Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 316. “I Wasn’t Stupid Enough to Say This Could Be Done Overnight” About this episode Indra Nooyi became C. E. O. of PepsiCo just in time for a global financial meltdown. She also had a portfolio full of junk food just as the world decided that junk food is borderline toxic. Here's the story of how she overhauled that portfolio, stared down activist investors, and learned to "leave the crown in the garage." (Part 3 of a special series, "The Secret Life of C. E. O.'s")
Transcript 9,099 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring, great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life, like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.
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2:31 Speaker 01 I never thought of myself as a businessperson or an entrepreneur.
2:34 Speaker 02 But I was a tough farm girl.
2:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, I had an enormous thirst to get my hands on it. I think the board didn't have a stomach for it. I'm a consumated insider. From day one, you are the CEO.
2:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Hey, you. Yeah, I'm talking to you.
2:56 Stephen J. Dubner? You, for the purposes of this conversation, are on the board of directors of a large publicly traded firm. And you've just learned that your CEO will be stepping down. So do you replace them with a company insider or an outsider? In our last episode, we learned that boards are increasingly picking outsiders in the hope of shaking things up. You can't blame them. Just think of all the business school buzzwords about shifting the paradigm and thinking outside the box, pushing the envelope. But if what you really care about is the firm's success, rather than just ticking all the boxes on the buzzword menu, then you'll go with a stable and experienced insider. That's what the data show.
3:41 Speaker 04 An objective, smart, honest, intelligent insider is generally a much better pick than somebody from the outside.
3:48 Stephen J. Dubner? On today's episode, we will hear from one such insider who's been phenomenally successful. She runs a huge and hugely visible company, a company whose products you've likely encountered in the last day or two, if not the last hour or two. And yet, she herself isn't hugely visible, which seems to be just how she likes it. She's not flashy, just smart, reliable, forward-looking, just about any other positive adjective you can come up with. If CEOs got reviews, like on Amazon, this one would have five stars. From people who shop for CEOs for a living, like David Rubenstein of Carlyle Group. I've known her for quite a while. I think she's done a spectacular job.
4:29 Stephen J. Dubner? From other members of the relatively tiny group of women who've run big companies, like former tech CEO Carol Bartz.
4:37 Speaker 02 Anytime we can put up someone like her. Hold her up as an example of what females can do. And she did. She did things against the, I don't want to say advice, but against popular opinion. She's been very strong.
4:53 Stephen J. Dubner? And from professional CEO watchers like Jeff Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management.
4:59 Speaker 04 She wants to delegate authority for others to grow and allow them to make some mistakes that she knows she could have prevented. Indra doesn't want to tell you, but she generally is the smartest person in the room.
5:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Today on Freakonomics Radio, Indra Newy, the CEO of PepsiCo, on how to deal with activist investors who want you to split up the company.
5:21 Speaker 05 At the end of the day, we view them as free consulting. Painful, but free consulting.
5:27 Stephen J. Dubner? On how hard it can be to make your company change with the times.
5:30 Speaker 05 You know, when people say culture eats strategy, I lived it firsthand.
5:36 Stephen J. Dubner? On why you have to accept some people as they are.
5:39 Speaker 05 Because if we don't, we're going to start feeling resentful or angry with whatever's happening around us.
5:45 Stephen J. Dubner? And what happens when the CEO, especially the female CEO, goes home at night?
5:51 Speaker 05 Don't try to pretend that you're still the big boss because you're not.
6:10 Speaker 06 From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
6:30 Stephen J. Dubner? Indra Newy grew up in India and went to college and business school there. She played cricket and lead guitar in an all-girl rock band. In 1980, she came to the States and got a second master's degree at the Yale School of Management. She worked for several years in management consulting, then in corporate strategy, and joined PepsiCo in 1994 as chief strategist. 12 years later, she became its CEO and now oversees 260,000 global employees and a snack empire that includes Frito-Lay chips, Tropicana juices, Gatorade, Quaker Foods, and of course, lots and lots of soda. We spoke with her not long ago on a Monday morning.
7:14 Speaker 05 Hi, Stephen. How are you?
7:15 Stephen J. Dubner? Very well, thank you. So let me ask you this. If we knew, let's say, 12-year-old Ingenui in Madras, India, attending an all-girls Catholic convent school, how surprised would we be to know that today she's CEO of PepsiCo in Purchase, New York?
7:33 Speaker 05 Probably incredulous, because what you would have assumed is that she was going to be a firebrand, she was going to do something that was non-conventional, but she was going to do it in India, you know, probably happily married with lots of little kids, taking care of all of the older people in the home, and just this little conservative girl around, but somebody who was going to be a firebrand and make trouble. CEO of PepsiCo in the United States of such a global company? Absolutely not.
8:03 Stephen J. Dubner? Was there a turning point?
8:05 Speaker 05 I think it's been a set of gradual moves. Even the day before, they told me that I was going to be CEO. I didn't think that I was going to be CEO. So there wasn't a plan to become CEO. The plan was to just keep doing a very, very good job and making sure the company was in a good place. I think one thing just led to another.
8:27 Stephen J. Dubner? You once said, "When we become CEOs, they give us CEO pills, and that allows us to remain strong in the face of all this criticism." So what's the toughest thing either that you've gone through as CEO or on a kind of routine basis about being CEO of a company like PepsiCo?
8:44 Speaker 05 You know, the biggest surprise in becoming CEO was that when you are sent to the number-one job, you are it, as they say. When you're president of the company or CFO, you still have a very important job, but there's always a CEO out there who was on the front line, who was being focused on. And when you become CEO overnight, you are the person calling all the shots. You're responsible for making sure you get all the information from the company, crystallize it down to, you know, simple ideas, and then tell the organization what to do. And so it's a very daunting job to be a CEO. So day one, you have to be ready to take on the mantle of being CEO.
9:31 Stephen J. Dubner? Newey was installed as president and CEO of PepsiCo in October of 2006 and became chairman in May of 2007. The timing turned out to be not so wonderful.
9:42 Speaker 05 People talk about a honeymoon period, but there really isn't a honeymoon period because from day one, you are the CEO. And when I took on the CEO job, the world was a different place because a few months after I became CEO, there was a financial collapse. You know, the retail environment changed, the US market slowed down. So one had to learn in a hurry how to run this company through extreme periods of adversity. And there's no book you can read. You have to develop the book as you go along. And that's what was really, really, really tough.
10:17 Stephen J. Dubner? After you became CEO, you spent a lot of time and money essentially reformulating PepsiCo as a food and beverage company, much more in line with modern ideas about nutrition. I'd like to speak about the upfront costs of that reformulation, including a dip in market share and some very unhappy shareholders.
10:38 Speaker 05 I think as we looked at consumer trends and we looked at where we thought the markets were growing, we knew we had to retool our portfolio. That was just not even a question. We knew that if we didn't do it, our future was in jeopardy.
10:55 Stephen J. Dubner? Did you feel at any point that PepsiCo might come to be seen as tobacco companies came to be seen, kind of peddling an indefensibly unhealthy product?
11:03 Speaker 05 It was never that drastic. It was more, you know, consumer tastes change all the time. You know, they change in food and beverage faster than they change anywhere else. And this was a sea change that was happening because, you know, the whole society and their habits and their lifestyles were changing. So my point is, this is a great opportunity. It's a great opportunity for us to change our portfolio, go where the consumer's going, and gain market share. But I was not, you know, stupid enough to say this can be done overnight. I mean, I knew this journey was going to be long, arduous, and was going to be filled with pitfalls because it's not just the desire to change the portfolio, we had to line up the entire company's innovation, marketing, execution, and budgets.
11:50 Speaker 05 To go where this marketplace was going. And then we had to change the culture of this company. You know, when people say, uh, culture eats strategy. I lived it firsthand because, um, uh, you know, I saw how many people sort of said, why should we change our company that's been so successful? For a future we don't quite understand. Uh, and so one had to paint the future in a very personal way. I mean, I had to use our own employees to say, look, your own eating and drinking habits are changing. If your eating and drinking habits are changing as evidenced by A, B, C, and D, which I was observing at work. Why do you believe the rest of the consumers out there, their habits are not changing?
12:34 Speaker 05 So once you start to change the culture of the company, everything else happens fast. So I think this core culture change is what took so long. And through that process, obviously people were impatient because, you know, the way our whole investing works. It's, yeah, you need to make the strategic changes. Yes, we know that the marketplace is changing and you have to change. But you've got to do everything while delivering phenomenal returns in the short term. Um, I mean, that's a tough one because, uh, change takes a little longer than, um, investors expect.
13:11 Stephen J. Dubner? You, like most big public companies, have dealt with activist, uh, shareholders. Uh, you seem to have taken mostly a firm line with them, including Nelson Peltz, who wanted you to spin off Frito Lay. Um, he eventually exited his position in PepsiCo with a pretty nice profit. Uh, I'm curious what you did to celebrate when Nelson Peltz exited that position?
13:35 Speaker 05 You know, believe me, and this might sound incredulous, but we didn't celebrate when he came in. We didn't celebrate when he left. Because at the end of the day, you know, we're all activists inside the company. I mean, I own almost fifty times my salary in PepsiCo stock. My entire net worth is tied up in PepsiCo. And if somebody as an activist came into the company and suggested we do things differently, we study every idea very, very carefully. Because if they have an idea for us to run the company better than we are, we will incorporate it. But if their idea has more risks than upsides, then we have to worry about the company. So at the end of the day, we are maniacally focused on the success of PepsiCo and our shareholders. And we're not just listening to ideas.
14:19 Speaker 05 We think about the implementation. And so when Nelson Peltz came and, believe me, when he presented his white paper to us, we studied every chart, every idea, and had multiple conversations with him because at the end of the day, we viewed him as a free consulting. Painful, but free consulting. So there were a lot of little operational things that Nelson opened our eyes to. And I'd say at the end of the day, any activist who's been in PepsiCo's talk will tell you that we treated them with great respect. We listened to them. We took in whatever we thought made sense. And where we thought our strategy was in a better place, we stayed firm.
15:03 Stephen J. Dubner? Until the early 1990s, PepsiCo was mostly about selling soda and salty snacks. Then it began to diversify. Under Newey, the company now groups its products into three categories: Fun for you, Better for you, and Good for you. Good for you products include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and so on, with an emphasis on less sugar and fat. This category includes brands like Tropicana, Quaker, and Aquafina, which is water. Better for you includes lower-calorie sodas and baked potato chips. And Fun for you, well, those are the brands you're probably most familiar with: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Lays, and Cheetos.
15:46 Stephen J. Dubner? I understand that men and women eat chips very differently. Can you tell us the differences?
15:52 Speaker 05 I think, you know, when you eat out of a Flex bag, you know, one of our single-serve bags, especially as you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos and, you know, they lick their fingers with great glee. And when they reach the bottom of the bag, they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth because they don't want to lose that taste of the flavor and the broken chips in the bottom. You know, women, I think, would love to do the same, but they don't. They don't like to crunch too loudly in public. And you know, they don't lick their fingers generously. And they don't like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.
16:35 Stephen J. Dubner? So is there like a male and female version of chips that you're playing with or no?
16:39 Speaker 05 It's not a male and female as much as are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently? And yes, we are looking at it and we're getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, you know, low crunch, the full taste profile, you know, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers. And how can you put it in your purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse. The whole design capability we built in PepsiCo was to allow design to work with innovation, not just on packaging colors, but to go through the entire cycle and say, all the way to the product in the pantry, or how it's being carried around,
17:23 Speaker 05 or how they eat it in the car or drink it in the car. What should be the design of the product, the package, the experience? So that we can influence the entire chain.
17:33 Stephen J. Dubner? You are known for being really involved down to the micro level on how the product is in stores and so on.
17:42 Speaker 05 So I want to be clear on one thing. Our business leaders all run their own businesses. I don't run their businesses. But what I do do is I'm constantly out there in the marketplace, looking to see how our products look on the shelf. And then I come back and I talk to my people about what I saw was good and what wasn't really good. To push them to higher levels of performance, especially versus competition, we have to look at the product all the way to the retail shelf, maybe sometimes to the consumer's pantry at home. And that's what caused us to even do home visits at times. To really figure out how the consumers talk the product. Is our package size right?
18:23 Speaker 05 Is it suitable to the refrigerator sizes that people have in their homes in various countries?
18:29 Stephen J. Dubner? I'd like to talk to you about the scientific thrust of the firm. You've got a science background yourself. You hired Derek Yoc, a former World Health Organization official, to develop your dietary guidelines. So I'd love you to talk about the kind of interface between the scientific method that you grew up as a student appreciating and how that's incorporated into a modern food and beverage company.
18:58 Speaker 05 You know, one of the things that my experience has taught me is that if you were trained as a scientist in your, you know, youth, through your high school and college, if you stay with the STEM disciplines, you can learn pretty much all of the subjects as you move along in life. And your scientific disciplines play a very important role and ground you very well as you move into positions of higher and higher authority, whatever the job is. It's very hard to learn science later on in life. So one of the pleas I would have for most young people today is stay with STEM as long as you can. Now let me get to the question that you asked.
19:40 Speaker 05 I think one of the big things we realized in PepsiCo is that we were very good at line extensions of our products. We had more development in PepsiCo than we had research. So we could do flavor extensions of our products. Occasionally, we could buy and build on a new product. But we were not very good at meaningful innovation or meaningful package transformation or meaningful ingredient development that could, in fact, apply to multiple products. We knew we needed to build a very strong R and D capability because the name of the game going forward was incremental innovation, incremental in terms of top line growth
20:22 Speaker 05 and incremental in terms of pricing and profitability. And the only way to do that was to have A strong R and D department inside the company. We had very good people, but they were more development focused than they were R and D focused. On top of that, as we were shifting the portfolio to more good for you products, we realized that we needed products which had functionality claims. Whatever claims we made had to be rooted in science. They couldn't be flaky claims because when it comes to nutritious products in particular, people are very sensitive as to exactly what you say on the package because the ingredient list has to reflect, you know,
21:04 Speaker 05 exactly what you're suggesting in the front of the product. I'll give you an example. When we bought Sobi, one of the Sobi products was called Liquid Liposuction. And that was Sobi Lean Liquid Liposuction. You know, when Sobi was an edgy, small business, they could use these interesting words to describe their product. The minute PepsiCo bought it, Liquid Liposuction had to come off the bottle. And we had to explain what we meant by Sobi Lean in the back of the product. Because it's a big company, people hold us to a higher standard than they do, you know, small startups.
21:44 Speaker 05 So we needed a very, very good team that could be very serious about whatever we put on the package, on the label, on food safety, food security, food traceability.
21:55 Stephen J. Dubner? Okay, on that note, your chief research scientist is an endocrinologist with an expertise in diabetes, yes?
22:03 Speaker 05 I interviewed a lot of candidates, but I have to tell you, Mahmud Khan absolutely impressed me because here was somebody who came from a pharmaceutical background, a medical doctor, but was very interested in the whole food and beverage space and had an attitude, approach and demeanor that I thought would fit very well within PepsiCo. So he didn't wear his medical credentials on his sleeve and sort of lecture to us as what we should and shouldn't be doing. He wasn't talking down to us. And he was so well networked and connected in the scientific world that I felt he could come into PepsiCo, build bridges within people in PepsiCo, further our scientific agenda and bring the right talent into the company. And all that I had to do is a couple of things.
22:48 Speaker 05 One, tell the organization that Mahmud was here to stay. I didn't want people rejecting him. Two, I had to give him all the resources he needed. To get going. And three, I had to understand what he was doing so that if people were to come in and say, why are we investing in this omics lab? Or why are we investing in a high throughput assay machine? I could actually explain to people in sort of chickie ducky terms as to why we were doing what we were doing. So that they understood that this was not just Indra, the CEO, supporting an R and D head. It was the CEO basically saying, these are the bets we're going to take as a company because it's going to get us to a better place. And this is where the scientific background helped because I could understand what Mahmud was saying.
23:32 Speaker 05 And I could also challenge the R and D department to do things that, you know, they enjoy doing. I mean, very often I'd write them a note saying, look, I have six challenges I'd like to give you. And this is why I'm putting these challenges out to you. And they loved it. You know, somebody else might say, God, she's wasting our time. But to the R and D people, wow, this is great that the CEO is interested. She wants to use us to move the company to a better place.
23:57 Stephen J. Dubner? Give me a, for instance, of one of the kind of challenges you would have put to R and D.
24:01 Speaker 05 One of the things I told them was that I wanted to take the waste from orange peels. You know, when you squeeze an orange, you have all of the peels and the flesh from the orange after you take out the juice, that's converted to animal feed. I wanted to extract the fiber and figure out a way to put it back into the orange juice. Because orange juice doesn't have fiber, yet that orange pulp has so much of the fiber. How do you extract the fiber from that and put it into the juice? They've now accomplished that. And the list goes on and on.
24:36 Stephen J. Dubner? I guess I have two things I'd love to know about the future of PepsiCo. One kind of specific and then one broader. The specific one is about working with non-traditional proteins, whether from insects or plants or fungi or whatnot. And then maybe related to that, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on personalized nutrition and where you see PepsiCo playing a role in that eventually.
25:02 Speaker 05 Many of these areas are new, emerging areas, Stephen. In some areas, they've progressed quite far. In other areas, on a mainstream basis, they're still new and emerging. Remember, there's lots of startup companies in Silicon Valley that are playing around with personalized nutrition, playing with new sources of protein. They haven't yet come to the big companies and into the mainstream. We have bets that we are making with lots of little companies to think about personalized nutrition for athletes through Gatorade. We are working through other VCs to see how we can place bets on a group of companies working on non-traditional protein sources.
25:47 Speaker 05 The thing we have to be careful about is not trying to accelerate into the big leagues, something that's still on the edge and something that people are still getting comfortable with. So we are very judicious in making sure that, you know, when it comes to PepsiCo, it's ready to be scaled up. I mean, example is Kevita. When we first invested in Kevita and kombucha, you know, it was still an emerging trend. But the way we structured the deal with Kevita, when we felt this was becoming a mainstream trend, we could buy it and scale it within the PepsiCo system.
26:22 Stephen J. Dubner? If you look at the history of American industries, American companies, over the course of, let's say, 50 or 100 years, most of the big firms disappear, right? Because times change and it's really hard to change a company to keep up. So keeping that in mind, if indeed the global appetite for the kinds of food and beverages that you make were to decline substantially, could you imagine PepsiCo repositioning itself as a very, very, very different kind of company? Maybe a personalized nutrition company per se?
26:55 Speaker 05 Yes and no. I think we have to understand very clearly the core competences of our company. And clearly, we will do what it takes to keep our company successful. I mean, there's no pride of authorship here. All that we want to do is to make sure that this entity called PepsiCo, in whatever shape or form, on our own and in combination with others, remains a vibrant company that is, you know, growing, that's creating shareholder value for the short and the long term. That's what we're singularly focused on. If it means changing our business model, but doing it in a way that doesn't take us way off our core competence, so we don't fall flat on our face, absolutely, we'll do it.
27:40 Speaker 05 But we have to do whatever transformation, keeping in mind that there are things that we're good at. There are things we're not good at. If a startup company is better at doing personalized nutrition, the question is, how do we partner with them to best deliver personalized nutrition?
28:04 Stephen J. Dubner? Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, a different kind of partnership for ingenue, the one that happens at home.
28:10 Speaker 05 Because at the end of the day, your first priority is being sort of a wife and a mother and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and all those roles we have to play.
28:17 Stephen J. Dubner? And if you enjoy Freakonomics Radio, please leave a review or a rating on Apple Podcasts or whichever podcast app you use. It helps more than you think. Thanks, and we will be right back.
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30:51 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.
31:28 Stephen J. Dubner? Pepsi-Cola was invented by a North Carolina pharmacist in the late 19th century. In the early 21st century, PepsiCo has more than 100 brands and trademarks, including 22 that each do more than $1 billion in annual sales. The company has a market cap of around $170 billion. We're speaking today with the CEO of PepsiCo, Injunui. You are known for working hard, 20 hours a day, seven days a week, I've read. I don't know if that's even possible. Is that true?
32:01 Speaker 05 Close.
32:02 Stephen J. Dubner? I'm just curious, what you actually do in a given day, considering there is probably no given day in your job, but maybe today. Just give us a sense of what your workday is actually like.
32:12 Speaker 05 Today, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and I read the balance of the stuff I hadn't read over the weekend from my mail. And then I played tennis for an hour. Then I came to work at 8:30 this morning. And I go till about 10 o'clock tonight. I have back-to-back meetings. Then I go to the design studio this evening. I spend the evening with all the designers of PepsiCo. Then I take them to dinner, all of them. And over dinner, they get to ask me any questions they want on any topic. That'll probably last for two or three hours. And then I'll get home by about 10:30 or 11:00 tonight. I'll probably read whatever mail came from today till about midnight,
32:54 Speaker 05 go to sleep, and be back up at 4:00 a.m. tomorrow. And that's a normal routine.
32:59 Stephen J. Dubner? Most important question out of all that. Did you win tennis this morning?
33:03 Speaker 05 I don't play competitive tennis. I have a pro. And I just hit with the pro because, you know, at this point, I have no time to go play in the league.
33:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Right. Let me ask you, this is a standard question we ask a lot of people. I'm very curious to know how you'd answer it. What's something, Injunui, that you believed to be true for a long time until you found out that you were wrong?
33:28 Speaker 05 Huh, I'm gonna say something which you might actually chuckle about. For a long time, especially given my cultural upbringing,
33:38 Speaker 05 I thought, you know, you just listen to your parents and you did whatever they asked you to do. Until I had my own kids. And they told me, no, we are people too. We have our own mind, we do our own thing. And I learned the tough way that, you know, the rules that applied to me from my parents to me, I mean, I was a very dutiful kid in many ways. And if the parents said, jump over this line, you jumped over the line and you didn't ask questions. You know, as I had children here and my husband and I, we learned that they're people too, they have their own thoughts and ideas and we have to jointly evolve a point of view as opposed to you will listen to me.
34:18 Speaker 05 So this is one of the, you know, in life, I'm learning a lot of lessons that are different from my own cultural upbringing.
34:25 Stephen J. Dubner? Talk for a second about being a mother and a daughter to your mother, to your parents and being CEO.
34:33 Speaker 05 You know, I think we grew up in a culture where, you know, our parents basically said, don't let these jobs get to you, whatever your job is. Because at the end of the day, your first priority is being sort of a wife and a mother and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and all those roles we have to play. So, you know, I have a mother who in particular believes that fiercely and believes that these jobs give you crowns and leave those crowns in the garage. When you come home, don't try to pretend that you're still the big boss because you're not.
35:03 Stephen J. Dubner? Does that seem a little unfair because if you were born male, that she probably wouldn't say that to you?
35:09 Speaker 05 That's correct, but you know, I can't change her. So I can either spend my time trying to change her or just say, you know what, let her think whatever she wants. All the times that she's with me, I leave the crown in the garage. The rest of the time, I at least bring it and leave it on the front door or somewhere or a table, sort of in the garage. You know, Sally Stephen, I think we all have to develop adaptation strategies. Because if we don't, we're gonna start feeling resentful or angry with whatever's happening around us. From my perspective, my mom says, leave the crown in the garage, fine, I left it in the garage. You know, I've been married 37 years to the same guy. I don't think I could have balanced all of this had I brought my crown into the house every day.
35:54 Speaker 05 There's no way it would have worked. And would I have liked to have brought it in? No, not at the expense of my marriage and my children. I'm married to a great guy. But it required constant sort of adjustments to make sure that we both were equal versus each other and to our children, we both were parents and one was not CEO and one is not CEO. I don't think that works at home at all.
36:21 Stephen J. Dubner? Do you think that one reason there are relatively so, so few female CEOs in the States and elsewhere is that there's a kind of standard model for what we think of as a CEO and that standard model is someone who never takes off the crown, not even at home? Is that an issue, do you think?
36:40 Speaker 05 I don't think that's the issue. I think the issue is that we get a lot of women in in the entry level positions. You know, as you get to middle management, you know, women rise to those positions and then that's the childbearing years and when they have children, you know, it's difficult to balance having children, your career, your marriage and, you know, be a high potential outperformer who's going to grow in the company in an organization that's, you know, every one of them is a pyramid. So it starts to thin out as you move up. We have to solve for that. How are we going to attract women who are more than 50% of all the college graduates who are getting all the top grades?
37:22 Speaker 05 How are we going to attract women to the workforce where we need them, but allow them to balance having a family and taking care of aging parents because they're all part of a sandwich generation today and still allow them to contribute productively to the workforce? Don't have an answer to that. It's going to be a concerted effort on the part of governments, societies, you know, families, companies, all of us coming together. You know, I was lucky, Stephen, because I had a lot of extended family that all chipped in to help us take care of our kids. You know, my husband and I worked in partnership with each other to make sure that our schedules didn't keep us both out of the office at the same time.
38:06 Speaker 05 But then our families all chipped in to help take care of the kids or supervise the nannies, if you want to call it that. And in turn, we take care of our aging parents today. And so I think this Asian model of having extended family coexist with the young people today may have to be imported in so that we can take care of our children and take care of the aging parents at the same time.
38:38 Stephen J. Dubner? A few years ago, Nui was interviewed by David Bradley, chairman of The Atlantic, at the Aspen Ideas Festival. She was asked whether women can indeed have it all: a career, family, et cetera.
38:50 Speaker 05 And I'll tell you a story that happened when my daughter went to Catholic school, convent of Sacred Heart. And every Wednesday morning, they have class coffee with mothers. Class coffee with mothers for a working woman? How is it going to work? How am I going to take off nine o'clock on Wednesday mornings to go for a class coffee? So I missed most class coffees. My daughter would come home, and she'd list off all the mothers that were there, and you were not their mom. First few times, I would die with guilt. But I developed coping mechanisms. I called the school and I said, "Give me a list of mothers who were not there." So when she came home, when she came home in the evening, she'd say, "You were not there, you were not there." I said, "Uh huh, Mrs. Rag wasn't there, you know, Mrs. so-and-so wasn't there." So I'm not the only bad mother.
39:35 Speaker 05 You know, you have to cope because you die with guilt. You just die with guilt. My, my observation, David, is that the biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other. Total, complete conflict.
39:54 Stephen J. Dubner? PepsiCo is the biggest company by market cap with a female CEO. So what kind of responsibility, if any, does that come with that isn't present for a male CEO?
40:07 Speaker 05 I don't know about, you know, the market cap and the size of the company, but I will tell you that where we have female CEOs today, women are searching for role models. They want to talk to people who've made it to the CEO suite or to the C-suite, I'd say more generally, to learn from them as to how they've, you know, operated in a more male setting. How do they trade off having families and, you know, their job? And trying to learn some lessons so that they can apply it in their own life. So there's that challenge of being a role model to women at large. Then, of course, a lot of diverse people turn to me to say,
40:49 Speaker 05 tell me as an immigrant woman, how did you move forward in, you know, an American business context? And then I have a lot of demands from Indian-American people, men and women alike, who say, can you tell us how Indian-Americans can move forward in, you know, a global business environment? So it's interesting that I get the tug and pull from all three constituencies.
41:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:17 Speaker 05 I'd say that when you become a CEO and you're a woman, you are looked at differently. You know, whatever you say, people do, they say things like, well, you know, a guy's CEO wouldn't have said that or a guy would have said it differently. You're held to a different standard, there's no question about it. It's not that you've become CEO and now you get a hall pass, you don't. Everything you say, you do, gets analyzed a different way. You know, but you know, any industry, in any profession, in any part of society, trendsetters went through this sort of scrutiny and criticism and commentary. And so I think this group of women CEOs, all of us are going through that right now.
42:00 Speaker 05 Hopefully, as the numbers get bigger, and I hope they do, nobody's looking at us as women CEOs, but just as leaders of big enterprises. I hope that day comes sooner than later.
42:19 Stephen J. Dubner? It's a cliche, but is it lonely at the top? I mean, when you're president, as you were previously, if you're a vice president, if you're in any other executive capacity, you know that you defer ultimately to the judgment of the CEO and they'll take the heat and the glory, of course. When you're it, though, at the top, what do you do about that? And really, yeah, is it lonely?
42:42 Speaker 05 Incredibly lonely. But again, as you said, it's a cliche. What you've got to do is talk to a lot of people, especially other CEOs that you trust, to learn from them in terms of what they did when they were faced with similar situations. And so, there's no question it's lonely, but you've got to create your own ecosystem and your own kitchen cabinet, so you can sort of alleviate some of the loneliness, without giving away any confidential information. I remember that we had a group of five CEOs that we would meet every quarter. There was Jeff Immelt from GE, there was Ken Chenold, Sam Palmasano, and then Ginny
43:24 Speaker 05 Romiti, and then we had the J&J CEO, it was Alex Gorsky. And the five of us would get together every quarter, we'd try to get together every quarter, to talk about issues that were on our mind. And it was a good, safe group for us to sort of bounce ideas off of each other.
43:44 Stephen J. Dubner? That is really interesting. I'm curious, what are the kinds of issues that might have come up there that outsiders wouldn't expect?
43:50 Speaker 05 So as a group, we might talk about the problem of doing business in emerging markets, and how do you judiciously balance developed markets versus emerging markets? Or it might be something to do with, how do you groom succession? Because the day you become CEO, you have to think about grooming a successor. How do you take people and give them bigger assignments, especially at a time when the economy is so tough? You want safe hands sitting and safe jobs. But to really develop succession, you want safe hands and uncomfortable jobs to see if they can do more. You know, you have to constantly think about taking the risk versus retreating to safe positions.
44:33 Speaker 05 So you talk to your fellow CEOs and say, how did you do it? How did you accomplish the same challenge in your own way? So those kinds of things we talk about, everything ranging from big, broad portfolio bets to, you know, how do you articulate an investor story to how do you think about people development?
44:53 Stephen J. Dubner? I see that you recently gave a very large gift to Yale, which will go to the School of Management, which will name its deanship after you. I see that your sister, she and her husband are behind the naming of the Tandem School of Engineering at NYU. Talk for a minute about the kind of experience of you coming from an immigrant family and becoming in the space of really a half a generation so thoroughly ensconced in not only the business community here at the highest level, but the educational community, and just what that's been like for you.
45:22 Speaker 05 I think in many ways, we're all just grateful for what the United States has given us in terms of education and opportunities. And we want to make sure people after us benefit from those opportunities. But I think, at least in my case, my giving has gone beyond the schools in the United States. I just redid all the science labs in my high school and redid all the science labs in my undergraduate college in India. And I'm in the process of rebuilding the women's lounge, which was, you know, not in very good shape. So I think at the end of the day, we've been privileged to have enough resources. But, you know, you don't take your resources with you when you pass on. I think the best thing you can do is to...
46:05 Stephen J. Dubner? Not yet, at least. Not yet.
46:07 Speaker 05 I think the best thing you can do is to... Are paid forward. And so, you know, putting the money to work for the next generations is critically important.
46:17 Stephen J. Dubner? When you, I think this was in association with your gift to Yale, you were quoted as saying that business issues are never just business issues. And my most ardent hope is that this endowment will teach future generations of leaders at the most successful companies of tomorrow will do more than make money.
46:35 Stephen J. Dubner? I'd love to hear what you mean by that. Business issues are never just business issues, especially when you're in a business of making food and beverages that not all of the world, especially the public health people and the nutrition people, love.
46:47 Speaker 05 You know, our company's business was developed and grown at a different time. As society became more sedentary, for whatever reason, you know, the offering of foods and beverages to that society, to the sedentary society, has to change. It's not a or game, it's an and game. There's a time and place for the fun products. But now increasingly, we have to develop good-for-you products that are suitable for an increasingly sedentary population. So from our perspective, you know, clearly you'll make a lot of money just focusing on the products of the past, but we'd be growth constrained.
47:31 Speaker 05 What I wanted our company to do is think about societies, think about communities, think about how we can evolve a business model that takes into account changing societal trends, whether it be our product portfolio, whether it be environmental issues, whether it be issues related to diversity and inclusion. I wanted to make sure that we looked at all of these issues holistically and made sure we did the right things as a company so that we would remain successful into the future. Because at the end of the day, Stephen, you know, companies like ours are little republics. PepsiCo's market capitalization makes us bigger than many countries around the world.
48:16 Speaker 05 And we have access to lots of technology. We have access to big distribution systems. We have access to capabilities that many countries don't have. And we have it on a global basis. So we can actually move it across the world seamlessly. So I think companies like ours have not only got to run the company for the benefit of shareholders. We've got to do it in a way that's very sensitive to societies and communities around the world. And that's my sincere hope that every company views their place in society that way and modifies their business model to be more sensitive to these countries, societies, and communities in which they operate.
48:59 Stephen J. Dubner? So if you were not Ingenui, but maybe a marketing executive working for Ingenui, or maybe a food scientist at PepsiCo, or maybe even an intern, what would you say about Ingenui as a boss?
49:14 Speaker 05 I'd say somebody who has very high standards, who holds us to high standards, but helps us get to these higher standards. Somebody who's very demanding, but also very caring. Somebody who works as hard as we do, doesn't just delegate and go off to play golf or, you know, have a relaxing life, but is there alongside us, helping us get to a better place, but also pushing us and herself to be a better person and a better executive. I think that's what they'd say about me.
49:53 Stephen J. Dubner? Maybe it's just her personality, or maybe it's the calm that comes from having weathered many crises. Whatever the case, Ingenui doesn't sound as if she's ever been stressed out or terrified that her job was in jeopardy, or that her company was going to implode. But... Stress and jeopardy and potential implosion. That's why CEOs are paid the big dollars. So coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, the secret life of CEOs continues with all the trouble a CEO gets to deal with, from consumer rebellions.
50:28 Speaker 03 There were maybe 15,000 or 20,000 people who were very upset.
50:32 Stephen J. Dubner? To changes in consumer preferences. We tried too hard to keep our old model alive. And huge changes in technology. And then iTunes came along and the internet came along. Don't forget macroeconomic problems. The Japanese were coming. They were eating our lunch. And good old fashioned fraud. And the guy called me and said, Jack, we've got $400 million missing. Also, the joy of personnel issues.
51:03 Speaker 03 How do you fire the one person who's actually going to get you over the finish line?
51:08 Stephen J. Dubner? As Indra Newy told us today, when you are CEO, you are it. Next time, what being it really feels like. Taking those decisions that impact people's lives and livelihood is not easy. It weighs very heavily on me personally. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Also, would you like to appear in a future episode? We are working on a story about what's called moral licensing. It's the idea that if you do one good deed, you might somehow feel entitled to follow it up with something much less good. Like, you visit your sick grandmother. I am such a good person, you tell yourself.
51:51 Stephen J. Dubner? And then you go home and cheat on your taxes. So we want your stories of moral licensing. Use your phone to make a short audio recording. Just use whatever voice memo app you have. And email us the file to [email protected] . Tell us your name, where you live, and then tell us your story. If, given the nature of your story, you need to be anonymous, it's OK too. Thanks. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Max Miller. We had research help from Zach Lepinski. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Merritt Jacob, Burek Rothers, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. For this series, the sound design is by David
52:32 Stephen J. Dubner? Herman with help from Dan DeZula. The music you hear throughout our episodes was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive at Freakonomics.com where you can stream or download every episode we've ever made. There are more than 300. You can also find the transcripts and links to the underlying research. We can be found on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected] . Thanks for listening.
53:12 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible, and when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.
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