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  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, courtesy of the author; 23, 24, 25 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, by Joe Vericker/Photobureau; 32 PepsiCo, Inc., 2017 Annual Report Cover; 33, by Andy Ryan; 34, courtesy of Reckitt Benckiser; 35, a photo taken on the stage at Tina Brown’s 2016 Women in the World conference, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, Indra Nooyi, and Norah O’Donnell; 36, courtesy of Centerview Partners; 37, courtesy of Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball. Visit MLB.com; 38, courtesy of the Nelson Mandela Foundation; 39, by Jon R. Friedman.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nooyi, Indra K., author.

  Title: My life in full : work, family, and our future / Indra K. Nooyi.

  Description: New York : Portfolio, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021011930 (print) | LCCN 2021011931 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593191798 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593191804 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nooyi, Indra K. | Women executives—India—Biography. | Work and family—India. | Women—Education—India. | Women—Employment—India. | India—Social life and customs.

  Classification: LCC HD6054.4.I5 N66 2021 (print) | LCC HD6054.4.I5 (ebook) | DDC 338.7/66362092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011930

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011931

  ISBN 9780593421321 (international edition)

  Cover photograph © Annie Leibovitz, 2021

  Book design by Jessica Shatan Heslin/Studio Shatan, Inc., adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

  For my husband, Raj,

  My children, Preetha and Tara,

  My parents,

  My thatha

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part I

  Growing Up

  Part II

  Finding My Footing

  Part III

  The PepsiCo Years

  Part IV

  Looking Ahead

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  One foggy Tuesday in November 2009, 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—Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo—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—spontaneous kindness from the leaders of the two great countries that have given me so much. I am still the girl who grew up in a close family in Madras, in the South of India, and I am deeply connected to the lessons and culture of my youth. I am also the woman who arrived in the US at age twenty-three to study and work and, somehow, rose to lead an iconic company, a journey that I believe is possible only in America. I belong in both worlds.

  Looking back, I see how my life is full of this kind of duality—competing forces that have pushed and pulled me from one chapter to another. And I see how this is true of everyone. We are all balancing, juggling, compromising, doing our best to find our place, move ahead, and manage our relationships and responsibilities. It’s not easy in a society that changes very fast yet sticks to some age-old habits and rules of behavior that feel out of our control.

  The twin demands that define me have always been my family and my work. I joined PepsiCo, in 1994, in part because the company’s headquarters were close to my house. I had two daughters, ages ten and one-and-a-half at the time, and a husband whose office was nearby. PepsiCo’s job offer made sense, we thought, because the commute was short. I’d be able to drive to the school or home to the baby in fifteen minutes. Of course, this is not the only reason I chose PepsiCo, an exuberant, optimistic company that I wholeheartedly enjoyed from the moment I walked in. I also felt that PepsiCo was a place that was open to changing with the times.

  That was important. I was female, an immigrant, and a person of color entering an executive floor where I was different from everyone else. My career had started when the dynamics between women and men at work were not the same as they are now. In fourteen years as a consultant and corporate strategist, I had never had a woman boss. I had no female mentors. I wasn’t upset when I was excluded from the customs of male power; I was just happy to be included at all. But by the time I got to PepsiCo, waves of educated, ambitious women were pouring into the workforce, and I could sense the atmosphere changing. The competition between men and women was becoming more acute, and, in the subsequent decades, women have altered the game in ways that would have been unthinkable to me early on. As a business leader, I always tried to anticipate and respond to the shifting culture. As a woman and the mother of girls, I wanted to do everything possible to encourage it.

  As my career progressed, and my children grew up, I wrestled with the ever-present conflicts of working motherhood. For fifteen years, I kept a whiteboard in my office that only my daughters could write on or erase. Over time, that board was a comforting kaleidoscope of doodles and messages, a constant reminder of the people closest to me. When I moved out of my office, I kept a canvas replica of its last iteration: “Hey Mom, I love you very, very much. XOXOXOX.” “Hang in there. Never forget that you have people that love you!” “Have a great day!” “Hey Mom, you are the absolute best! Keep doing what you are doing!” the image exclaims, with cartoon characters and pictures of suns and clouds, all in green and blue dry-erase marker.

  As a high-profile female CEO, I was asked over and over to discuss work and family conflicts in front of large audiences. I once commented that I wasn’t sure my daughters thought I was a good mother—don’t all moms feel that way sometimes?—and an Indian TV network produced a full-hour prime-time discussion program, without me, on what Indra Nooyi said about working women.

  Over the years, I met thousands of people worried about how to be true to their families, their jobs, and their ambitions to be good citizens. This engagement had a great impact on me; I learned and absorbed the details at a visceral level. I thought about how family is such a powerful source of human strength but realized that creating and nurturing families is a source of stress for so many.

  At the same time, I was among a vaunted group of global CEOs regularly invited into rooms with the most influential leaders on the planet. And I came to notice that the painful stories about how people—especially women—struggle to blend their lives and livelihoods were entirely absent in those rooms. The titans of industry, politics, and economics talked about advancing the world through finance, technology, and flying to Mars. Family—the actual messy, delightful, difficult, and treasured core of how most of us live—was fringe.

  This discon
nect has profound consequences. Our failure to address work and family pressures in the senior reaches of global decision-making restrains hundreds of millions of women every day, not only from rising and leading, but also from blending a satisfying career with a healthy partnership and motherhood. In a prosperous marketplace, we need all women to have the choice to work in paid jobs outside the home and for our social and economic infrastructure to entirely support that choice. Women’s financial independence and security, so central to their equality, are at stake.

  More broadly, ignoring the fact that the work world is still largely skewed toward the “ideal worker” of yore—an unencumbered male breadwinner—depletes us all. Men, too. Companies lose out because productivity, innovation, and profit suffer when so many employees feel they can’t bring their whole selves to work. Families lose out because they spend so much energy coping with old systems, from short school hours to a lack of parental leave or elder care, that don’t mesh with their reality.

  And, of course, the entire global community suffers. Many young people, worried about how they will manage it all, are choosing not to have children. This could not only have dire economic consequences in the decades to come, but, on a very personal note, I find this detail sad. With everything I have accomplished, my greatest joy was having children, and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss the experience if they want it.

  I believe that we must address the work and family conundrum by focusing on our infrastructure around “care” with an energy and ingenuity like never before. We should consider this a moonshot, starting with ensuring that every worker has access to paid leave, flexibility, and predictability to help them handle the ebb and flow of work and family life, and then moving fast to develop the most innovative and comprehensive childcare and eldercare solutions that our greatest minds can devise.

  This mission will require leadership that we don’t often see. I think the fundamental role of a leader is to look for ways to shape the decades ahead, not just react to the present, and to help others accept the discomfort of disruptions to the status quo. We need the wisdom of business leaders, policy makers, and all women and men passionate about easing the work and family burden to come together here. With a can-do sense of optimism and a must-do sense of responsibility, we can transform our society.

  Transformation is difficult, but I have learned that with courage and persistence—and the inevitable give-and-take—it can happen. When I became PepsiCo’s CEO, in 2006, I laid out an extremely ambitious plan to address the underlying tensions in a company still rooted in selling soda and chips. I knew we had to balance supporting our prized Pepsi-Cola and Doritos brands with a full-throttle effort to make and market more healthy products. We had to keep stocking stores and pantries with convenient, delicious snacks and beverages but account for the environmental impact of that growth. We had to attract and retain the very best thinkers in their fields but ensure that PepsiCo was also a terrific place to work for a quarter of a million people. I called this mission Performance with Purpose, and, for a dozen years, I weighed every decision against these measures, making constant trade-offs to achieve a more sustainable, contemporary organization.

  In the months before I left PepsiCo, in 2018, I thought about how I would contribute in the years ahead, knowing that I am one in a chain of woman leaders who can help move us forward for generations to come. I set out to write a book and insisted to all around me that it would not be a memoir. Instead, I thought, I would devote every ounce of my experience and intellect to a manual for fixing how we mix work and family.

  The book you hold is not that book.

  First, I soon found that the research on work and family has been done. From every angle, in every corner of the world, the arguments and ideas for supporting families—from maternity leave to early childhood education to multigenerational living—have been compiled, analyzed, scored, and debated by brilliant minds. I didn’t need to repeat all that.

  Second, everything I bring to this issue, I know now, comes from my own life in full.

  Part I

  Growing Up

  1

  The women’s living room in my childhood home had a single piece of furniture—a huge rosewood swing with four long chains that were anchored into the ceiling when my grandfather built the house, on a leafy road in Madras, India, in 1939.

  That swing, with its gentle glide back and forth in the South Indian heat, set the stage for a million stories. My mother, her sisters, and her cousins—wearing simple saris in fuchsia, blue, or yellow—rocked on it in the late afternoon with cups of sweet, milky coffee, their bare feet stretched to the floor to keep it moving. They planned meals, compared their children’s grades, and pored over Indian horoscopes to find suitable matches for their daughters or the other young people in their extensive family networks. They discussed politics, food, local gossip, clothes, religion, music, and books. They were loud, talked over one another, and moved the conversation along.

  From my earliest days, I played on the swing with my older sister, Chandrika, and my younger brother, Nandu. We swayed and sang our school songs: “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” “The Woodpecker Song,” “My Grandfather’s Clock,” or the Beatles, Cliff Richard, or Beach Boys tunes we’d heard on the radio: “Eight Days a Week,” “Bachelor Boy,” “Barbara Ann.” We snoozed; we tussled. We read British children’s novels by Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, and Frank Richards. We fell onto the shiny red-tiled floor and scrambled back on.

  Ours was the big, airy house where a dozen cousins would gather for festivals and holidays. The swing was a set piece for elaborate plays we wrote and performed, based on anything that caught our fancy. Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles gathered to watch, holding bits of torn newspaper with the words one ticket scrawled on them. Our relatives felt free to critique our shows or to start chatting or simply walk away. My childhood was not a world of “Great job!” It was more like “That was so-so” or “Is this the best you can do?” We were accustomed to honesty, not false encouragement.

  The reviews didn’t matter on those busy, happy days. We felt important. We were in motion, laughing and carrying on to our next game. We played hide-and-seek, we climbed trees, and picked the mangoes and guavas that grew in the garden surrounding the house. We ate on the floor, sitting cross-legged in a circle, with our mothers in the center ladling sambar sadam and thayir sadam—lentil stew and curds mixed with rice—from clay tureens and dishing out Indian pickles onto banana leaves that served as plates.

  In the evenings when the cousins were visiting, the swing was dismantled—the great, shiny-wood plank unhitched from the silver-colored chains and carried to the back porch to be stored overnight. Then we’d line up in the same space to sleep, boys and girls in a row on a large, colorful mat, each with our own pillow and cotton sheet. Sometimes, we’d be under a mosquito net. If the power was on, a fan turned lazily overhead, pretending to break the heat when the overnight temperature was 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29.5 degrees Celsius). We’d sprinkle water on the floor around us, hoping its evaporation would cool the place.

  Like many houses in India at the time, Lakshmi Nilayam, as our house was named, also had a men’s living room—a vast hall with big square windows directly off the entry portico, where it was easy to keep an eye on who came and went.

  My paternal grandfather, a retired district judge, had used all his savings to design and construct this grand, two-story residence, with its terrace and balconies. But he spent all his time in the men’s living room, reading newspapers and books and lounging in a large easy chair with a canvas seat. He slept on a carved-wood divan with deep-blue upholstery.

  He warmly welcomed visitors, who almost always dropped by unannounced. The men would gather on the room’s two large sofas and talk about world affairs, local politics, or current issues. They had strong points of view about what government or companies should be doing to help citizens. They spoke in Tamil
or in English, often alternating between the two. Children came and went—hanging out, reading, or working on homework. I never saw a woman sit in that room in front of my grandfather, whom I called Thatha. My mother was always in and out of the room, serving coffee and snacks to visitors or tidying up.

  The Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Dictionary, both bound in burgundy leather, lay on a wooden side table. Thatha once had my sister and me read Nicholas Nickleby, the almost one-thousand-page novel by Charles Dickens. Every few chapters he’d take the book, point to a page, and ask, “What’s the meaning of this word?” If I didn’t know, he’d say, “But you said you’d read these pages.” Then I’d have to look up the word and write two sentences to show I understood it.

  I adored and revered Thatha, whose full name was A. Narayana Sarma. He was born in 1883 in Palghat, in the state of Kerala, which, under the British, was part of the Madras Presidency. He was already in his late seventies when I was a schoolgirl, a slight man of five feet seven or so with thick bifocal glasses, regal, very firm, and very kind. He dressed in a perfectly pressed white dhoti and a light-colored half-sleeve shirt. When he talked, no one else did. He had studied math and law and, for decades, had presided over both civil and criminal cases. His marriage was puzzling to me. My grandparents had eight kids, but when I knew my grandmother before she died, they never seemed to speak. They lived in different parts of the house. He was entirely dedicated to his young grandchildren, introducing us to ever more sophisticated books and ideas, explaining geometry theorems, and pressing for detail and clarity on our school efforts.

  I was never in doubt that the head of the household—and of the family—resided in the men’s living room.

  But the heart and soul of our lively existence was down the hall, in the open space with the red-tiled floor and the gigantic rosewood swing. That’s where my mother kept the household running, with the help of Shakuntala, a young woman who did the dishes at the outdoor sink and mopped the floors.