Podcast: Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on Her Climb to the Top

“I would go look at myself in a mirror. I would talk to myself. I would rage at myself. I would shed a few tears, then put on some lipstick and come out. And that was my go-to because all people need an outlet. And you have to be very careful who your outlet is because you never want them to use it against you at any point,” Nooyi says.

In this episode of The Insightful Leader, Nooyi speaks with Kellogg Professor Ellen Taaffe about how she achieved and managed success.

Podcast Transcript

Laura PAVIN: You’re listening to The Insightful Leader. I’m Laura Pavin.

Are great leaders born, or are they made?

One of my hobbies is reading the Wikipedia pages of notable people to figure that out. Like, what confluence of things made them who they are? Was it their upbringing in rural Indiana? Their college major? How do you get to be someone like Apple’s Tim Cook. Or PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi?

I actually didn’t have to read Nooyi’s Wikipedia page to hear that story.

Ellen TAAFFE: Hi Indra, it’s Ellen Taaffe. Nice to see you.

Indra NOOYI: Hi Ellen, how are you?

PAVIN: That’s Kellogg professor Ellen Taaffe with the Indra Nooyi, the former Chair and CEO of PepsiCo. Nooyi recently spoke at the Kellogg School’s Global Women’s Summit, but Taaffe and Kellogg Insight caught up with her before that to talk about the pieces of her that make up the whole and to find the inspiration in that.

And there’s a lot to be inspired by. Nooyi was one of the first Fortune 100 CEOs to make sustainability part of a broader business strategy. She pushed PepsiCo into healthier food categories—way  before the entire industry started doing the same. And she did it all as the first female chairman and CEO of PepsiCo. The company grew its net revenue more than 80 percent under her.

But for Taaffe, Nooyi was something else. A mentor. Which is what makes this conversation really special. They talk about Nooyi’s upbringing in India, her journey to the top of the org chart, how to ensure more women have the opportunities she had, and of course, what good mentorship looks like.

Taaffe led the interview with Nooyi. She starts by talking about her time at PepsiCo. You’ll hear Taaffe speakafter this.

TAAFFE: I wanted to start out by telling you how you changed my life.

I had been running Convenience Foods. I wanted to join Brock Leach in the innovation group working on the health and wellness strategy. And I was facing a lot of personal things. I was burnt out from leading the post-acquisition group in Chicago.

I had two small daughters who were under three, and my mom had just passed away, and my husband was running a startup, and I was really at a pivotal point in my career. Do I stay? Do I go? And I found that opportunity, talked to Brock, and said, I would love to do this new job. But I need to do it with more flexibility and on a reduced basis.

And he was open to that but said, I need to get Indra’s approval. And I thought, Indra Nooyi, the heir apparent, you know, she works a million hours, has little sleep. Would she ever approve this? And you did. The next 18 months helped me to reset myself. I went back to full time, and I look back and I think, I don’t know if I would have become a CMO, a board director, an author, a professor here at Kellogg had I not had that opportunity.

And I just think it’s so emblematic of you leading in your way but also respecting and allowing others. And the flexibility that you gave me and the career opportunity made a world of difference in my work, but also in my life too.

NOOYI: To me, what we did at PepsiCo for you is because we said, hey, Ellen’s a talent.

We have to hold on to her. If that means working flexibly for a couple of years, hell, let’s do it. Because she’s going to come back even more energized, and that’s great for the company. And you know, it’s good for her family because she now has time to also focus on that. So, you know, it goes to this, the core of what we need to talk about.

This whole thing is a talent issue. Women is a talent issue. It’s not a gender issue. Family is a talent issue. Family is a next-generation consumer issue. We lose sight of that.

TAAFFE: You really modeled the way. But I’d love to learn a little bit more, go back to you growing up. What do you think shaped you?

NOOYI: I grew up in a world where there was no internet, there was no computer, there was no television when I was growing up because television didn’t exist in India.

So you focused on human-to-human interactions, reading, education, you know, uh, very childlike, extracurricular activities. And the men in our family said, the girls are going to have the same opportunity as the boys. And they enforced it with a discipline that was unbelievable. They said, look, if you don’t want to study, if you don’t want to move ahead, we’re happy to find somebody for you to marry.

Because those days it was all arranged marriages. But they said, if you want to study, if you want to move ahead, we are not going to stop you. In fact, we’re going to encourage you to do that. Even when we didn’t have money, the first dollars would go, the first rupees would go towards our education.

It was a gift my parents gave us. And so, in many ways, I am a product of that phenomenal upbringing.

TAAFFE: You had many mentors, and certainly sometimes that’s being in the right place at the right time, but you were coachable. You created these trusted relationships. Could you talk a little bit more about how mentoring played a role in your career?

NOOYI: I’d say that they picked me. I never went to somebody and said, “Will you be my mentor?” I just worked hard and I put my head down and for me, delivering a great product was better and more important than running for the next job. And I always worried about how to make the life of my boss easier by not upwardly delegating stuff. Now I was very conscious of not upwardly delegating.

Many people do that. They do a half-assed job and hope their boss will fix it. I decided that I’d like time. My boss says, “I don’t even need to review your stuff because you’ve checked it.” And by doing all that, people came out of the woodwork and said, “I want to mentor this person because when she gets to some place of great importance, I want to say I had a role to play in her life.”

And when I did become CEO, I wrote to some of those mentors and I said, “look, um, you know, you had a part to play in my life.” Some of them wrote back saying, “you’re damn sure I did because, uh, I did this A, B, and C for you.” And I say, “yeah, that’s why I wrote to you.” So mentorship is a two-way street. You’ve got to respect your mentor and then they in turn mentor you.

TAAFFE: Where do mentors and mentees go wrong?

NOOYI: You know, sometimes what happens is somebody takes all this job of mentorship very seriously. You give advice to your mentee, and then they go do something quite the opposite. It doesn’t work out or it works out, but they never go back to the mentor and say, “why didn’t I take your advice?”

And mentors feel like, what am I, a chopped liver? This person always comes to me for advice. I give them advice. They sometimes take it, sometimes they don’t take it, but they never tell me why they took it or didn’t take it and how I could help them the next time. And when you have mentors who picked you, show your gratitude to them. And it means dropping an email to them once in four or five months saying this is what I’m up to. And nothing confidential.

This is what I’m up to. Just do it. It’ll make them feel so good. And they will say wonderful things about you to the rest of the world. Mentorship requires gratitude.

TAAFFE: As you moved across industries and were navigating, building your career, I’m sure you also faced challenging times. I’m curious if you could talk about that. Did you ever hit a breaking point or want to throw in the towel? Can you talk about the challenges—how you got through it and what you learned from it?

NOOYI: There were many times where I wouldn’t throw in the towel for several reasons. One, either because I did something that didn’t meet the mark and I was harder on myself. And I’d say to myself, I don’t think I can do this anymore. Or I faced biases in the workplace, which made me feel very, very bad. Or the pressures of home and family and work just come crashing on you going, do I want to continue?

But I tell you, one of the things that kept me going was that we had nothing besides the jobs and our families. And we had to keep going because we needed those paychecks. And the thing that people don’t understand is as you climb up the corporate ladder, the higher up you go, it’s up or out. So you can’t just stay in place and sort of retire on the job.

You better figure out a way to keep working to keep the job, or you have to leave.

But at every point in time, first of all, I said, “Hey, I’m not going to let anybody down. I’m not going to let women down. I’m not going to let people of color down. I’m not going to let immigrants down. I’ve got to keep powering through.” Then when I became CEO, president, and then CEO of PepsiCo, I said, “I’m not going to let PepsiCo down.”

And so I dug in and said, this company is very important to me, put the company before me. And I just kept powering through to say, I’ve got to handle it. Now here comes the challenge. What do you do when you have these challenges? Who do you talk to?

It’s very hard to find people to talk. You know, I have a wonderful husband, and very often I come and talk to him. But at times your husband goes, “do I have to listen to this negative stuff all the time?” And he’s right, because you’re at home for such a short time. If you keep talking about negative stuff, they too get fed up, Ellen.

So you can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you. And so it puts you in a fairly lonely position.

And I would talk to myself. I would go look at myself in a mirror. I would talk to myself. I would rage at myself. I would shed a few tears, then put on some lipstick and come out. And that was my go-to because all people need an outlet. And you have to be very careful who your outlet is because you never want them to use it against you at any point.

So the best thing is talk to yourself in the mirror.

TAAFFE: I love that advice for, we can control our mindset. We can’t control a lot of things around us.

NOOYI: In today’s world with social media and all that stuff, it’s very hard to trust somebody because you never know downstream, if you had a falling out, what happens.

You just don’t know. Be very, very careful.

TAAFFE: You mentioned moving into the CEO role at PepsiCo. You created, led with the performance-with-purpose mission, which was so valuable to the company.

PAVIN: Hey! This is Laura just popping in here to say that this “performance-with-purpose mission” Taaffe just mentioned, that was Nooyi’s push for the company to offer choices like baked chips, waters, and teas—stuff you wouldn’t typically associate with Pepsi at the time. And she wanted the company to be a little more focused on sustainability, the environment, and social issues. This was in the early aughts, before that became the industry-wide rallying cry. Okay, back to Taaffe. 

TAAFFE: And I’m curious. I can remember some of the days where it was harder to drive that change. How did you handle that driving change and any advice on how others who are trying to change something about their strategy or their workplace, what they could do?

NOOYI: Ellen, you know, transformations are difficult. Transformations when you have a burning platform and it’s an inside-out transformation is easy because everybody’s looking at the burning platform.

So if you’ve got hemorrhaging profits, or costs have gone too much, or your revenue growth has fallen, you know, everybody knows you have a burning platform, and they rally around to what changes need to be made. In my case, the company was doing very well, but I had a future backed burning platform. As I looked at what the market trends were and the mega trends, I’m looking at this going, “God, we have to change, otherwise the company will be in trouble.”

Not that the company is in trouble now—it’s going to be in trouble. Change before the change forces you to make the change. Right? Which means you’ve got to anticipate what’s going to happen based on all the trends. You’ve got to look at the trends constantly, you know, read lots of signals.

And so because I was basing the transformation on the future back perspective, I had to lay out the trends that I thought were going to impact us. Surprisingly, everybody bought into the trends, but some of them struggled to make the changes to accommodate those trends or to, you know, compete in that world with all those trends.

And that’s where the, you know, the rub came. They fought me on those. So for a long time, I worked with them. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes I made, I worked with some of them too long. I hoped to change their mind because they’d been around PepsiCo for a while, and I loved working with them.

But then when they become too much of a hurdle, then you’ve got to get them out. And many of them have retired as a consequence. You know, for example, if I look at the shift to health and wellness, Brock Leach, who worked with me, you know, both of us love Brock. He was way ahead of the curve with us. He said, “we have to do this, Indra.”

Let’s just, you know, figure out a way to do this because that’s where the consumers keep going. That’s the right thing to do. And, um, I still, the thing I feel the best about PepsiCo is the push towards more nutrition, lower calories. You know, because every child in the world should be our child. How we feed our children, that’s how we should feed the world.

So I felt very strongly about that. And so I think people felt everything deep down their heart. And unless you touch their heart, the head is never going to change. And then I had to get the hands to start doing different things. So it was a missionary type of a job going and talking to people.

Appearing in large meetings, repeating the message again and again in different ways to touch people’s heart, to make it relatable to them. It was long hours and relentless, but it had to be done.

TAAFFE: So you talked about, as you rise up, the expectations rise, and often what worked before doesn’t.

It doesn’t work going forward. Can you share any ways that you might have evolved, whether you got feedback or saw that something about your style or approach wasn’t working as you rose through the ranks?

NOOYI: Oh, so many ways. And there were, I’m glad I was surrounded by people who told truths to power, because sometimes people would just say to me, “I wish it weren’t so abrupt.”

Or could you give this feedback in a more gentle way? So it’s palatable, as opposed to getting people mad about you. And many people gave me feedback, people who are my bosses, people who worked for me, people who worked as my peers. When they give you the feedback, you feel a bit defensive. But if you step back from it and listen to them carefully, listen to them carefully, as opposed to just, sort of, in one ear and out the other ear.

You listen to it carefully, and if you trust the person who’s giving you the feedback, right? And say, hey, this person’s not out to get me. They really care for me and the company and the work group. Then you will pause and say, okay, “how do I change what I’m doing?” And I’ve had to do that many times.

Believe me, I was a lifelong student. Not only of content and theories. I had to study behavior, too, because as you move up and you’re commanding more people, leading more people, and you’re making change and transformation, you have to evolve and adapt yourself. And I had to learn a lot, and I made mistakes along the way.

TAAFFE: It’s very clear that you are a lifelong learner. I’m curious, what are you learning now at this stage of career in life?

NOOYI: Lots of things, because the world is being completely upended by technologies. And you know, I’m learning everything there is to know about all these new technologies coming on the horizon. Not just AI, but whatever’s coming in molecular biology, whatever’s coming in electrification, quantum computing—enough to be able to understand how it’s going to impact the companies that I’m associated with, like Amazon or Philips or Memorial Sloan Kettering.

And so I’m like a kid in a candy store. I’m reading everything I can. I’m reading everything on foreign policy, geopolitics. I’m reading about how many, many verticals are going to change because of the progression and technologies. And so I’m actually enjoying myself because now I have the freedom to read whatever I want.

I have the freedom to go deep in whatever I want and the freedom to actually call on experts, and [say,] “hey, can you just tell me a little bit about this?” And people are willing to do that. Even though I’m not a CEO anymore, they’re still willing to give me some time. So I’m calling on some banked goodwill with all these people and saying, “hey, can you give me some time to teach me this?”

So, you know, if you have this mindset of lifelong learning, you will never walk away from it. But you’ve got to have that mindset and you’re never too old to be a lifelong learner. The day you stop lifelong-learning, Ellen, you will atrophy. And you should remember that.

TAAFFE: So one of the, I guess, lessons learned from the pandemic was a window into households, into what parents were facing, in particular women.

We saw in many ways, uh, a number of women drop out of the workforce. As we came back to work, we started to see more flexibility and increase ... in some ways, it’s two steps forward, one step back. Now, as we see more mandates to come back to the workforce and we face a lot of issues with caregiving and all that, I wondered if you could talk about what you see the workplace needing to be, what leaders need to do to enable a more equal playing ground for all people to have the careers they want.

NOOYI: I think we have a human problem, a sociology problem, a political problem, an economics problem, a legal problem. Every discipline around, every university, has to talk about this. And let me tell you what I’m talking about. Today, if I look at universities, high schools, whatever, 70 percent of valedictorians are women.

More than 50 percent of the college degrees are being gotten by women. And they’re getting all the top grades. Even technical schools are, you know, largely women. Thirty, forty percent women. They’re hungry. They want the power of the purse. They want to be economically independent. And if you look at the Magna and Summa Cum Laude, women are getting as many, if not more, than the men.

So you’ve got an extraordinarily bright group of women who want to contribute, who want to work, right? And the economy needs the best and the brightest. If we want to feed our economy with our own people, we need the best and the brightest.

I feel like one should write up this problem and say, “guys, let’s do this. Solve it. How would you approach this problem?” And don’t just focus on managerial women. Think of the factory worker who’s a woman who’s working the 8 to 8, 8 p.m. to 8 a. m., shift. Who needs that job because without that she can’t feed her kids. What is she supposed to do? And remember, right now, everybody’s saying we need more kids. All right. How are we going to solve this problem? Let’s figure out how to thread this needle. And if we can somehow make all of these conflicting demands work through some intervention, more power to us.

But it cannot be families, female, let us make the women just collapse with, uh, you know, the stress of doing too many things. And then let’s make sure we pay them less. We don’t promote them. We have all kinds of unconscious biases in the workplace. And then say, you know, women, they’re hysterical. They always complain.

Let’s not say that. Without women, the economy doesn’t work. Of all the frontline jobs, nurses, school teachers, medical assistants, dental hygienists, beauty-care salons, restaurants, retail, real estate, they’re all women. Seventy to ninety-seven percent are women. If all of these women now decided they’re going to stay home and take care of kids, how is this economy going to run again?

Do we even talk about that? I don’t know. Do we even talk about how their kids are going to be taken care of? And how about the parents of these women and men? You know, when men ask for gyms in offices, we put gyms in all the offices. Now, let’s say women ask for child care. Are we willing to do it?

TAAFFE: Really, like how you position it is a human and societal issue. It truly is, and we see it in the trends of holding off on having kids, and how do you afford this and keep your job. So, I’m sure as, uh, the CEO that you have been, and I know we both have two daughters. I’m curious, and I’m sure you’ve gotten the question a million times, how have you done it?

NOOYI: In many ways, my husband made a huge difference because he was a big support.

He had his own career, he was traveling a lot, but we coordinated calendars constantly. In the early days of our kids, we had support from our parents. My mother and his mother, my father had passed away, and my mother was there to help his parents, and then various aunts and uncles came in from India to help us.

Three months at a time, four months at a time, they helped us. We had the financial ability to pay for a babysitter or a nanny at home. We somehow worked our schedules so that one of us will always be home at night with the kids. It was not easy. But I will tell you, Ellen, um, I think 30 percent of the time my kids will say, “Mom was a great mom.”

Seventy percent of the time they would say, “God, what mom? We never had a mom when we were growing up. Mom was always busy. She was always stressed out. She was always working, reading, carrying bags of mail and going through it all the time,” which is true. And, um, they would say they missed out, but they were never latchkey kids.

They never not had a roof over their head or food on the table or clothes on their back. They never missed a birthday party or a vacation, so they had everything. But they didn’t have a dedicated mom at home, or a dedicated dad at home, because dad was also working. Uh, and that’s the story of immigrant families who don’t have anything to fall back on.

Right? We were building wealth as we went along. And so, sometimes when you talk to my kids, they’ll say how proud they are of mom. Other times they’ll say, “mom, forget mom, she was never a mom.” It depends on the time of day. Um, I would say that if I had to do it again, would I do the same thing? Probably. Probably. Um, I don’t know how it is not to work so hard. I just don’t know. I don’t know if a different model, if I knew of a different model, I might say, I wish I didn’t work so hard. I just don’t know what another model is. I kept working hard, and one thing led to another. It was just my DNA, but it’s not easy.

If you don’t have a support structure with your family, your community, and if you don’t have the wherewithal for supporting a babysitter or a nanny full time with you, you can’t do it. And all bets are off if you have an ill parent or a child with special needs that needs you to give them a lot of attention.

And I’m not just saying for women. For families, it’s very hard to climb a career when you have so many competing problems you have to deal with at home. It’s not possible. And if you don’t have a very supportive spouse, forget it. That’s the reality, and the sooner we recognize all this ... and that’s why a lot of women are not having kids now.

It feels like we have to choose between career and kids. And second, once I become a stay-at-home mom, my pension savings goes down massively because I don’t have a pension savings. I could be a single mom any day if my husband walked out on me, which many, many men do. Okay. And third, If I have a big crisis at home and we don’t have the financial ability to take care of the sickness at home, how is it going to work?

How are we going to make ends meet? And how are we going to create wealth as a fact? And for a single mom, the problem is compounded.

So again, this is a very serious human issue, which we’re kind of sweeping under the rug. But the more we ignore this issue, we will have more stressed-out caregivers, more stressed-out women who are disproportionately high percentage of caregivers, and we’re going to lose out on an incredible talent in our workplace.

TAAFFE: So, so last question, how do you think leadership has changed, you know, what’s needed in leaders today that is different than the past?

NOOYI: I think leadership is getting more complicated and more exciting or, you know, just worrisome. I don’t know. Especially if you’re leading a big multinational. We’re now in a time when we’re questioning, what is the role of a multinational?

We went from the world is flat to the world is getting all kinds of national bar, you know, walls built around it. How should you compete? You’ve got a more diverse workforce, and it’s getting increasingly more diverse. How do you deal with the diverse workforce? How do you treat every person as a valuable contributor to the company as opposed to a tool of the trade?

How do you say to yourself, this is an asset of the company and deal with them with respect. So learning to deal with a diverse workforce, giving everybody honest feedback, putting the company before yourself, and dealing with a world that’s going to be more complicated than ever is all table stakes for leaders today.

So having clarity of direction, clarity of purpose, and looking at your people as assets, not tools for the trade, are going to be the only successful elements of the formula for the future, because people are going to make you successful. You can’t do it all yourself. And you can’t influence geopolitics.

You’ve got to play within the geopolitics. So understand it, you know, craft an intelligent path through the conflicts, but don’t try to be too vocal about it. And you know, tiptoe your way through it. Those are all skills you have to develop and evolve as you go along.

PAVIN: That’s our show for today. We hope you liked it. It was produced by Laura Pavin, Jessica Love, Ellen Taaffe, and the Kellogg Insight team, which also includes Fred Schmaltz, Abraham Kim, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. It was mixed by Andrew Meriwether. Special thanks to Indra Nooyi. As a reminder, you can find us on our website, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you liked the show, please leave us a review or a rating. That helps new listeners find us. See you in a couple of weeks.