Indra Nooyi, Former CEO of PepsiCo, on Nurturing Talent in Turbulent Times

Indra Nooyi has ideas for how the corporate world needs to evolve. HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down with the former CEO and chairman of PepsiCo to discuss the power of purpose in driving the strategy, triumphs, and setbacks she experienced as one of the few women running a Fortune 500 company, and how important leadership is for creating truly inclusive workplaces. She urges us to think about how to take care of all workers, at all phases of the supply chain, with a focus on paid leave, and reminds us not to forget essential workers in our discussions about the future of the workplace.

This interview is the second in a new video series called “The New World of Work,” which will explore how top-tier executives see the future and how their companies are trying to set themselves up for success. Each week, Adi will interview a leader on LinkedIn Live — and then share an inside look at those conversations and solicit questions for future discussions in a newsletter just for HBR subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, you can sign up for the newsletter here.

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Transcript 

ADI IGNATIUS: We have great guest today: Indra Nooyi. She was born in India. She got her business degree in the US, and is having an amazing career in business, capped by her role as CEO at PepsiCo from 2006 until 2018. At Pepsi, she was probably best known for her Performance with Purpose approach, which was a strategy aimed at driving long-term growth while also trying to have a positive impact on society and the environment. She’s also just published a memoir about her life and work called My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future. So Indra Nooyi, welcome to the show.

INDRA NOOYI: Thank you for having me, Adi. Such a privilege chatting with you.

ADI IGNATIUS: It’s really a privilege to have you here. I read your book and it’s great. It’s very substantive, very personal, and I definitely urge our viewers to check it out. At one point in the book, you said that leaders need to anticipate and respond to shifts in culture. And I’d love to get your thoughts: Where are we right now? What are the big trends that are unfolding that you think will change the way we live and work?

INDRA NOOYI: One of the great things about stepping out as CEO is that you can look at the whole world with a level of objectivity and really understand what could happen to it over the next few years. I believe this pandemic was perhaps the most disruptive event in the lives of most companies, the lives of most people. None of us living on the planet had been through the Spanish Flu of 1918. So, we don’t know what a lockdown, a pandemic-driven shutdown looks like, and we all experienced it as a world. This is the first time three quarters of the world shut down simultaneously. We’re only now slowly coming out of it. And one of the challenges we have is everybody’s looking for answers on what the future of work and the workplace is going to look like, as if we need to make a decision immediately.

I honestly believe, Adi, this is a time we have to think about scenarios, not about one solution, but scenarios, because people got used to working from home. People got fed up of working from home. People saw children at home not going to school. People saw childcare shutting down. So we had many extraneous factors that impacted how people liked or didn’t like working from home. So I would honestly suggest that we take the next year to do a whole bunch of experiments on what the future of work, the future of the workforce and the workplace could be, and then evolve the right model for the right jobs.

And while doing that, there’s only one caution. What we should not end up with is all the office-going workers getting to choose flexibility, working from home, hybrid working, whatever, while all the frontline workers and essential workers have to go to work and don’t have support systems. So we should not create two classes of workers, one which could be viewed as a privileged class, and one that’s viewed as, once again, I’m a forgotten class. So I think we are on an interesting point in the evolution of work, where we could actually evolve a new work style with humanity in the center. At the same time, we could also be viewed as ignoring the needs and the challenges of the working people who keep our economy going. So we’re at an interesting fork in the road.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I like your notion that we’re experimenting now. We don’t have answers, but we will get the data — or we’ll get the experience and test that.

There’s this dilemma that we’re all working through, which is workers clearly want agency, they’ve gotten used to running their lives, running their own work-life balance. And companies are thinking, yeah, but we sort of need to be together for some of that magic that happens when people are together and they innovate and they create culture. What about that: can you create and sustain a vibrant culture if you’re not physically together, do you think?

INDRA NOOYI: So we should actually talk about this in two groups. The knowledge companies, where most of the people actually come into the office and they can also work remotely because they’re all technology-driven, that’s where all these conversations are being had. How many of us need to come back? How many can work from home? Totally flexible? Do we do hybrid? Do we do it from a co-working space? This is a discussion filled with options. And for those people, this is where I say, Adi, we should experiment. I think companies should come together and pool their learning, constantly survey your employees, run three or four experiments in different parts of the company, and think about what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Do you need people to come in because you need to develop a company culture which can only be done in person? Do you need people to come in because you want to teach them soft skills, which can only be done in person? The objectives have to be crystal clear. And put the objectives out for people to react to and devise different styles of working. Without that, if we just start to mandate coming in for half the time or don’t come in for half the time, I think people are going to get confused. Start with the objective criteria.

To me, the bigger issue is what are we going to do about our essential workers? I’ll give you one example. Everybody who worked in a manufacturing plant had to show up at work for the pandemic: manufacturing supervisors, ship supervisors, plant supervisors. And then all the truckers that took the product out of the plant showed up for work every day. What happens to them?

I think we are focusing completely on the office worker, which I can understand, but we are forgetting the essential worker. I think it’s important we keep a discussion going on both, because a lot of these essential workers have quit the job market, because they’re saying, “Can’t do it. Nobody cares for us and how we care for our families while we had to work through the COVID pandemic. So give us more support structures, give us the means to pay for care, give us fair wages.” That’s what I’m seeing in the economy right now and that’s what worries me the most.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. I think that’s really interesting. We’re all trying to find the right work-life balance. And I think that consideration has changed, even in the past year and a half. In your book, you talk a lot about work and life. You talk a lot about gender issues, in the workplace in particular. I’ve interviewed CEOs before and I ask about work-life balance and they say, “Yes, yes, yes, it’s very important.” And then I say, “What about you?” And they say, “Well, it doesn’t apply to me. I just work all the time.” And that seems to be a problem, because leaders need to model behavior that then allows the people who report to them or further down the chain to say, “Okay, I don’t have to work 24/7 to make it here. They understand that I have a life and that’s okay.” You’re a talented, ambitious woman who has done very well in the workplace. What’s does work-life balance mean to you?

INDRA NOOYI: The word balance didn’t enter into my lexicon at all. I looked at it more as a work-life juggling. I always had these multiple balls in the air between my kids, my husband, my family, the job. In fact, I had three PepsiCo balls up in the air, and I would just hope that in the juggling process, I didn’t drop anything. Or if I dropped something, it wasn’t the most important one. It’s not easy, Adi. I mean look, all of them have demands on your time and you only have so many hours in the day.

I’m going to say something now, which I hope people don’t misunderstand. I think as you get to the C-suite, many bets are off, because the C-suite, the CEO and their direct reports, are running such big parts of the company that once you get there, your family situation is fairly stable.

And what you can’t expect to have is balance or juggling or whatever. You need to give the job everything, because your entire company is looking at you for direction and for keeping the company out of trouble. So as I say in the book, once you become a C-suite person, all bets are off in terms of how you manage yourself. What you do is up to you, but now let’s talk about everybody else. It is a juggle. I mean, it’s a juggle that cannot be done unless you build a support structure around you. And yes, you should model the behavior, but how can you model it if you don’t have a support structure? So you need either multi-generational family support, spousal support, or some sort of an infrastructure if you want to have a family. If you don’t want a family, that’s a whole different ballgame.

ADI IGNATIUS: In the book, you say, “I wish I were wired differently.” What did you mean by that?

INDRA NOOYI: Yeah. I don’t know why I am this way, but if there’s an issue, until it’s resolved I just can’t sleep. I’m just focused on it all the time. I mean, right now I’m focused on the care issue, and I’m researching everything I can about care. I’m totally consumed by this care issue, figuring out how we’re going to support care for the caregivers, for the essential worker. With the pandemic, because I co-chaired Reopen Connecticut, I saw too much upfront and it’s impacted me enormously. So I am a little bit wired such that every issue of this type that I get involved in, it impacts me so deeply and consumes me to get to some idea of solution. And I don’t know yet what the solution is here, but I’m wired that way, Adi, and that consumes a lot of my time.

ADI IGNATIUS: There’s another line from the book that I’d love to hear you talk more about. When you were writing about the unique challenges that women face in the workplace, you write, “No matter what we do, we’re never quite enough.”

INDRA NOOYI: I have heard people talk about women in the workplace. They usually say, she’s too passionate or she’s not involved enough. God, she’s too shrill or she talks like a man. Oh God, she’s dressed too glamorously.

There’s always a label given on the woman that’s always extreme. When a woman is judged, she’s judged for her performance and even if it’s great, it’s discounted. A man is judged for potential. A woman, the performance appraisal will go, her performance was fantastic but I’m not sure she has great potential. The man would be, his performance was pretty good but he’s got great potential.

I just don’t like the fact that with the woman it’s, “but she can’t do it”, with the guy it’s, “and he’s got great potential.” I think we have to change this mindset to say, we are not looking at women or men. We are looking at talent.

Look at people gender-blind, ethnicity-blind, whatever-blind, and look at them as raw talent to drive the company forward, and I think you’ll assess them very differently. We’re not there now. It’s going to take a while to get there. This is where tone at the top is going to be very important to catch all these bad behaviors.

ADI IGNATIUS: Did you see progress over the years, or do you think we’re still pretty much in the same place we were 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

INDRA NOOYI: There is progress. I mean, the fact that there are more women in the workplace, more diversity in the workplace. People like me, we are always the flag for making sure we made progress. But the problem is that you need the next generation of leaders to keep moving this agenda forward. It shouldn’t be an agenda that’s only driven by numbers.

I always say that, when you think about things like diversity and inclusion, diversity is a numbers game, inclusion is a mindset. You can’t deal with the numbers without changing the mindset of the people to make people feel included, diverse people, women, people of color feel included.

I think we’ve got to get to a point where the tone of the top models the behavior of inclusiveness. To me that’s the next big frontier. How do you get people to say, this is raw talent? This is not just getting a diverse person to show the world I have a diverse person. This is a talented person. I’m going to do everything to keep them and have them perform.

ADI IGNATIUS: Then on the other side, you write in the book about a manager of yours relatively early in your career. You didn’t seem to be saying this was an evil person but he perpetually called you “honey”. What’s your advice? Where it’s not pure evil or pure harassment, but it’s just this kind of treatment. What’s your advice?

INDRA NOOYI: I’ll be honest with you, over time I’ve been called “honey”, “doll”, “sweetie” by some very interesting people. Let’s leave it there. As I got more senior, every time they call me “honey” or “sweetie”, when I was a CEO, I’d look back and call them back “honey” or “sweetie”. They’d look at me surprised, why are you calling me that? I said, because you did. I thought we should have this “honey, sweetie” conversation with each other.

When I was more middle-level manager, I was always treated very professionally when I was working for my German boss Gerhard [Schulmeyer]. Then a new person comes in and calls me “honey”. He wasn’t doing it out of bad intent. He was actually a very good guy. But it made me very uncomfortable because in this European company where the Europeans didn’t call me “honey” but I thought somebody from here calling me “honey”, I didn’t know what it was. It made me uncomfortable. The “honey” word was reserved for the women. There was no term of endearment for the men.

I tried to talk to this person to say, can you cut the “honey” out? He said, no, that’s how I refer to women. What can I do? Just live with it. I couldn’t. I didn’t make a fuss. I didn’t sit there yelling. I just said, hey, fine. You are who you are. I am who I am. I think I’ll go do something else.

ADI IGNATIUS: Let’s fast forward. You arrive at Pepsi I think in 1994. All of the other people at your level, at the senior level are men. We know how the story ends up. But talk a little bit about that situation. No one’s calling you “honey” but you’re in this very male world trying to be yourself and trying to be effective.

INDRA NOOYI: Male world, I was a person of color, an immigrant from an emerging market. I had every strike against me Adi. Then I wasn’t dressed quite elegantly either. I had many strikes against me.

But remember, if you rewind a little bit, Wayne Calloway who was the CEO made a humble appeal to me to come to PepsiCo saying, “We need somebody like you. I’ll make sure that you’re mentored and developed. I think you’ll do very well because the company needs somebody like you.”

Believe me, the boardroom or the senior management of PepsiCo reflected what every other senior management in the company looked like. It wasn’t that PepsiCo was different. Everything looked the same in every company because this was the early days when women were not in senior positions.

The difference is that, thanks to the incredible tone on the top set by Wayne Calloway and Bob Dettmer who was the CFO, they made me feel welcome. I would say 90% of the executives included me. Took me around. Introduced me to everybody in the company and they made sure they lived up to the message from Wayne Calloway who they all respected. To say, “This is somebody that I’ve brought in because the company needs somebody of her skill and expertise and background to change the culture of this company.”

I had to earn my stripes. Just because I’m there doesn’t get me future fame. I had to earn my stripes. But everybody helped me on board and really move forward. Nobody treated me like she’s a lesser being, can’t do it. I was given very stretch assignments and asked to prove myself and I did. I earned my place and kept it because of competence, but the people were incredibly supportive. Incredibly. PepsiCo is a fantastic company that way.

ADI IGNATIUS: Sticking on the gender topic: Right now, we’ve seen that the burnout rate for women is far more severe than for men. As companies are trying to figure out what to do with the future of work, hybrid, all these big questions, what can and should companies do right now to deal with this trauma that a lot of women are feeling and have felt through these last 18 months?

INDRA NOOYI: The first thing, I would talk about family as family and not family as female. One of the biggest problems we have is that when we talk about family, we say it’s a female problem. It’s not. It’s a family opportunity for us to help nurture families and make sure we have young people to feed into pension systems and take care of the aging down the road. We have to have a different perspective on families.

Second, let’s understand what challenges families have had, especially women at home. Broadband access was highly limited. We are not yet state of the art when it comes to broadband access. When kids or husband needed access to the internet and the working mother needed access too, the working mother lost out most of the time. That was a tension point. There were no schools so the mother became the caregiver, the school teacher, the party planner, everything.

Yesterday I was talking to Kyle Dropp from Morning Consult. He was saying that men thought they had done so much more housework for the pandemic. In reality, men had only done seven points more work in the pandemic and women were still doing a disproportionate amount of the work.

Women not only had the traditional burdens they were carrying, they had to do much more through the pandemic. They’re sitting there going, “I am overwhelmed. I’m one person. How much can I do?” Because all the systems that gave them some support broke down.

Then finally people with young kids: All childcare centers shut down. When they reopened, some of them, the cost was so high that families couldn’t afford it. All of a sudden, predominantly women are back to saying, “I can’t do it. I’m collapsing. My brain is toast. I can’t do it.”

Mental illnesses went up. People had more nervous breakdowns. I think we’ve now reached a point where if you really want to look at the care infrastructure, the essential worker infrastructure, the nursing, the cleaners, the hospitality workers, they’re disproportionately women. Women of color. They’re also people who are single parents.

If we don’t all figure out how to give them the support structures and care for them so they can come back to work, I think we’re going to be looking at a whole new workforce that doesn’t exist. That we need to conjure up to keep our wheels of the economy moving.

ADI IGNATIUS: You talked about the paid leave issue a few minutes ago, and that is still in active discussion in terms of U.S. policy and whether that will be some sort of government mandate or not. But what’s your view? Is this really something that companies need to step up and take care of? Or do you think, in the U.S. at least, this would benefit from government clarity?

INDRA NOOYI: On the surface the paid leave was a no brainer. I am a product of paid leave. When I started at BCG [Boston Consulting Group] way back in 1980, two years after I started, my father was diagnosed with cancer and dying. I was told he would die within six months. BCG out of the blue called and gave me six months paid leave.

This is in 1982 when I was perhaps one of a handful of women in BCG. My father died in three months. Three months and one day I went back to work. I didn’t abuse a paid leave. But without that, I wouldn’t have had a job. We wouldn’t have had my paycheck to keep the family going. And I had no idea what we were going to do, but I did know that I had to take care of my dad, because he depended on me.

Similarly, when I had my child, having a child is a traumatic thing for the body, you need some weeks to recover. BCG gave me maternity leave, ABB [Asea Brown Boveri] gave me maternity leave, and I always came back ahead of time to work.

My point is, why is paid leave a subject that is so contentious? I don’t understand. To me, this is a human issue. It’s not an economic issue, it’s a human issue that of course costs some money. It can’t just be the big companies doing it and everybody else saying, “I’m not going to do it.” I think big companies, small and medium-size enterprises, governments, NGOs should all come together and say, “How are we going to make this paid leave work?”

And I think this is important because we want to have children, we want the country to have a higher fertility rate. 2.1 is the replacement rate, and we are sitting at 1.6. Let’s give them paid leave, let’s give them flexibility, let’s give them care and maybe they’ll end up differently.

Now I want to be honest, the challenging part is small and medium-size enterprises are saying, “How are we going to pay for paid leave? What are we going to do when people in our company go away and I only have five employees?” So it’s not no-brainer, this whole issue, but I think we should not dismiss the whole thing because it’s tough. That’s when all of us should come together and talk about, “What have other countries done with small and medium-size enterprises? How do we deal with government jobs? And how many companies should be doing it, not because government mandated it, because it’s the right thing to do for its employees?”

I know at PepsiCo, we gave 12 weeks paid leave for maternity and paternity care. And if you had sickness in the family, we looked upon that too as paid leave. That created loyalty with our employees. So I have no idea why this is being discussed with such emotion. I think it’s a subject that should be looked at logically, and a good answer gotten to fast, because we are only one of two countries in the world. I think the other’s Papua New Guinea that doesn’t provide paid leave. That’s not a great commentary.

ADI IGNATIUS: So however this issue plays out, it does seem like the nature of capitalism is changing, is evolving. If the period that’s coming to the end is a Milton Friedman shareholders-first era, we’re in a new one, and you helped advance this with your own approaches and calling for broader stakeholder capitalism. Where do you think we’re headed in terms of the new capitalist paradigm?

INDRA NOOYI: If you go back and read Milton Friedman, he also talked about duty of care to society. He never said, “Create shareholder value and destroy society.” He never said that. He never said that society’s problems are not yours. He said, “You’ve got to have a duty of care to society.” Somehow we’ve forgotten those words.

So let’s come and talk about what’s happening today. I think people are interpreting ESG as, “Oh my God, all those metrics. It’s a waste of time, we are taking the focus away from shareholder value and governance, and focusing on environmental and social.” Everybody’s pitching it as destruction of value. Dead wrong. I think the way we’ve got to look at it is, rather than look at it as, “Oh God, we have to report on 50 or 100 metrics,” which then ultimately leads to a company having a department that just worries about metrics.

INDRA NOOYI: Don’t do that. Look at the ESG metrics very carefully and say, “What handful of metrics impact our company and will make our company a better citizen in every country that we operate in?” And if that makes sense for you as a company to be sustainable, then it’s something you should focus on.

If it is second-tier or third-tier, park it aside for the moment. I’ll give you an example: human rights in the supply chain. Obviously we should care about human rights in the supply chain, because we don’t want to employ child labor in our operations. Somebody gave me the example and said, “Well, let’s take Bangladesh, a factory making apparel, children are working in the factory. Human rights in the supply chain, that’s a problem.” I agree, I don’t want children working in the factory, but if the children don’t exist in the factory when their parents or mothers in particular are working in the factory, they’re going to be out in the street because there’s no school for them to go to.

So can we build a school? Will governments allow us to build a school? So I think we need to have the second- and third-tier conversations about, “What is the impact of our business in countries in which we operate?” We cannot make money at the expense of some other human being being exploited. So ESG has got to be taken personally, not be viewed as, “Oh God, not another program, not another set of metrics we need to report on. These stakeholder policemen are going wacky and out of control.” Don’t look at it that way. Look, put yourself in the shoes of those people in the country, and walk a mile in the shoes of everyone, the NGOs who are pushing for all these actions.

ADI IGNATIUS: So let me go to a question that’s come in from a viewer. You’ve mentioned that one must lay stress on humanity while defining strategies. So the question is, “What role does empathy play in successful leadership?”

INDRA NOOYI: I mean today, the biggest one is talent. If I look across companies, industries, everybody’s looking for the next generation of talent, people who have the skills of the future. I don’t think we are hiring robots, I think we are hiring people, and we want their head, heart, and hands engaged in the business of the company. What we say is, “You’re a tool of the trade.” “No, we’re not, we’re an asset.” And this asset comes with the heart, comes with a family perhaps, comes with a community and the responsibilities that go with it. I don’t know why we cannot think of this employee as a sum total of the whole thing. So as we think about future of work, going back to that first question, Adi, how about if we design work and the work hours so that we finish the work day at three o’clock, enabling parents to pick up their kids from the bus? It makes a huge difference. (I couldn’t do it as a leader because we had no technology.) And then at six o’clock you can pick up doing all the stuff you could do remotely. But from the 3:00 to 6:00, you spend time with your kids, check on their homework, set them up, then you can work again if you want to. And a day a week if you want to work flexibly, because you want to take the kids out or you want to take them to the pediatrician, that’s fine.

But we have to start with the family structure and say, “How do we allow families to thrive? How do we allow both members of the family, the mother and the father if there’s two, or just a mother or whatever arrangement, how do we allow them to contribute to the economy and have a family?”

So let’s think like economists rather than making it a feminist issue. And if you think like an economist, we will put that family unit in the center of the discussions. And if we did that, perhaps that’s called empathy, but I look at it as hardcore economics, which could imply a little bit of empathy thrown into it because we are talking of the word family.

ADI IGNATIUS: A lot of the comments that are coming in, there are a lot of people who just say they admire you, and they admire you as a woman, as a leader, as a successful business person. I’ll put you on the spot, but if you’d be willing to share a crucible moment in your career that that made you who you are, that got you where you have gone?

INDRA NOOYI: My very appointment as a CEO was a crucible moment, Adi, because I never intended to be a CEO, I never thought I’d be a CEO. I was doing every job to the best of my ability. And as I always say, and I say in the book many times over, only in America will an immigrant from an emerging market, a woman of color, ascend to the CEO-ship of an iconic American company. And so the big crucible moments are: every mentor that stepped in to push me, promote me, develop me, criticize me and prop me up, leading to this big pivotal moment when I was announced as CEO, which even today in retrospect, I think is about the most incredible and incredulous moment in my life, because I never thought I’d be CEO, I never thought I was a candidate for CEO. And the fact that the board picked me, I was simply blown away.

ADI IGNATIUS: Here’s another viewer question. “What is your view on the Great Resignation?” And we haven’t really talked too much about talent, how power seems to have shifted maybe from the employer to the employee who feels empowered to make decisions, to vote with his or her feet. What’s your view on what’s happening with what we’re calling the Great Resignation?

INDRA NOOYI: Here I would strongly suggest that rather than just talking big globs and say, “2.8 million people have left the workforce. 2 million of them are women.” Instead of talking in big numbers, there’s a lot of research out there on specific reasons why people are leaving the workforce. And I think we should go and attack every one of those reasons and figure out what can be done through policy, what can be done through cooperation across companies, NGOs, governments, whatever. But the time has come not to talk about 2.8 million workers missing, but to start talking about individual cohort groups and what we need to do to help them, what’s bothering them?

They believe that the jobs they were in paid so little that it’s not worth the stress they went through with the pandemic to go back to those jobs. And also, many of those jobs, the work conditions weren’t great, at least that’s what the research is showing. Second, they don’t have childcare, because childcare costs have gone up. And they don’t have good care, and they can’t afford to pay for it. So they’re saying, “Where am I supposed to leave my kids?” The essential worker has no predictable hours. Most essential workers don’t have predictable work hours. Definitely no flexibility, but they don’t have predictable shift schedules. We may want to think about how to give them more predictability.

So I think the time has come to go through a detailed analysis on why they’re leaving and bit-by-bit start to address them, including what is it going to take in terms of a wage rate to keep them in the jobs.

And you run the math and a childcare worker makes $10 to $12 an hour. How can you live on $10 to $12 an hour? How can you bring your whole self to taking care of babies or senior citizens at $10 to $12 an hour? Especially, if you have to have another job working in a Starbucks or a fast-food restaurant to make ends meet. Then how are you supposed to go home and take care of your own kids and the older people in your house?

I think that this is a moment in time coming out of COVID, where we have to have these conversations in a much more granular, more deliberate way with an eye towards solutions, not an eye towards vilifying those people and say, “Oh, they’re lazy. They just don’t want to work. They just quit the workforce because benefits ran out.” Don’t put those labels on them. Let’s talk because, at the end of the day, it’s our way of life that was enabled by all of those people. The Great Resignation is what enabled our way of life or the “Great Resignators” if there’s a name like that.

ADI IGNATIUS: There is now. Looking back at your career at Pepsi, and that’s not very long ago, what are you most proud of? And is there anything you wouldn’t mind doing over if you had a chance?

INDRA NOOYI: I’m very proud of Performance with Purpose. At that time it was considered, “What the hell is she doing? She should just focus on brutal shareholder value,” even though PWP was performance first. Today, they might say, “She was prescient.” But those days it didn’t feel quite prescient given all the attacks, but that’s okay. I think when what you’re trying to change is the frame of a company you should be willing to take on that sort of criticism and attacks. I’m okay with it because my board was behind me and I was just fine with it. I feel proud about performance and purpose.

The other thing I feel very, very satisfied about is the amount of talent that we developed at PepsiCo. I think just on the last six years of my CEO-ship I have produced nine CEOs who’ve gone on to run big public companies or big parts of other companies in the corporate world. So I feel very, very good about the talent pool that was developed, and the fact that the board had such a robust succession pipeline to pick from for my successor, also made me feel very, very good about the process, the talent pool we had and the fact that the board picked the right people. So I feel very good about those things.

The do-over: Even though I was CEO for 12 years, there were really two eras. Era one was the first six years. Managing through the financial crisis, globalizing the company, fixing the problems with the North American bottlers, which was quite a thorny issue we had. That was the first six years. It was tough work but had to get done, and also build the new capabilities to implement performance and purpose which had articulated. The second six years was realizing the results from it.

What would I have liked to have done over? I’d have liked to wave the wand and had the financial crisis go away because that was a very disruptive couple of years in the life of any company. And I would’ve loved for our problems with bottlers to be addressed with conversation or dialogue or something simple as opposed to having to buy them back and integrate them and really create a new company. And so my two six-year terms were marked by different jolts to the system, but I can’t do it over, but I wish it was different.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, no, that’s a good answer. Last question. And I try to ask this each week of our guest. What is the key to successful innovation?

INDRA NOOYI: Successful innovation should do a few things. One, it should drive the top line. If not immediately, it should drive the top line over the next two or three years. Revenue top line. Preferably, it gives you some price realization. Good innovation should lead to price realization.

But the most important thing is, if it’s truly innovative, it leads to many more line extensions and offshoots downstream. That to me is great innovation. I always say you innovate for platform, which gives you years of spinoffs of innovation from that platform that gives you price realization because the products have differentiation and it really is lasting in the company. So the best example is Tostitos Scoops. It was a brand new platform where you shape the Tostitos to scoop in salsas. But that scoop technology now said you can launch a whole range of dips with it and it doesn’t have to be a corn scoop. It can be made in any substrate. So it gives us years of innovation and runway. And so it’s thinking about platforms, spinoffs, and price realization. Stickiness.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, Indra, I want to thank you. It was a fantastic conversation. It’s always great to hear from you. Again, Indra Nooyi, the former CEO and chair of Pepsi and author of a brand new memoir called My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future. It’s a great read. So I urge people to pick that up.