Indra Nooyi

Long before the current generation of Indian-American chief executives filled the covers of business magazines, there was Indra Nooyi — the woman who ran one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world for twelve years, and who, for a generation of Indian women contemplating a corporate life in the West, was not one role model among several but the proof that the path existed at all.

A Madras childhood of ambition

She was born Indra Krishnamurthy on 28 October 1955 in Madras, into a middle-class Tamil Brahmin family. Her upbringing was conservative in its structure and quietly radical in its expectations: she has often described how her mother would set the daughters a challenge at the dinner table each night, asking them to give a speech on what they would do if they were Prime Minister or Chief Minister, and then picking a winner. She played cricket, and she played guitar in an all-girl rock band in Madras — details that sit unexpectedly beside the future Fortune 500 chief executive.

She took a degree in physics, chemistry and mathematics at Madras Christian College, and then a place at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, one of the country's most competitive business schools. After a few years working in India, she made the decisive move: in 1978 she was admitted to the Yale School of Management, and she left for the United States.

The immigrant's thin wallet

Nooyi's American beginning was the classic immigrant story, without gloss. Money was tight; to afford her first professional wardrobe for job interviews she worked the overnight shift as a receptionist in a college dormitory. She has spoken candidly about the anxiety of those years and the distance between the confident executive she became and the frightened graduate student she was.

The rise, and PepsiCo

After Yale she rose quickly through strategy roles at the Boston Consulting Group, and then at Motorola and the engineering conglomerate ABB, before joining PepsiCo in 1994 as its chief strategist. There she engineered the moves that defined the modern company: spinning off the restaurant chains — Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell — to focus the business; acquiring the juice company Tropicana; and above all leading the 2001 merger with Quaker Oats, which brought PepsiCo the enormously valuable Gatorade sports-drink brand. She became chief financial officer, then president, and in 2006 chief executive officer — one of very few women, and the first immigrant woman of colour, to lead a corporation of that size, which she did for twelve years, until 2018.

Performance with Purpose

Her signature idea was ahead of its time and cost her, internally, before it vindicated her. She called it "Performance with Purpose," and it pushed the snacks-and-soda giant toward healthier products, reduced sugar and salt, water and energy conservation, and better treatment of its workforce — years before "environmental, social and governance" became standard corporate language. She was mocked and second-guessed for it by investors focused on the next quarter, and she held the line; over her tenure PepsiCo's revenue grew by roughly eighty per cent, and the strategy came to look prescient.

After the corner office

Since stepping down in 2018 she has served on the boards of Amazon and, notably, the International Cricket Council, sitting on the governing body of the game she grew up loving. She published a bestselling memoir, My Life in Full, in 2021 — as much a manifesto about the missing infrastructure of care for working parents as a life story — and she has campaigned publicly for paid leave and childcare, arguing from her own experience of trying to run a global company while raising two daughters. India awarded her the Padma Bhushan in 2007.

Why the Roll remembers her

Nooyi belongs on this Roll because she came first, and because she carried the burden of being first with visible grace. When she took the helm of PepsiCo there was no template for a woman who had grown up in a conservative household in Madras running an American corporate giant; she became the template. For two decades of Indian women entering Western corporate life — and for Indian-American executives of both sexes who followed her into the chief executive's chair — she was the standing proof that the ceiling could be broken and the company run well on the other side of it. The girl who gave dinner-table speeches about being Prime Minister ended up leading an enterprise larger than many nations' economies, and used the position to argue that business owed something back to the people and the planet it depended on.

The battles behind the boardroom

Nooyi's tenure was not a smooth coronation; she fought for her strategy against powerful sceptics. As she steered PepsiCo toward healthier products under the "Performance with Purpose" banner, the activist investor Nelson Peltz took a large stake and campaigned publicly to break the company in two, splitting the snacks from the drinks. Nooyi resisted the pressure and kept the company whole, and the results eventually vindicated her patience. She also brought an unusual instinct to a food-and-drink giant: she made design a corporate priority, hiring a chief design officer and pushing the company to think about how its products looked and felt, not merely how they tasted.

The elder stateswoman

Since leaving PepsiCo, Nooyi has become one of American business's most sought-after voices. She joined the boards of Amazon and the International Cricket Council, co-chaired a commission to reopen New York State after the pandemic, and has championed the cause closest to her own experience — the missing infrastructure of paid leave and childcare that makes it so hard for women to combine a career with a family. Her 2021 memoir My Life in Full was as much an argument about that unfinished business as a personal history. India honoured her with the Padma Bhushan, and business schools study her tenure as a case in leading a legacy company through wrenching change. The girl who gave dinner-table speeches about being Prime Minister ended by running an enterprise larger than many nations' economies, and by insisting, against the market's short-term instincts, that a great company owes something back to the people and the planet it depends on.