Indra Nooyi at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2008, when she was PepsiCo's chairman and CEO. Photo: Andy Mettler, World Economic Forum / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Indra Nooyi spent 24 years at PepsiCo, the last dozen as chief executive, and left in 2018 having reshaped the company’s portfolio and its public language about food. Born in Madras, now Chennai, India, she became one of the most closely watched executives in American business.
From Madras to Yale
Nooyi was born Indra Krishnamurthy on Oct. 28, 1955, the second of three children. Her father worked at the State Bank of Hyderabad and her mother was a homemaker. She attended Holy Angels Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School in Madras, then took bachelor’s degrees in physics, chemistry and mathematics at Madras Christian College in 1975.
A postgraduate diploma from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta followed in 1976. She worked in India as a product manager at Johnson & Johnson and at Beardsell Ltd. before heading to the United States. She was admitted to the Yale School of Management in 1978 and earned a master’s degree in public and private management in 1980.
Her early U.S. career was in strategy. She joined Boston Consulting Group in 1980, then held a corporate strategy and planning post at Motorola and later worked at Asea Brown Boveri.
Climbing at PepsiCo
PepsiCo hired her in 1994 as senior vice president for strategic planning. From 1996 she led corporate strategy and development, and in 1997 the company spun off its restaurant business as Tricon, now Yum! Brands, the parent of Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell. Proceeds from the separation helped pay for faster share buybacks.
Two deals defined the period that followed. PepsiCo bought Tropicana in 1998 for $3.3 billion, a purchase that drew resistance from some inside the company and from Wall Street critics. In 2001 it merged with Quaker Oats, which brought Gatorade into the fold; at the time the sports drink held about 80 percent of its category’s sales.
Nooyi became chief financial officer in February 2000. In 2001 she was named president and CFO and joined the board. In 2006 she succeeded Steven Reinemund as CEO, the fifth in the company’s 44-year history. By the account in her Wikipedia biography, PepsiCo’s annual net profit rose from $2.7 billion to $6.5 billion over her tenure.
Performance with Purpose
As CEO she framed the company’s direction as “Performance with Purpose,” a strategy that paired growth targets with goals for health, the environment and the workforce. Products were sorted into three groups, “fun for you,” “better for you” and “good for you,” and investment shifted toward the healthier categories. Packaging redesign, water conservation, renewable energy and recycling were part of the same push.
Not every move held. PepsiCo removed aspartame from Diet Pepsi in 2015 and brought it back in 2016 after customers objected.
On Aug. 6, 2018, she announced she would step down. Ramon Laguarta took over as CEO on Oct. 3, 2018, and she remained chair until early 2019. Her stretch as CEO ran roughly seven years longer than the average for large companies, according to an Equilar study cited in her biography.
After PepsiCo
Nooyi has kept a heavy schedule of board and civic work. She joined the International Cricket Council in June 2018 as its first independent female director, and Amazon’s board in February 2019. She served on the Schlumberger board from April 2015 to April 2020 and earlier chaired the U.S.-India Business Council. She has also been involved with the World Economic Forum, the International Rescue Committee, Catalyst and Lincoln Center, among others.
She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2019 she became co-director of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, a public-private partnership, and in 2020 she co-chaired the state’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group with Yale epidemiologist Dr. Albert Ko during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2016 she made a gift to the Yale School of Management that made her the school’s largest alumni donor. It endowed a deanship, which her biography describes as a first for a highly ranked business school with a woman donor. Her honors include the Padma Bhushan from the Indian government in 2007, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2017 and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2021. Fortune ranked her first on its Most Powerful Women in Business list from 2006 through 2010. Among her honorary degrees is one from the State University of New York at Purchase in 2015.
Her 2021 memoir, My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future, covers her career and family life. She married Raj K. Nooyi in 1981, and they have two daughters.
Source: Wikipedia, Indra Nooyi.
