What does the former CEO of PepsiCo see as our biggest problem?

My Life in Full by Indra Nooyi

I loved listening to Indra Nooyi's book My Life in Full. She described her early education in India & moving to the US for further graduate studies.

The tensions between having support for her education & career, & the traditional role of women in her culture. I love the analogy of her mother: one foot on the accelerator on her advancement, one foot on the break on her achievements. It summarizes the fine balance so clearly.

Indra talks about the challenges of being a mother of two daughters & an executive, then CEO. How she created a village of support because there was so little support from society.

She shares when her workplace provided leave for a family illness, a devastating car accident, & for her girls. And how she had mentors in those companies who supported her career growth.

But throughout the book she asks: Why isn’t there subsidized childcare and paid leave? Why isn’t HR proactive for pay equity? Why don’t female executives get access to time saving perks? Why don’t male CEOs get held up for their lack of female successors? Why is there just a DEI officer? Why isn’t this a board level issue?

I love the insight Indra provides into her brain, how she thinks, how she learns & leans on experts, how she manages all these incredible moving parts.

At PepsiCo she addressed sustainability and healthy alternatives, two mammoth projects. She led the company through massive IT upgrades and she brought in design as a foundation for innovation.

Part of her responsibility as a CEO was to predict future trends. Given, her incredible experience in business & social impact projects, it doesn't surprise me that her new moonshot has 3 elements:

1) paid leave 2) flexible & predictable work and 3) caregiving.

She understood all the moving parts of her business in the global economy, she now also sees how housing & community resources e.g. parks are important parts of our complex social support system that allows workers to thrive. Her work on the obesity epidemic likely informed this perspective.

While Indra didn't mention burnout, she admitted CEO was like 3 or more jobs, & she mentioned her ability to function on little sleep. What she recognizes is that how we are working today is broken & the answers are clear.

She calls on men who are comfortable with the current work situation to see the hidden work of women that is holding it all together & to recognize the business imperative of supporting thriving families to be part of the economy.

My vision to solve burnout stems from my struggles to reach the top of my field as a mom, my experiences addressing public health disparities, advocating in communities for resources, & from years of multi-level health interventions in complex settings.

I came across Indra's book because a comment on my #TEDx talk told me to look at Indra because it seemed like our missions were aligned. If anyone's listening, I am here to help!