It’s great to be back.

I imagine we’re all still in the throes of our resolutions for 2025 (unless you aren’t, in which case, congratulations on knowing when to quit), so today I’m sharing a few lightly edited motivational excerpts from a conversation between Kellogg’s Ellen Taaffe and Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s former chairman and CEO.

Plus, a prediction that President Donald Trump will play nice with China this year.

On finding an outlet for venting about CEO-related stressors

“It’s very hard to find people to talk to. 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.”

On driving difficult change at PepsiCo—specifically, the company’s prescient decision to offer choices like baked chips, waters, and teas

“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.

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 compete in that world with all those trends. And that’s where 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 retired as a consequence.”

Hear more from Nooyi and Taaffe’s conversation at Kellogg Insight.

A Trump–Xi Alliance?

What’s your unlikely prediction for 2025?

For Kellogg’s Nancy Qian, it’s the (well, in her view, not so unlikely) idea of a Trump–Xi alliance emerging.

“Many worry that a heavy-handed play against Xi Jinping, who has made clear that he will fight for what he views as China’s rights, can escalate an already tense geopolitical relationship. But upon closer examination, it is just as likely that the opposite will happen,” she writes in Politico.

For instance, while increasing tariffs on Chinese goods was a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign, so was reducing immigration—both of which could boost prices for American consumers. And if he has to choose between them, she predicts he’ll go with immigration, offering room for compromise with Xi.

Read more from Qian in Politico.

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor
Kellogg Insight