Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi Believes in Showing Team Appreciation

Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico, No. 44 of the 1,000 Largest Public/Private Companies

“People are everything,” Indra Nooyi has been known to say. “The success of an enterprise usually comes down to one thing: the team.” To keep her team happy and motivated, Nooyi sends out thank you letters to the parents of her employees, saying how proud the company is for their children’s contributions. This idea came when her own parents received accolades after Nooyi became CEO of Pepsi.

“A steady stream of family and friends came into the house,” Business Insider reports. “They’d go right over to my mother and say, ‘Congratulations’. Or ‘You did such a good job raising Indra.’”

Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women, Nooyi recently offered IndiaTimes 7 lessons for leadership. In particular, she notes, “we have one mouth and two ears,” so we, as leaders, should “listen more and talk less.”

She also says CEOs should never stop learning. You cannot afford to stop learning. Despite being a CEO, Nooyi likes to learn things that don’t fall in her expertise. She likes to talk to customers, field salespeople and all her employees and absorb information from a diverse group of sources.

Indra Nooyi is No. 44 on Chief Executive and RHR International’s ranking of top 1,000 public and private companies.

Facts about Indra Nooyi
Chairman (since May 2, 2007) and CEO (since October 1st, 2006), PepsiCo

Previous Position: President and CFO

Company start date: 1994

First Position at Company: SVP, Strategic Planning

Age: 61

Education: B.S. from Madras Christian College, an M.B.A from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and a Master of Public and Private Management from Yale University.