Indra Nooyi: making progress and profits at Pepsi

Indra Nooyi put the principles of stakeholder capitalism into practice at the soft-drink giant before it was fashionable and grew returns for shareholders too.

Indra Nooyi, Pepsico chair
(Image credit: © Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

“I’ve occasionally wondered whether there’s something about Indians that makes them particularly suited to American corporate life,” says Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. The roll-call of Indian-born CEOs who have run prominent US companies is impressive. Yet most are men. The first woman to break the mold is former PepsiCo boss Indra Nooyi.

Indian-born Nooyi has just published a memoir, My Life in Full, which she hopes will inspire more women to reach the top echelons, says the Financial Times. When she became PepsiCo’s CEO in 2006, Nooyi was one of only 11 women running a Fortune 500 company. Things have improved since, but not by much. More than 90% of America’s biggest listed businesses are still run by men. Few women who join companies like PepsiCo reach even the second or third tier of management. They face unconscious bias and unequal pay, she says. Then “the biological clock and career clock are in conflict with each other”. Many have no choice but to “opt out of this incredible rat race”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.