Women’s Day sorrow
Unassuming and whip-smart, Pepsico’s outgoing CEO Indra Nooyi has long been held up as the paragon of a woman breaking the US corporate glass ceiling.
Nooyi — one of the most prominent women and one of a handful of people of colour to lead a Fortune 500 company — will be remembered for shattering something else: the myth of work-life balance. Instead, she says you can have it all, but it will cost you.
For the generation of women who chose to have a career and a family, her frankness and refusal to sugarcoat the challenges with which so many struggle have been welcome.
“On a relative basis I’ve had it all — I’ve been fortunate to have a wonderful husband, two great kids, a very tight-knit family and an awesome job with a great team. But to get here and to stay here [there have been] lots of trade-offs, lots of sacrifices, and under the water, a lot of collateral damage,” she once said in an interview.
She’s been candid about sacrifices, “mom-guilt”, the need for a good support system and the struggle of working your way up in male-dominated industries.
At the 2018 Forbes Women’s Summit, Nooyi, who was born in the Indian city of Chennai, or Madras as it was called when she lived there, talked about the early days in her career, when she was self-conscious about how she looked. She had just two suits: a black one and a beige one, that she would alternate during the week.
“I decided after a while I was never going to win the looks battle. I focused on the brains part. I focused on doing the job better than anyone else could do it,” Nooyi said. She recalled that colleagues started coming to her for projects when they wanted something done, and done well.
“I started to depend more and more on my brains and my hard work as opposed to how I looked or how I talked.”
Nooyi leaves Pepsico in better shape than she found it. During her 12-year tenure as CEO, sales have grown 80% and Pepsico’s share price has risen 75%.
The company and its competitors have over the past few years been trying to diversify into organic or niche products perceived as healthier, as revenue from traditional products like soda has struggled. Nooyi reclassified the company’s products into three categories: “fun for you”, “better for you” and “good for you”.
At the end of last year, Pepsico said that the “better for you” and “good for you” categories (which contain products like water, oats, hummus and pressed juice) now account for 50% of its product offerings, up from about 38% 10 years ago.
Famously Nooyi, 62, will also be remembered for facing down activist investor Nelson Peltz, who took a stake in Pepsico and pushed for a split of the business. He backed off after a two-year feud.
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What? A woman? In charge?
Nooyi will remain as chair until early next year.
It is worrying that she is the latest in a series of female CEOS who have left major consumer businesses: Irene Rosenfeld at Mondelez, Denise Morrison at Campbell Soup, Margo Georgiadis at Mattel and Meg Whitman at Hewlett-packard.
After Nooyi leaves Pepsico in October, only 24 CEOS — just 4.8% — at the top publicly traded companies that comprise the S&P 500 will be women. And if you were wondering, only 2.2% of Jse-listed companies have female CEOS.