The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
How lucky for state: Nooyi named to Amazon board
Former PepsiCo chair and CEO Indra Nooyi joined the Amazon board Monday, which raises a question: When Gov. Ned Lamont tweeted on Feb. 8 that he had asked Nooyi to “construct a path forward” on attracting the online retail giant to Connecticut, could he have known the path was that direct?
Amazon.com Inc. announced late Monday it added Nooyi, 63, to its board, the second woman added to the Seattle-based company’s board in the last month — following a promise last May to add more women to its board.
Nooyi, of course, would be a highly sought board candidate at any global company after retiring from Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo as CEO on Oct. 2, and as board chair on Jan. 31. It was an orderly succession following a dozen years during which she nearly doubled revenues and moved the company toward healthier snacks — relatively healthier, that is.
What we care about is Amazon in Connecticut, after the company nixed its deal earlier this month to bring 25,000 people to Queens as part of a coheadquarters. Lamont, Nooyi and Jim Smith, Nooyi’s co-chairman of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, leaped into action at the first hint the New York City deal was faltering.
Can’t get better access to Amazon than this; Nooyi, of Greenwich, a longtime Lamont friend, is one of only 11 members of the board. She joins as a member of the audit committee, traditionally a powerful board spot.
Amazon already has about 2,000 employees in this state at facilities in Windsor and Wallingford, and is set to add at least 1,800 more in a new, $250 million warehouse in North Haven, once the site of a Pratt & Whitney factory.
The company said it won’t relaunch a search for a co-HQ2 site, after picking Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., and New York late last year. But that isn’t stopping Connecticut — including Nooyi, who is charged with attracting companies here — from helping develop a Stamford plan for Amazon.
Nooyi told me in an interview on Feb. 1, the day Lamont introduced her as part of his economic development team, that she’s on “a couple” of boards, and when I asked whether she’d join more, she said, “Maybe, maybe not, I don’t know.”
Nooyi has been on the board of Schlumberger, a giant oil exploration and drilling company, since 2015. She was under consideration as president of the World Bank, the New York Times reported last month.
I’m not suggesting Lamont knew Nooyi was about to join the Amazon board — Nooyi might not have even known it herself a few weeks ago. And all joking aside, Lamont can’t really expect her to actively lobby her fellow directors, let alone Holly Sullivan, the powerful Amazon selection chief.
That’s not how these things work, and depending on the circumstances, it could become an ethics issue, which Nooyi wouldn’t cross. Still, having her on the board can only help Connecticut with Amazon. When I spoke with her, she was effusive about helping the state where she first came to graduate school at Yale in the late ‘70s from her native India, and where she’s lived for more than 25 years.
“I see it as a great state to start a business and to live here,” Nooyi said. “I’d like to put together the best selling-pitch on Connecticut, which we haven’t seen as yet...Not a selling pitch alone, the truth about Connecticut.”
The truth, she knows too well, is that Connecticut is down on itself. “The first thing we have to have is confidence in our state,” she said. “We keep hammering the issues that don’t work. Let’s talk about what works and let’s fix the others.”
Lamont’s office didn’t have a comment about Nooyi’s appointment late Monday.
Nooyi declined to talk about specific economic policies in our very brief talk after Lamont’s announcement, but she said the state’s large overhang of pension liabilities is not a deal-killer for companies looking to move here.
“I don’t think it’s pension overhang as much as we want tax certainty,” Nooyi said. “If there’s tax uncertainty, you start getting to the root cause, why is there tax uncertainty? Then you start thinking about what’s going wrong. But we have to make it predictable for businesses, good infrastructure, easy to do business, a government that works for business, a workforce that’s available, a trained workforce, and then of course, tax certainty.”
Easy, right? If Nooyi can advise Connecticut about Amazon, and advise Amazon about Connecticut, then maybe a small satellite office in Stamford could happen. We’re not greedy. You know, 5,000, 7,000 jobs would go a long way if New York doesn’t want them.