“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.
CEO Lars Petersen shares how Fujifilm took advantage of technological competencies to pivot and build…
When results wobble, elite teams don’t grit their teeth—they rely on conditions built long before…
The rapidly spreading autonomous agentic AI system highlights how agent-based technologies are advancing faster than…
When work swallows everything, it’s not a badge of honor—it’s a warning. In this week’s…
How Shivani Dhamija shut down a failing concept, pivoted to packaged foods and built Shivani’s…
A new survey examines how public and private companies manage short-term demands against long-term strategy—and…