Sweet, carbonated, but readable

Indra Nooyi’s memoir opens with a charming anecdote. In 2009 she was invited to the White House to meet India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. When Obama introduced her,

Manmohan Singh exclaimed, “Oh! But she is one of us!”

And the president, with a big smile and without missing a beat, responded, “Ah, but she is one of us, too!”

Indeed, many immigrants describe themselves as straddling two cultures (although few have two heads of state affirming this). Nooyi, too, says she ‘belongs in both worlds’.

I don’t normally read corporate memoirs, which often strike me as self-important(‘I me mine myself’), oblivious to their own privilege (‘Look at these accomplishments that I achieved all by myself!’), or preachy (‘I rose to the top ranks of my profession, and you can too if you follow my example!’) . And my uncharitable assessments are just based on the back covers :-).

Plus, they are often hefty tomes (more self-importance!). Nooyi’s memoir, though, clocks in at 300 pages, which is reasonably terse for the genre.

The blurbs on the back cover piqued my interest. The CEOs of Xerox and Target, sure — one imagines all these CEOs schmoozing at country clubs, happy to blurb each other’s books. Hillary Clinton? Female empowerment bonding, perhaps. But the collection of actors — Matt Damon, Mindy Kaling and Sofia Vergara — who wrote ‘amazing read’ and ‘extraordinary’ rather surprised me. A little internet investigation indicated that Matt Damon teamed up with Pepsi for a clean water initiative, Mindy Kaling advertised for Doritos, the top-selling snack from Pepsi, and Vergara has also advertised for Pepsi. Hmmmmm.

Nooyi, then Indra Krishnamurthy, grew up in Chennai, in a large multi-generational house where education was deeply valued, and where her grandfather would help the children with their math homework, while her mother efficiently made multiple meals each day from scratch. She was a steadily good but not extraordinary student, by her own description. She picked up debating early, and appears to have been very good at it — surely a skill that would have helped in corporate boardrooms as well.

Her other extracurricular activity was more unusual for conservative Chennai: she picked up guitar from a friend, and despite no parental support (“Good South Indian Brahmin girls did not play guitar and sing English rock’n’roll songs”), she continued practicing, went on to form a band with her fellow girl students(‘(the nuns gave them the amusing name ‘The LogRhythms’), and even eventually included a couple of boys.

Nooyi never explicitly blows her own trumpet, but reading between the lines of her remarkably smooth rise, her abilities are obvious. She got every job she desired or applied to. She had mentors who advised her throughout her life. She sailed into IIM Calcutta, then eventually to Yale Business School. She was recruited by Boston Consulting Group, then Motorola. Some years later, when she left a job she was recruited by GE and Monsanto before finally accepting the Pepsi vice-president job.

She avoids the tempting trap of fashioning a rags-to-riches story. While she had some hurdles — travelling around India alone in her first job, eating salad and bread at Yale because the vegetarian options were so limited, going to job interviews in the badly-fitting polyester clothes that were all she could afford — she says firmly:

Mine is not an immigrant story of hardship — of fighting my way to America to escape poverty, persecution or war. I don’t know what it feels like to be a refugee, homeless because my own country is in crisis. I spoke English. I had landed in the US with $500. I was at Yale. And I had the safety net of my family in India, a place that I was familiar with and loved and that would take me back.

Nooyi also takes care to note the advantages that came her way: the company that let her take six months leave with pay to help care for her aging father, three months of paid parental leave, a mother who stayed with her to help, and extended family who supported every step. After she was badly injured in a car crash, the rest of her family flocked in to help. And yet, despite an apparently vast network of part-time live-in relatives, there were times they struggled with childcare. Nooyi uses this experience to empathize with other parents, and wonders why ‘accessible, affordable quality childcare is not a national priority’. She is honest about the emotional travails of multi-generational living which usually fall on the mothers in the middle. She has thoughtful if not original things to say about the work-life pressures on women.

She remains relatively relatable because of her quotidian, familiar worries: her older child suffered from sibling anxiety when the younger was born, her family was turned down for house rentals in ‘lily-white Darien, Connecticut’, her daughter was bullied as one of the only children of color in a school. And of course, as a senior executive at Pepsi she was part of a vanishingly small group of powerful businesswomen, let alone women of colour. The chairman of Pepsi’s board invited only male executives on his team-building weekends, and she often got paid less than men with equivalent positions (but never complained). She deeply regrets the many family life events she missed due to her relentless work schedule — funerals, birthdays, her children’s activities.

I must admit that the details of her corporate jobs were somewhat dull to me, but might be riveting for readers who have more interest in whether Coke’s return on investment is better than Pepsi’s, or how Pepsi succeeded in buying Quaker Oats. Much space is given to a bit of sleep-inducing corporate jargon called ‘Performance with Purpose (PwP) – Nourish, Replenish, Cherish’. Nooyi claims to have jumpstarted the direction of the convenience-food industry to healthier foods, a claim I am unable to judge on its merits.

What makes the book rather bland is that her opinions are remarkably uncontroversial, except to a very old-fashioned reader. She is non-threatening; she takes pains to say that her family and daughters are the center of her life, despite all her corporate success. She encourages women to be ‘true to their families, their jobs and their duties as a citizen’. To her credit, she attempted to incorporate these values into her corporation, along with an attempt to increase diversity. But what when these noble ideals are in conflict, for example with the Texas abortion law? Nooyi won’t comment.

Once she joins Pepsi, she is a true believer with nary the hint of a negative word to say about the company and its products. Over her tenure, Pepsi reduced their plastic use and decreased the water requirements to make their sodas, but Pepsi and Coke are still agents of water privatization, even in Chennai where there are huge water shortages. The company sells some healthier food options, but these take a backseat to the moneymaking Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew. The company has a long way to go in achieving her ‘sustainable capitalism’ goals.

The latter half of the book is a series of short essays: she pushes for women to be paid the same as men, she wants to support families, she wants men involved in women’s equality, she wants more paid leave, work flexibility, predictable schedules for factory workers, and reliable childcare. There’s only a brief mention of the infamous Pepsi ad trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement, that appeared during her tenure. She’s not the kind of person who burns any bridges.

It is pleasing to see that Nooyi not only credits her ghostwriter Lisa Kassenaar in the acknowledgements, but goes out of her way to delineate Kassenaar’s contribution to the novel: “she took all my stories, facts, anecdotes and pages of edits and wove them into beautiful chapters, each with core lessons.”

Apart from Nooyi’s relentless work ethic, there’s little for an aspiring corporate worker to learn, and she had so few hiccups in her career that this won’t be of much use as a self-help book either. She mentions her regrets often enough that she doesn’t seem to be encouraging other women to follow her path. There’s no strong ‘voice’ — neither funny, nor witty, nor particularly clever: it’s just ‘nice’. Still, her journey and accomplishments are remarkable, and one hopes that free of corporate pressure, she will utilize her retirement to push some of her unarguably worthwhile goals.