Dubai: ‘Performance with purpose’ has always been the mantra for success for this Indian technocrat who was chief executive officer (CEO) at one of the largest business houses in the world for 12 years — seven years longer than the average tenure of CEOs at large corporations globally. Meet Indra Nooyi, one of the finest minds to ever grace a boardroom, whose book My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future has earned rave reviews from all over the world. Nooyi will be part of a rich array of authors and literary luminaries at this year’s Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Ahead of her presence in Dubai on February 12, to share her thoughts on her life in general and her book in particular, Gulf News caught up with Nooyi for an exhilarating tete-a-tete. Following are excerpts ...
GULF NEWS: During a meeting with Barack Obama, the then US president, and Dr Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister of the time, Dr Singh reportedly said, pointing at you, “She is one of us”; to which, president Obama replied: “She is one of us, too!” An Indian-origin technocrat who topped the corporate hierarchy in the world’s most powerful economy ... How do you see yourself in that bit of a ‘dual’ role?
INDRA NOOYI: When I think about it and go back to my childhood and I ask myself the question ‘Who I am’, I realise that my life has always been about this duality. Growing up with my family, I had one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator. It’s all about my family telling me that, ‘Yes, you can go to America, but don’t forget your Indian values. You can have all the power, but you’ve got to have the humility so that you can balance performance with purpose’. It was always about these dualities and so in many ways I’m a product of both, an Indian and an American upbringing. I was born in the world’s largest democracy, India, that gave me a lot of family values. And then I thrived in the world’s oldest democracy — the United States. I think it is a culmination of the two that helped me unleash my true potential. So I’m grateful to both the countries and I think the comments of prime minister Manmohan Singh and president Obama captured it in a nutshell.
In April 2020, it was announced that you, along with epidemiologist Dr Albert Ko, from the University of Yale, would represent Connecticut on the six-state working group, planning for the careful easing of COVID-19 restrictions in the US. How was it, working with Dr Ko and what sort of a roadmap did you offer?
My job was to reopen Connecticut. This was a statewide initiative and the Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, chartered Albert and me to co-chair the committee to figure out how to reopen Connecticut. And because Connecticut is a small state nestled within seven other states around us, there was a seven-state coordination because you couldn’t have figured out Connecticut and then have this train run from Washington to Boston through Connecticut, that would become a COVID corridor! So it was very important that we coordinated our activities.
Growing up with my family, I had one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator. It’s all about my family telling me that, ‘Yes, you can go to America, but don’t forget your Indian values. You can have all the power, but you’ve got to have the humility so that you can balance performance with purpose’.
The amazing thing is that Dr Albert Ko is one of the leading infectious diseases epidemiologists in the world, representing what I would call ‘life’, while I represented, as a business person, ‘livelihoods’. So between Albert and myself, we talked about how to balance lives and livelihoods. But the most important part of our collaboration to reopen Connecticut was that I had to learn public policy and epidemiology and Albert had to learn business. So we had to overlap with the margin just a bit and I must tell you that I enjoyed working with Albert, I enjoyed learning about public policy and epidemiology because he taught me all that. That allowed me to appreciate the concerns of public health officials and he appreciated the reason why we had to open up the economy faster. So, I think, in every state in the US, that is how we should pair up the right and knowledgeable people and then make them build a team to sensibly address issues.
As Pepsico CEO, you played a significant role in moving corporate spending away from junk food and into healthier alternatives. While this worked extremely well as a business strategy, it also served as a major marker for corporate social responsibility. Is there a way to ensure such business strategy is hard-wired into the policy templates of today’s corporate behemoths?
What you refer to as ‘social responsibility’, I call it ‘responsible running of a company’. I honestly believe that if you do something just to spend the money you make then it becomes ‘discretionary spending’, but if you hard-wire it into the way you make money then that can make a big difference. In our case, if we hadn’t changed our portfolio we couldn’t have grown; and if we couldn’t grow and couldn’t focus on the environment, then our costs would have gone up. So the whole responsibility piece was hard-wired into our performance. It was performance with a purpose. When purpose is something you do in the evenings and performance is what you do during the day, it doesn’t last. So I think we’ve really got to figure out how to link performance and purpose — so closely, that it drives business performance because ultimately, corporations have to deliver.
Your literary offering — My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future — is steeped in life lessons without being didactic. As an author, what was that one big challenge to make sure you struck that perfect middle-path between composing a personal treatise on a journey of a lifetime and sharing a set of values and experiences of universal appeal?
We started off saying that the book was only going to be 90,000 words, not longer than that. So that was the limiting factor. Secondly, we had to outline the chapters very clearly. For instance, what are the big lessons that I know came out of my life, which I would want to convey to the readers. So, the lessons were laid out and then the story was wrapped around those lessons.
While working on the book, I decided that this book is not going to be a tell-all — telling stories about people and throwing them under the bus! No, that was not the intent of this book. The intent was to tell a story, leading to some life lessons. That way, it’s a constructive book, not a destructive one. The other point is that I always believe that one should be true to the facts. Don’t try to spin the facts to make them more sensational. Now once we put those guardrails up-front, it was easy to write the book because we had ten stories for each chapter and you just needed to pick the right stories to tell, stories that would convey the right lessons and at the same time appeal to the reader.
For every chapter, we went through this exercise of first writing more than what we should have and then cutting back. For certain chapters, we would write about 20,000-25,000 words and then cut it down, knowing that we had only 90,000 words for the whole book.
So, as an author, what was the challenge — giving primacy to form over content or the other way around or striking a middle path?
Well, you know, it was about balancing the two. But there were other dilemmas as well. For instance, what should I play up more in the book, the practical years or the growing-up years? Should I talk more about the later years? This was a struggle because when it comes to a memoir leading to a certain direction, you struggle with what should be given primacy. It was then that we concluded that I am a product of my upbringing, my education in India, my journey to the US, what the US gave me, my time in different companies, with Pepsico and so on. I’m a product of everything — my family, my kids. So, in this go-around, let’s just talk about all of those to sufficient depth. But when I appear privately in various sessions, I can elaborate on my life. The book, therefore, serves as a great backdrop.
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Coming back to you as PepsiCo CEO ... You served as the Pepsico CEO for 12 years, which is seven years longer than the average tenure of senior CEOs at large companies, according to an Equilar survey. How was this made possible?
When I took over PepsiCo, I had this burning desire to implement performance with public right, but then we went straight into the financial crisis. Then we had issues with our bottling system that I needed to address. So I look at my time in PepsiCo as two six-year terms. The first six years were about handling the financial crisis and fixing the issues. The second six-year term was about realising the benefits of performance of purpose. When I finished my first six-year term, I developed the energy to go for another six years. So, I don’t look at it as one 12-year term, I look at it as two six-year terms. That way, I was just like the average of what the others had done and that’s what the Equilar survey says too. Only difference is, I did it twice right!
