Indra Nooyi - My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future

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 groups progress, and President Obama began introducing the American team to his Indian counterpart. When he got to meIndra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCoPrime 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!

Its a moment I never forgetspontaneous 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 dualitycompeting 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. Its 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 companys 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. PepsiCos job offer made sense, we thought, because the commute was short. Id 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 wasnt 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 wasnt sure my daughters thought I was a good motherdont 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 peopleespecially womenstruggle 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. Familythe actual messy, delightful, difficult, and treasured core of how most of us livewas fringe.

This disconnect 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. Womens financial independence and security, so central to their equality, are at stake.