In her telling, Indra Nooyi’s decision to join Pepsi out of graduate school at Yale came after a strong pitch by its then-CEO Wayne Calloway, who wanted to woo her away from an offer from GE.
“I hear you’re going to join GE. It’s a great company, and Jack Welch is a great CEO. But my need at Pepsi is greater than Jack’s,” she recalls him saying to her. “We don’t have somebody like you here, and you’ll make a bigger difference at PepsiCo.”
A woman of Indian descent would bring a much-needed perspective to the company’s senior management, Nooyi thought.
When Nooyi became CEO in 2006, that worldview helped transform the food and beverage giant, which grew into new categories, expanded its healthy offerings, and stayed ahead of ever-changing consumer taste.
The gambit was a big risk. The idea of PepsiCo selling Kombucha raised a lot of eyebrows.
“I’m not here to tell you what to eat or drink. My job is to give you a choice of products, between fun for you, better for you and good for you,” she told The New York Times in 2019.
Ultimately, it paid off. During her tenure, the company’s sales have grown 80 percent.
She may be headed to Washington next. Nooyi is frequently mentioned as a potential Cabinet member in Democratic administrations.
— Niv Elis
photo: Getty Images