“Do everything well.”

INDRA NOOYI SHARES HER SECRETS TO RUNNING ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS FOOD AND BEVERAGE COMPANIES, PEPSICO.

- Emily Pidgeon

When you tell your mother that Steven Reinemund has appointed you CEO you don’t expect her response to be, “I’ll give him a call and tell him to change his mind.” But that was the case for Indra Nooyi. “My mother loved him,” she laughs. Since the “out of the blue” moment in 2006 when the then CEO announced he was stepping down as PepsiCo CEO and handing the role over to her, the trailblazing leader has consistently been ranked among the world’s 100 most powerful women.

Indra was the head of the iconic international food and beverage company for 12 years before leaving in late 2018, and today she sits on the board of Amazon, the World Economic Forum, Yale School of Management and the International Cricket Council. “It was a brutal time to be the CEO, transforming the company, dealing with activist investors, dealing with the financial crisis, dealing with all kinds of attacks on our categories,” Indra revealed at The Growth Faculty’s Sydney, Australia event, An Evening With Indra Nooyi, in June 2019. “It was a tough 12 years.”

Tough maybe, but Indra has never done anything by halves. From creating a women’s cricket team at Madras Christian College at a time when nothing like it existed in India, to personally writing more than 400 letters to her global senior executives’ parents (and to their in-laws) expressing how proud she was of them, the former PepsiCo CEO infused the corporate world with her own rebellious touch.

Whether PepsiCo was acquiring new brands, being the centre of controversy with some of its advertising campaigns or moving towards healthier products, the decisions she chose to make for the company often came with backlash from investors. “I never viewed them as gigantic decisions,” Indra says. “But they had to be done because the company needed them to be successful going forward.”