From her time in a rock band to her first, lonely meal in the US, former PepsiCo CEO @IndraNooyi opened up to Brut about her life and work...
@HachetteIndia
@HachetteIndia
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00You know, many men that I know would just yell and scream four letter words, but not me. I couldn't do that.
00:05So I take the bread slice, put a tomato on it, squash it on it, and put some chips on that and try to mimic what I was eating in Madras.
00:21I think in the 60s and 70s, everybody wanted to be a rock star, and I was no different.
00:26I was thrilled to be on stage performing, but more interesting was the aunts and uncles and my parents humming the tunes that we used to sing all around the house.
00:38So Carnatic music was now augmented with good rock and roll songs.
00:42It was a great experience in retrospect.
00:47You know, it was the first women's cricket team out of Madras Christian College and among the first two or three cricket teams in the city of Madras.
00:54And what was interesting is the boys, all the male teachers, all the coaches, everybody decided to help us be successful.
01:02And even though we didn't have fancy equipment and we all borrowed whites from our parents, especially our brothers and fathers, and wore them onto the field,
01:12we just felt empowered and felt great because we were not playing with a different ball.
01:16We were playing the regular cricket ball, regular cricket equipment and on a regular field.
01:22So it felt like we had arrived.
01:27It was great to be able to give women more freedom, because I grew up at a time when there was no packaged feminine protection.
01:36But in those early days, we were not allowed to advertise feminine protection.
01:40So all that you could show was women playing tennis or running or volleyball or something like that by implication to say they are wearing stay free and they're doing whatever they want.
01:50But, you know, it was interesting because it taught us a lot when you have to go from school to school, home to home,
01:56convincing mothers to pay for personal protection for their daughters and for daughters to ask their mothers for money because all of a sudden you could be in class longer.
02:08You don't have to be worried about accidents when you're trying to convince both sides of the equation to ask and go buy personal protection.
02:17That's a whole different level of marketing, which I think I learned a lot from and I grew as a marketer as a consequence.
02:28Well, you know, remember, I'm coming off being in India all my life at that point, and I'm a vegetarian, a South Indian vegetarian who grew up with rice and sambar and rasam and yogurt rice.
02:41So that's who I was.
02:43I never changed.
02:44So I come here.
02:45First of all, none of my familiar foods are anywhere around where I am.
02:51And the staple for any Tamilian girl is rice and yogurt.
02:56When in doubt, eat rice and yogurt.
02:58So I go to the store.
02:59I'm looking for rice and I don't know how to cook it because I don't have any pots and pans.
03:03So there goes the rice.
03:06So I look for curds, which is what yogurt was called in Madras and I don't see anything called curds.
03:13And I'm terrified because I have no idea how to shop and stuff.
03:16So I say, OK, let me go to the next thing that looks familiar, a loaf of bread.
03:22I know that typically a sandwich is eaten with some sliced tomatoes, but I don't have a knife to slice these tomatoes.
03:28But I need chips because I was used to chips or aplam as we say in Madras growing up.
03:34So I take the bread slice, put a tomato, squash it on it and put some chips on that and try to mimic what I was eating in Madras.
03:44And I missed the spice.
03:46I missed the foods.
03:47And it's amazing how growing up in your cultures and food are all so interlinked.
03:55So the first few days in the US, if I missed one thing, it was the familiar foods, which deepened the loneliness, if you want to call it that.
04:05It's not that I asked, but I could spend a night in jail.
04:10I just there was no room available around the town in Wisconsin that I was doing a consulting assignment for because there was a convention going on.
04:19And for many miles around the town, there was no room available.
04:22So I had to drive back to Chicago and then come back the next day.
04:26It's like a three and a half hour drive.
04:28So I was speeding to Chicago so I could get home and then turn around, drive back in the morning.
04:33And I got stopped by a policeman who was very polite, very nice.
04:38And he said, sorry, ma'am, you were speeding.
04:40And I said, yes, I was speeding.
04:41I'm very sorry.
04:42I was rushing to Chicago to spend the night at home and come back in the morning because there's no hotel room around here.
04:48And he understood because the convention was very popular.
04:51And he said, well, it's like, you know, whatever dollars and fine.
04:55We only paid the visa.
04:57I only had American Express.
04:59So he said, follow me to the police station.
05:01I go there and they're trying to figure out how to get me to pay the fine.
05:05I'm trying to call my husband to ship some money over the next day.
05:08But what happens this evening?
05:11Then as I looked over, I saw a beautiful jail cell, very nicely furnished.
05:15I don't think it's ever been used.
05:17So I said, look, since I don't have the money and it's not going to arrive until tomorrow and I only have an American Express, I don't have a checkbook with me.
05:26Why don't I just spend the night in your jail cell?
05:28And tomorrow morning, my husband will be here with the money and we'll be all set.
05:33When I suggested that, they started laughing and they said, go home and bring the money to us tomorrow.
05:41You're in the public eye all the time.
05:44Everybody's evaluating you, investors, media evaluating you.
05:48And employees are sitting there saying, what is our CEO trying to do with the company?
05:52Do I buy into it?
05:54Has she convinced me?
05:56The leaders are saying, is she taking us to a new and better place?
06:00So there's a lot of people around you, some of whom are supporters, some of whom are detractors, some of those sitting in the wall.
06:08So what you've got to do is bring them all on your side with the message that resonates with all of them.
06:15And then somehow keep a steady hand and make sure the company moves forward while all the time worrying about what the critics are going to say.
06:25It's very hard and all amplified by the fact that I was a immigrant woman of color running this iconic company and trying to effect a transformation.
06:38Just getting this transformation done was rewarding.
06:40But I have to tell you, anybody who has the opportunity to lead a large organization, a large division, a large business, whatever it is, should consider it a tremendous privilege.
06:52So you've got to take the job very, very seriously and realize that you have to leave whatever you've got better off than it was when you got it.
07:03So you've got to run whatever you're running for the future, not just for today.
07:12But, you know, sometimes you think that what you're trying to do is so obvious, everybody should get it.
07:18I'll give you a simple example.
07:20When I was trying to shift the portfolio to healthier products, I found that all the people that I was trying to convince had already shifted their eating and drinking habits to healthier products.
07:31Yet they were the very people who were questioning what I was doing.
07:34That used to frustrate me.
07:36As a leader, as a CEO in the public domain, you absolutely cannot show your frustration in public.
07:42You have to remain cool and calm and collected.
07:45And sometimes you just go into your room and shut the door and, you know, just let out your frustration in private.
07:52You know, many men that I know just yell and scream four-letter words, but not me.
07:57I couldn't do that because it just wouldn't be becoming.
07:59And people would talk about a woman doing that as if it was a terrible thing she did.
08:05So I just go into my office, shut the door.
08:07I'd go to my bathroom and just vent my frustration out and then put on some makeup and come back up.
08:14That's par for the course, to be honest.
08:19And I bought my first car, a Toyota Camry, way back when.
08:24I thought that I had arrived because at that time it was a large portion of my income.
08:30And my husband and I were determined never to take loans.
08:33We wanted to be debt-free always.
08:36And so that first car I bought for myself, I thought that was an extremely luxury purchase, but necessary purchase.
08:48And it felt good, felt a little scared because we were spending a lot of money on it.
08:52But, you know, we moved little by little by little to higher levels of luxury.
08:56But that was my first luxury purchase.
09:02I think it's in our DNA.
09:04I think guilt is encoded in our DNA.
09:07And the only way we're going to get out of it is if companies, governments, communities, families all help us build an infrastructure
09:16and explicitly endorse us when we go out to work and bring in a paycheck for the betterment of the family.
09:23And don't throw in barbs, whether through TV shows or newspaper articles or criticism at home that things are not going well because you're working.
09:33There's a lot of that that goes on.
09:34Subtle barbs, subtle insults, all of that has to change.
09:38My hope is that by the time the Gen Z's reach motherhood and have their kids, life will change and they won't be living with as much guilt as my generation did.