‘Do you think you are Mother Teresa?’
New Delhi: For a dozen years as one of the worlds most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi, redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. To the extent that when she once pitched a revolutionary strategy to introduce healthy products, she was asked if she was Mother Teresa! Her prescient strategic thinking, insight into consumer […]
New Delhi: For a dozen years as one of the worlds most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi, redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. To the extent that when she once pitched a revolutionary strategy to introduce healthy products, she was asked if she was Mother Teresa!
Her prescient strategic thinking, insight into consumer behaviour, and wisdom on managing a vast, global workforce make her one of the world’s most sought-after advisors to entrepreneurs, executives, and governments. The first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company — and one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time – she transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence, and a deep sense of purpose.
Her memoir, “My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future” (Hachette India), offers a firsthand view of Nooyi’s legendary career – a story of exemplary resilience, courage, and leadership. Generous, authoritative, and grounded in lived experience, the book delivers a blueprint for 21st century prosperity, peppered with masterful insights.
For instance: “I believe that a company’s impact on society needs to be written through all business planning, and that this cannot be an afterthought. What’s good for commerce and what’s good for society have to go together.”
The rewards were fulsome. “One foggy Tuesday in November 2009,” Nooyi writes in the book, “after hours of meetings in Washington, DC, with two dozen top US and Indian business executives, I found myself standing between the president of the United States and the prime Minister of India.
“Barack Obama and Manmohan Singh had entered the room for an update on our group’s progress, and President Obama began introducing the American team to his Indian counterpart. When he got to me, Prime Minister Singh exclaimed, ‘Oh! But she is one of us!’ “And the President, with a big smile and without missing a beat, responded, ‘Ah, but she is one of us too!’
“It’s a moment I never forget” Nooyi writes.
When Nooyi took over as CEO of PepsiCo, one of her pivotal – and controversial — ideas was to steer the company toward healthier products, reinvent its environmental profile and lead the company into a future where they championed ‘Performance with Purpose’. The strategy met with immense backlash from some shareholders who wouldn’t stand for anything that affected the company’s short-term profitability targets.
In the book, Nooyi narrates a particular conversation in the face of tremendous resistance: “The most memorable comment came from a portfolio manager in Boston — ‘Who do you think you are?’ he asked me. ‘Mother Teresa?'”
