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LILAH JONES: Today, I am so thrilled
to be able to host an amazing speaker, an amazing person,
an amazing CEO, Indra Nooyi.
INDRA NOOYI: Lilah, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to talk with you.
It's a privilege to talk with you.
So I'm looking forward to our conversation.
LILAH JONES: I love one of the things
that you said in the book that talks about this
not being a memoir for you, but really
being a manual for the rest of us
who are out here working to build our careers,
taking care of young children, taking
care of older, aging, elderly parents,
and also trying to make a difference in our society
and communities.
INDRA NOOYI: You accomplish a lot in your life.
At least in retrospect, you feel like you've
lived a good life in terms of professional,
having the family.
But living a good life doesn't mean you just
abandon everything after you retire because life is well
beyond your time as a CEO.
The real question is, how can you
continue to make positive change in the world and in society?
And in my case, I decided that I would lean in
to make positive change in two areas.
One, I noticed that a lot of young women in managerial ranks
came into the workforce in large numbers
and dropped out in the second or third level
because they just couldn't figure out
how to make motherhood and rising in the corporate world
possible because the corporate world is a pyramid.
I mean, it's a steep pyramid.
And if you take a detour or you drop out,
it's very hard to come back.
So first, we need to figure out how
to make more of them ascend to the top
because women are basically wicked smart.
And they're very talented.
And they should be deployed in all of the productive jobs that
will help the economy.
If you look at all of our frontline workers
across the economy, they are the people
that keep the wheels of the economy going.
And if you look at a lot of those jobs,
like caregiving jobs, they're all skewed towards women.
At the managerial level, how do you provide a support
system to move women up the ladder, but in the front line,
how do you just allow young family builders, and women,
in particular, just do the work that they
want to do in order to support their families,
but also helps the economy.
And I think we have to stop talking about this issue
as being their problem.
I think it's now our collective challenge to address.
When you speak without a speech in front of you,
Lilah, the person who's listening to you
should be able to form a picture in their head of what
you're talking about.
So even the most complex subjects,
break it down into its component pieces
and deliver it so that people can
form a picture in their minds right away.
And that's a skill that's teachable,
that's trainable, that's practicable,
if you want to call it that.
But I think that we have to equip people
with that capability because as you become a leader, as you
ascend, you have to constantly mobilize your troops
to come along with you.
And you can't always pick up a piece of paper
and read from it.
And you can't always just repeat what you're saying
and expect to get the same result if it hasn't
gotten the results so far.
So at every point in time, you have
to tune the speech to the audience.
You have to create vivid pictures in their mind
and constantly let these pictures evolve
so it goes from the mind, from the head to the heart.
And that's the skill that we all have to teach people.
I always had this immigrant fear.
And I'd walk into a room and I'd say, God, I'm so different,
nobody else like me.
Therefore, people must be asking themselves the question,
why is she at this table?
Why is she in this room?
Why is she giving us advice, or why is she
working on the project?
I just had that complex in me, all right?
So I would dig myself into a hole,
and then I would have to find a way to come out of the hole.
And I knew the only way I could do
it is by showing that I was on top
of the material, prepared everything,
and I knew more about what needed to get
done than anybody in the room.
So I had to do it with sheer grit and knowledge
and depth of expertise, OK?
That's all I had to focus on.
So that's all I did.
I focused on the knowledge base, on competence,
on thinking about the issue at the detail level
and at a higher level.
So I was zooming in and zooming out of every issue.
And so I came to the table with those skills.
And after a while, people looked past--
just like that interview we talked about--
looked past who I was, my background,
how I looked or talked or whatever, and said, man,
here's somebody who actually has some great points to make.
I think the first one is really understand what you're doing.
Have conviction in what you're doing,
and make sure that your board-- in particular as a CEO,
you have to make sure your bosses-- that's the board--
buys into what you're doing because they
are your first line of defense against any action
from shareholders.
So if your board has bought into you,
you know you have some room to get your plan executed.
So you have to have clarity of direction,
clarity of how you're going to implement it,
and you've got to have the board completely bought
into what you're doing.
At the same time, you've got to sell your programming
to your senior executives and your,
I'd say, top three levels of the company,
because at the end of the day, you've
got to make it happen through them--
through them.
They have to carry your message.
They have to make sure the rest of the organization lines up.
And so the challenge we have is, in the hours of the day,
how do you craft the message, get the board signed up?
And you just don't get them signed up once and walk away.
You've got to reinforce it regularly with the board.
And get your senior executives signed on.
But then those that don't, after a while, you say,
look, it's time to leave, because you
can try with them for a few months,
but if they still don't sign on to the program,
they've got to be moved out.
Otherwise, they become sort of the stumbling
blocks in the company.
But all in the public eye because everybody
is watching to see, is this woman going to succeed?
Not is this CEO, is this woman going to succeed.
Is this person of color who is an immigrant going
to succeed as a CEO of this Fortune 50 iconic company?
So everybody is watching to see when you're going to fail.
And social media doesn't help because anything you say or do
gets amplified in social media.
You know, mentors by themselves are not good enough.
But if they're supporters and promoters, besides being
mentors, it's great.
A few observations.
Mentors pick you.
You can't pick them.
LILAH JONES: Hmm.
INDRA NOOYI: They pick you because they see something
in you that they like and they think
you're somebody who's going to go places
or can go places with just a little push.
So they say, hey, I see something in this person.
I want to make sure that I advance their interest
because these people can be molded into something much
bigger than they are today.
So mentors pick you.
And then they transition to supporters and promoters.
But the very important lesson with mentors,
you have to respect them.
And if you go to them for advice and they give you advice
and you choose not to take it, you've got to go back to them
and say, let me tell you why I didn't take your advice.
Because if you ignore their advice
and do whatever you want to do, they'll
never give you advice again.
I think that in every job that I was in,
I never, ever worried about the next job.
I focused on the job I had.
I mean, just focused on doing the job I had very, very well.
I'm thinking back to all the jobs I've had in my life.
And by focusing on the job I had and doing a great job
with that, people realized that I
wasn't interested in promoting myself or looking
for the next job or the next job,
but I was putting the company before me to say, how can I
do my job so well that the company is benefited
from it, or by it?
And I think that made a huge difference, Lilah,
because there were times when somebody would say,
could you take on more responsibility?
Look, if you did the job well and advancements don't come,
shame on the company.
Shame on the company, because the company should want people
who are highly qualified.
OK?
I just focused on the job that needed to get done.
The one other thing I did which I would encourage
a lot of people to focus on, when I did a job,
I just didn't do the job.
I looked at all the connections and linkages
of what I was doing to other pieces of work that
were going on around me.
So I'd say, look, I'm doing this.
Can I overlap a little bit with what
you're doing so it's easy to transition from my piece
to yours?
As opposed to let's just touch briefly,
I wanted a little bit of overlap-- every module.
So I'll almost map out how my module
is going to fit into a broader tapestry of work that
was going on to make sure, together, we
would add value in the company.
So again, this all came under this overall umbrella
of how is the work I'm doing benefiting the company, as
opposed to how do I just do a job.
It was how do I add value to the company,
how are we making a difference.
Diversity and anything to do with just plain diversity
is numbers.
Do you have diversity?
What is diversity?
It's a very mathematical thing.
Inclusion is a state of mind.
So I think if you focus on diversity
and don't focus on inclusion and retention and development
and promotion, then you really don't have a DEI program
because what you're trying to do is meet some external critics'
desire to meet some numbers.
But you're not making the effort to make
them fit in, make them feel included in meetings,
giving them the kind of stretch assignments
you would other people and helping them get to these goals
that you set for them.
So I think we all have to practice inclusion
in a much more meaningful way because that's really
what makes diversity work.
I think I credit my previous CEO, Steve Reinemund,
with a lot of progress being made on diversity and inclusion
because he said something profound.
He said, you can't build an inclusion program
if you don't have a critical mass of diversity.
He said, look, if you have a small group of diverse people,
how do you spread this message of inclusiveness,
inclusivity across the company?
So step one is get a critical mass of diverse people,
and then build the inclusiveness platform over that.
Teach people how to practice inclusive behavior,
be more thoughtful about what they say,
and call them out when there's bad behavior.
So he put in place a scorecard, which
was parity hiring, parity promotion, parity retention.
It was way ahead of its time.
And everybody fought it, including me, saying, hey,
we can't hire anybody because you've said parity.
If there's four people we have to hire,
two people have to be diverse, can't find them.
He'd say, go look harder.
OK?
Remember, this was a white man who was saying, I don't care,
guys.
We've got to take the-- we either take this seriously
or we don't talk about it at all.
I think if we want to be a successful company,
we're going to take it seriously.
I want to first give credit to my grandfather and my father,
too, because the men in our family
believed that the women and men should
be equally educated, should be allowed to dream
as much as they wanted.
There will be no discrimination against the men and women.
Now, again, put it in context.
This is in the late '50s and early '60s in India.
My mother was brilliant, would have loved to have studied,
but she wasn't given an opportunity
because girls those days didn't go to college.
They got married at 18 and were homemakers.
So she had this foot on the brake,
and the foot on the accelerator said go off, dream big,
do whatever you want.
And my dad and my grandfather put their foot
heavily on the accelerator and said, soar.
Not just dream big, soar.
We'll provide the tailwinds for you.
So this combination allowed us to have a little bit
of a frame in our lives.
So we had discipline.
We had rules, strict rules, which is a good thing, Lilah,
which is a good thing.
We had the support of family.
We had that base.
We had accountability.
But we could also soar.
We could dream big.
And as long as we conformed within the frame,
we could do what we wanted.
And I think it's that combination of the brake
and the accelerator that worked so well.
I'm not sure the sisterhood of women
is as strong supporting each other as they could be.
And I think we all need to open our eyes a lot more to say,
are we open to advice from other women?
Do we feel comfortable that it's good advice, as opposed
to saying I'd rather take advice from a man than a woman?
Are we open to it?
Second, are we willing to trust other women who
work with us that each of us is worried about--
are focused on the best interests of the person that's
seeking the advice or you're giving them the advice?
So I think that our sisterhood needs to mature a bit.
If you want to soar, if you really
want to have a career that moves ahead,
you've got to have support at home.
You've got to have less pressure at home.
And you've got to have clear ground rules with your spouses,
too.
Equality in the marriage--
I mean, you've got to support your spouse, too, at times.
Don't get me wrong.
There were times when he's gone for six months at a time
when he was taking care of his father.
I said, go.
That's important.
I'll take care of the household.
Don't worry about it.
I gave him no pressure.
So I think you've got to have that understanding.
You've got to approach it with equality.
Very important.
I'm very honest in telling you that I was not
the perfect mom, the perfect executive, perfect daughter,
perfect daughter.
And I was not.
I juggled through all of those.
And at every point in time, somebody
would remind me that I wasn't available here
or I wasn't quite there.
And because the job needed me and I was
responsible for so many people, I prioritized PepsiCo first
because 260,000 employees were looking for the CEO
to provide direction.
And then between my husband and I,
we somehow managed all of our other priorities
and the extended family.
The thing I'm envious about, Lilah, is the technology
that we have today.
If I'd had all of these teleconferencing technologies,
FaceTime, the chat, the talks, can you
imagine, I could have actually gone home at 3:30?
I could have spent time with the kids,
taking the kids off the bus, and then continued
working from home.
I'd need not have traveled as much as I did.
I was on the plane all the time.
I need not have done that because I
could have run a lot of meetings through these technology tools,
OK?
So in a way, I wish all of this technology
had been available when I was a CEO.
And so I would say to all of the young people
today, take these technology and the tools
that you have as a gift and figure out
how to engineer a support structure around this.
I think technology is changing so rapidly around us,
thanks to companies like Google, that everybody
has to become a lifelong student to keep up with the changing
technology, because if you don't remain a lifelong student
and let the technology get ahead of you,
you're going to fall behind.
LILAH JONES: Indra, thank you again
for this amazing conversation.
It has had a huge impact on me.
And getting to know you through your book
is definitely one of the highlights for me.
I'm so grateful for that.
INDRA NOOYI: Thank you, Lilah.
It was a pleasure and a privilege chatting with you.
Thank you.
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