra Nooyi:

I don’t know. I’m not going to comment about PepsiCo. They probably got better jobs because they’re all coveted everywhere else, but as a consequence, I think the new PepsiCo, and your goddaughter can talk much better about it, the new PepsiCo is different. I mean, look, every company goes through changes, so I’m not critiquing it as much as saying when you build excellence, it resides in people and it resides in boards. And if boards decide that we’re going to focus on short-term success or we’re not going to focus on excellence, because we don’t know how to demand excellence. I don’t even know if we teach boards how to demand excellence. We know how to ask them to demand success. So CEOs themselves should be demanding excellence within their companies and telling their boards about it. I don’t think my board ever asked me about how I was building excellence in the company.

So I think maybe that’s what’s missing, or maybe it’s happening. I just don’t know. Retired CEO should be seen and never heard from, and I have followed that to a T, and I do not opine on that because you have a successor. My farewell speech was whatever he does is right, so I’m living by that.

Tyler Mathisen:

Well, that is dignity and grace in the role. Indra invited questions from the audience just there, and we have mic runners and we’re ready to start. I saw your hand first. Stand up, if you don’t mind, introduce yourself. We got a lot. I figured there’d be a lot. This young person here.

Trupti Bhat:

Hi, I’m Trupti. My last name is Bhat. I’m from the financial industry, consider myself a fraud fighter for identity theft and things of that sort. I really want to know if you have the swing from your grandfather.

Indra Nooyi:

The swing in our living room?

Trupti Bhat:

Yes.

Indra Nooyi:

Very much there, of course.

Trupti Bhat:

It’s there? Okay, great. Thanks. And the second question is how-

Indra Nooyi:

It’s not for sale.

Trupti Bhat:

How did you build excellence? What are some basic three things that come to your mind that when you were at PepsiCo, you were building excellence?

Indra Nooyi:

Well, remember, it doesn’t stop with PepsiCo. It’s continuing now. What Tyler said, curiosity, insatiable curiosity. I mean, look, if you don’t keep digging and keep asking the question why, why, why all the time to dig deep and understand things at the micro level, you can be kind of, sort of an expert, but not really. People will know quickly that you’re a bit of a fraud expert. So sitting on the Amazon board is a humbling experience because everybody in Amazon is so damn brilliant. You have to be insatiably curious and be a lifelong learner to remain excellent.

The second thing is walking around and really understanding what’s going on. I sit on the board of Phillips, the med tech company, but to understand med tech is not enough to understand the equipment. You’ve got to understand how it’s used in hospitals. So I sit on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering. I was doing surgical rounds to understand how Phillips equipment is used in hospital monitoring or in imaging or in radiology or robotics, whatever. So it’s being willing to learn the business bottom up, and then step back from it and say, “What does it mean?” So I think excellence doesn’t stop when you leave your job. It’s a lifelong process. That’s what I’m doing.

Trupti Bhat:

Thank you-

Indra Nooyi:

That’s what I’m doing. Yeah, thanks a lot.

Trupti Bhat:

Thank you. Thank you.

Tyler Mathisen:

I think if you stop learning, you die.

Indra Nooyi:

Atrophy, You atrophy. Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen:

You atrophy if you stop learning. This gentleman here in the blue suit with the orange sweater, then I’m going to go to you next, and we’ll make questions quick and we’ll try and get in as many as we can.

Kwaja Sheikh:

Thank you, Indra. This is Kwaja Sheikh. I came from Atlanta specifically to see you, and I have two part question. The first part is related to you excel at balancing the short term with the long term, and currently, we are facing in the auto industry where the auto industry is pivoting towards non EV era. What advice would you offer for a auto industry CEO to stay consistent to achieve the long-term performance in the context of climate goals? And then the second part of question is around ESG. I strongly believe that if you had to lead with ESG, you have to first lead with the G, which is governance, which means as you’re talking about, we need to have more diversity in the boardroom where half of the population are women, but we don’t have many women in the boardroom. So what advice would you have in the current climate that we are having to stay consistent with the G pillar?

Indra Nooyi:

Let me start with the second one. I think the problem with ESG is that it became with too many metrics. I remember Nordisk Bank did the metrics, very, very excellent set of metrics, don’t get me wrong, but there were like three pages or four pages of ESG metrics. When you start to look at so many metrics, you develop an ESG department in companies and they’re all filling out forms, and the reason they’re filling out forms is to keep you out of trouble. The rest of the company doesn’t care about what the ESG metrics say. So it became a program, a wasteful program as opposed to how does it drive the business? How does it lower costs? How does it give you a license to operate in countries and cities so that people don’t say, “You’re such an environmental blight. I don’t want you in my city because you add cost to the city”?

So I think the problem with the ESG is it had to be reframed to talk about how it can help drive the P&L or the balance sheet of the company, and that’s what we did in PepsiCo. We never talked about it as ESG. We talked about it as environmental sustainability to lower costs, how to get a license to operate in society. That’s why we did it. And I’ll say this for everything, whether it’s for diversity, whatever. Do it because it makes business sense. Don’t do it as a program that’s done in some department of the company and people are constantly holding you accountable for why did you hire this person versus that person? Look at everybody with blinders on and say, “It doesn’t matter what gender or ethnicity you are. I want to hire for the best capability.” I think you’ll end up with a diverse workforce.

Now on the electric vehicles, if the only reason you’re doing EVs is because you’re getting subsidies from the government, that’s the wrong reason to do Evs, and I think that’s where everything went wrong. It didn’t start with … It’s a great business-

Tyler Mathisen:

Who went wrong, where?

Indra Nooyi:

The auto company.

Tyler Mathisen:

The auto company went wrong.

Indra Nooyi:

Because you did it because you got subsidies. Without subsidies, you’re shutting down the EV programs. Big mistake. I think you have to stop and say, “Why are we doing EVs again?” If it’s right, then let’s stand by it. It doesn’t matter what the subsidies are, we have to stand by it. But again, I don’t run an auto company, so you guys have-

Tyler Mathisen:

I’ll come to you next, but I’m going to go to this young person right there. Just introduce yourself and quick question.

Juliana Garcia:

Hi, my name is Juliana Garcia. I’m 15 years old. How did you discover your true purpose, and did it change as you got older or is it continuing to change?

Indra Nooyi:

Well, it’s not discovering my true purpose. It’s just that when you go around society, you see what the needs of society are. For example, I still remember driving around. When you become a CEO of PepsiCo, you see all the plastic bottles or the cans on the side. You feel uncomfortable saying, “That’s my product littering the sides.” Now, there are those that will turn up blind eye and say, “Hey, somebody will pick up the garbage.” No, my point is that’s raw material that can be reused, but I’m polluting and not beautifying the town. Both have good reasons to do something about it. So you’ve got to have a sense of civic consciousness. If you don’t have that and if it’s not developed in you from the time you’re a kid, you’re never going to get purpose later on in life. So purpose is not something somebody teaches you in business school and you get it overnight. It comes from inside.

Tyler Mathisen:

Let’s go to this gentleman way up there with his hand high in the air. There you go.

Speaker 6:

My question is about the elephant in the room, AI. Two part question. How are you looking at it from a governance point of view as you sit on the board of Amazon, et cetera? Also, how do you see it from your personal and family? How to use AI, how much to use AI?

Indra Nooyi:

Okay. So Amazon thing, I’ll deal with, a tip toe around that. I’ll speak to the second one. Somebody once mentioned to me that most of the data centers and all the power contracts that are being signed up for right now, billions of dollars are being spent on email writing by people. People are using ChatGPT largely to write thank you notes and emails to friends, and for that, we are building data centers and billions of dollars. So believe me, I try experiment with ChatGPT and all these models, but I had to give a talk two days ago. Somebody sent me the themes that they were going to cover, so I asked my staff to go into ChatGPT and pull out the answers. They did, extensive answers. And I read them and I go … And the answers were based on what I’d said in the past, so they pulled it all out. I read it and said, “Wow, it sounds profound. Was I really that intelligent?” Then I’m reading it carefully. It lacked soul, it lacked humanity, it lacked me. Sounded wonderful, but it lacked me.

So I think contrary to what everybody’s saying, I think we still have ways to go before it can replace humans. It’s still nice emails, thank you notes are fine. I don’t think it’s still there to replace humans. So I’ll stop with that. The Amazon thing is something I don’t want to talk about.

Tyler Mathisen:

The gentleman that right there and then I’ll come back over here.

Pavik Pandya:

Hi, Indra. My name is Pavik Pandya. I’m a health economist. Someone that I work for was at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Mehmood Khan.

Indra Nooyi:

Of course.

Pavik Pandya:

He’s an endocrinologist and one of the bold move you did was hiring endocrinologists. For a company like Pepsi, when I heard the news, wow, I was blown away. But can you think, this highlights some of the thinking you had behind, and can you walk us through, what were your thoughts in terms of hiring someone like an endocrinologist who is a chief medical officer in the pharma sector bringing in-

Indra Nooyi:

With the multi-billion dollar R&D budget.

Pavik Pandya:

Exactly. What was your thinking behind hiring a physician endocrinologist, and how did he help you transform the health and wellness perspective.

Indra Nooyi:

Probably the best hire I made in PepsiCo was Mehmood Khan, just unbelievable human being and a brilliant scientific brain, but we were looking for a head of R&D. PepsiCo only had development people, we had no research people. We didn’t have in depth knowledge on the science of taste, on how the taste buds and the brain neurons impact gut. We didn’t have enough knowledge about all that. And I thought that as we were transforming the portfolio, we need science behind what is better for you? You don’t start with something which has 100 grams of sugar and reduce 10% and say this is better for you. Mehmood said there’s guardrails. Unless it has not more than so much sugar, it’s not better for you.

So I wanted somebody who put scientific discipline, almost like pharmaceuticals, into PepsiCo, and really talked about good for you in what is positive nutrition. So I wanted somebody who did that, and that’s what Mehmood did. And once you hire a leader who’s talented, he brings a lot of talent with him, and I learned so much from Mehmood. I used to do an exercise with Mehmood and the R&D fellows. Every quarter, I’d give them five questions that’s on my mind and say, “These are five out there questions. Can you answer it?” And predictably, at the end of three months, I would go to … We have a seal lab in Hawthorne, New York. We never let anybody go in there because I didn’t want the budget touched. We would go there and spend the whole day with the R&D people talking about these five questions. They would educate me, and I came out of these saying, “What’s possible in PepsiCo? What’s possible with our products?” Best hire. In fact, I just talked to him today. I’m going to see him tomorrow. Amazing human being.

Tyler Mathisen:

Let me go for the last question. There’s a young woman in a pink shirt there, and I’ll give you the last question, then I’ll conclude.

Alejandra:

My name is Alejandra. I come from Mexico, but I am studying at Kellogg, the MBA, and my question is being the first woman in so many rooms and in so many places, was it something that empowered you or was it something that gave you imposter syndrome, and how did you manage that?

Indra Nooyi:

I don’t know what imposter syndrome is, but I have to tell you, the first few years, it was very hard. Even now, I get butterflies in my stomach when I have to appear in all of these sessions, but a long time ago, I concluded that if I know my stuff and I know what I’m talking about, and I’m going to be consistent appearance after appearance, I’m not going to make up answers for the University of Chicago that are different from what I spoke on Tuesday in Austin because my story is my story, it’s always consistent, I ought to be able to face anybody and answer any questions. So it’s that backbone, that integrity that carries me through.

It’s not that I don’t have fear. I don’t know what syndrome it is, butterflies in the stomach syndrome, but I have that, and I always will. I also have an immigrant fear that still persists in me. I’m glad I have it because it propels me to do better every time, but that’s who I am.

Tyler Mathisen:

That is a beautiful place to end, but I’m not going to let it end there because I want to know, because this is the Graham School of Continuous Learning, what are you doing now and what’s next for you as you look over the horizon?

Indra Nooyi:

I’m an old lady, so what’s now? Look, after I left PepsiCo, after I retired from PepsiCo, I’ve done so much, and I taught at West Point, I lecture the Naval Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, so I do that. I’ve served on government commissions. I’ve done Connecticut State Economic Development, reopened after COVID, done all of that. Now with MSK and National Gallery of Art, I’m doing my nonprofit stuff. The for profit stuff goes on with Amazon and Phillips. What’s next? Being a good grandma.

Tyler Mathisen:

Good. Good. Good.

Indra Nooyi:

That’s what I want to do. Everything else, I’ve done. Now, I want to make up all the time I didn’t spend with my daughter, I want to give to my granddaughter. I miss her dreadfully already.

Tyler Mathisen:

Let’s stop right there. Indra Nooyi. Thank you for listening to Enduring Excellence, a podcast from the University of Chicago Graham School. Be sure to subscribe for more conversations about purpose, leadership and lifelong growth. To join us, visit graham.uchicago.edu for upcoming event details. I’m Tyler Mathisen.

Speaker 6:

This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.