Suparna Mitra: Good morning to all and a very special warm good morning to Indra thank you so much for making it to Titan it's an unbelievable Goosebump moment to be sitting on the same stage with you I think generations of corporate employees and students and many others have always looked at you as a in an inspiring role model and it's absolutely unbelievable that you're are here today to share with us many things that we would like to know so starting off Indra you've had the most stupendously successful career as CEO of one of the largest organizations in the world and who doesn't want to be in that space right how many of us would like to be in that kind of CEO level which is so inspiring
Indra Nooyi: Not too many
Suparna Mitra: How many yes
Indra Nooyi: Just a few
Suparna Mitra: Yeah so what are the qualities what are the traits What are the experiences that have actually made you so successful
Indra Nooyi: Okay that could be the whole meeting today but Venkat thank you for inviting me to speak to your senior managers and I've been reading the Titan annual report and all the documents I must say you are an inspiring company that's doing awesome things so it's a real privilege it's a real privilege to be here and having visited your stores I must say you run a great operation so congratulations to everybody in your company you've got room for improvement here and there but on the core you're fantastic at least that's what I tell my people don't get too complacent
Indra Nooyi: Okay so let me talk about how I got from Chennai to you know to the Pinnacle of Corporate America which is an improbable story in many many ways you know I was very lucky in that I was born into the right family I had all the encouragement of the men in my family who said study dream big we will stop your mother getting you married of in some arranged marriage system thank God so all of that was good news but let me park that all aside let me talk more about qualities that were instilled in us as we grew and what I put into practice as I started to work that actually got me the CEO job which I was not running for I there was never a plan for me to be CEO because in PepsiCo everybody who was a CEO before me was a white male Christian who worked in the US Armed Forces so there I was in PepsiCo I was sure that I'd reached when I became president the peak of my career
Indra Nooyi: So let me go back now and talk about what qualities might have gotten me there because I can't say definitively the first anytime I approached any assignment I dug deep to understand every aspect of the job before I zoomed out to understand you know how that job I was going to do fit into the overall fabric of the company I really invested the time to understand how a Salesman an operations guy somebody on a a line really executed the job because I felt that leaders should understand the job as the Frontline sees us so after I graduated from IIM cal and went to work for Metrobeard a company that I don't think exists anymore I spent a lot of time as a salesperson in the market I went to mettur I was was on the looms I was in the printing shops I was everywhere learning the business ground up and I think it's very important that you realize that nothing is below you you have to learn every job so zooming in and zooming out is a very important thing in my own growing up
Indra Nooyi: The second I put the company before me when I started working for any company I felt that the company was more important than me and I'll give you one very simple example very early in my career when I joined metro BSL was a young IIM Cal intern or executive and we were in short supply those days so anybody who graduated from the IIM was considered hot stuff I go into metro beardell and there's a MD who's come from England and he wanted to see this intern because metro BSL had never hired a woman in those levels so he came looking for me and kept asking everyone where is this woman that we've hired and they pointed to me sitting on the floor sorting out all the samples of textiles because in the past they had just taken the samples and shoved it into a godridge bureau there and
Indra Nooyi: My point is if I don't know what we've done in the past how do we design for the future and I didn't know who to delegate it to because clearly there was nobody in the company who felt that they should clean up so I decided to sit on the floor take everything out of the cupboard and sort it out and he just came and looked at me and said no executive has sat on the floor and ever put this all together I say this because at that point the company was more important to me than me whether I was sitting on the floor or on a chair was irrelevant and that experience has carried me through every part of my life I have always put the company before me and never wanted not to do something that the company needed me to do because I was working for the company so that's the second one
Indra Nooyi: The Third in the introduction they talked about leading with your head heart and hands people were my biggest asset to me engaging all the people in the company in the business of the company was very important you know very often we look at people as tools of the trade it's a terrible thing to do we think of them as eminently fungible we don't treat them very well we don't look at them as whole people I invested in extraordinary amount of time treating them as Talent you know like we would a movie star or a fashion model I treated them as Talent especially the high potential Talent treated them very very carefully the
Indra Nooyi: Fourth big trade going you know thinking back I focused on succession planning and leader development as much as I did the business you know it takes a secure leader to do succession planning and leader development because if we did it well those people could take your job so I spent an inordinate amount of time providing feedback developmental feedback pulling people up and making sure that they could take my job today because I felt that if I had my successes ready I could move to anything and do any other job so I focused a lot of time on that
Indra Nooyi: The other trait was the role of mentors I didn't pick any Mentor I didn't go to anybody and say can you be my mentor mentors picked me and I think they picked me because of the other characteristics I talked about they found somebody who put the company before them who really zoomed in and zoomed out and they said if I were to Mentor this person and they were successful and they will be I can hitch my wagon to them and say I did a good job picking this person the
Indra Nooyi: Last thing is I was a lifelong student I would read every Trend that was going on in the marketplace I would look at shapes connect these dots and make shapes when shapes didn't exist and no Trend out there was too trivial I would follow it and read and experience and constantly educate myself because I felt especially as you rise in an organization if you don't stay one step ahead of everybody else you should move out because you're up or out in the higher levels of a company and so that's what I did now all of this takes a lot of time so in many ways you know with a family with a job doing all this other stuff with me you know I don't sleep at nights I slept three or 4 hours every night genetically I've got that problem and I speed read so I read everything put in front of me and I'm a student and I'm always insecure about my knowledge and that's what keeps me going
Suparna Mitra: That's sounds very simple at one level but it's amazing that you've done it at that level of Corporate America I'll actually use this point that you said about Trends and segue into the next question question in your 12years stint in PepsiCo there was some radical changes and you've written in your book that there was a very orchestrated and coordinate well coordinated Trend sporting and there was this document called future back and that actually led to a lot of big pivotal shifts within PepsiCo how did you spot the trends how did you develop the strategies and most importantly how did you carry people along because not everybody gets the way your imagination is helping you connect the dots to the next big Trend
Indra Nooyi: You know this is interesting because when I took over a CEO PepsiCo you know I took over a very successful company my predecessor has done a great job I was president in CFO so I was part of the team that worked on the success of PepsiCo so now I take over the company my job is not to run the company for 5 years which is really what the tenure of a CEO was at that time I had to make sure this company was set up for success for the long term so I had to think hard about what are my priorities where am I going to make investments what kind of a company do I want to shape because I came from a strategy world my brain automatically went to that I was not focused on how do I extract another inch of performance out of the base that PepsiCo is very good at doing so I commissioned several teams around the company because I wanted people to own what we were going.
Indra Nooyi: To do the operations people sales people marketing you know the HR people every function in the company some of the key regions and a few Consultants too but those were fewer than you would expect and had all of them come back with their view of what are the big trends that are going to shape the corporate world consumer products world food and beverage and therefore PepsiCo and everyone came up with their list of Trends some had 15 or 20 asked everybody to call their list down to the 10 mega Trends what was surprising is as I looked across everybody's
Indra Nooyi: Trends they realized that about six were common across everybody and Not only was it common they had enough signals from the market that these Trends are already beginning to take shape and so it was relatively easy it wasn't esoteric six Trends we had already zeroed in on the other four we had to pick from the other Trends to see which ones to include so the first trend for example was consumer shifting to health and wellness I didn't have to convince anybody because all that you had to do is look at our own company you know in every meeting we'd have our products on the side tables in 1994 when I joined the company it would be 70 80% full sugar products and about 20 25% diet products by the time
Indra Nooyi: I became president it was moving to 50/50 when I became CEO in 2006 it was 30% full sugar 70% other products now why do we believe that PepsiCo employees are different than other people out there you see we sort of extrapolate differently than you know we should so you look at that and you go man if that mix is changing inside the company what about the marketplace isn't that mix mix changing too and then how is our portfolio shifting and if you really look at the reality it had not shifted okay and so our people were now beginning to realize that there were enough signals in the market place that we had chosen to ignore another one was another Trend was an extreme focus on environmental sustainability now what were the signals all that you had to do is look around the world plants were being shut down in in countries where the company was using too much water and there wasn't enough water in the city I grew up in Chennai there is no water in the city in the summer those of you who grew up in my time you had to wait for the corporation to release water it would trickle
Suparna Mitra: Same by the way
Indra Nooyi: Even now same okay and my parents would get up at 3 and 4 they'd fill buckets of water and give us everyone two buckets of water for your daily needs how can we as a company justify using 2 and half liters of water to make a liter of Pepsi when there's no water in the town it makes no sense similarly you look at the litter on the streets a lot of it is packaging of consumer products that's lying there you don't want it in your backyard what are you going to do push it to somebody else's backyard and in Emerging Markets today's landfill is tomorrow's foundation so people realized all of these issues but for some reason they allowed the moral code of their life and the moral code of their livelihoods to diverge as opposed to converge you understand
Indra Nooyi: What I mean what they would do is eat healthy but come to work and say no let's sell more of the fun for you products they'd want their backyards clean of all the litter but they didn't want you know that litter to you know come into you know their their neighborhoods but it's okay if it's somewhere else all of these are bad Trends so as people started to put these things on a piece of paper they said gez you know we have a problem we have to change the company so interestingly I didn't have to sell it too much okay they knew that things had to change in the company where they struggled was are you going to give us different targets are you
Indra Nooyi: Willing to invest in the headquarters for certain capabilities and if you're willing will to show that you are ready to take the hit for doing that we will execute the rest of it and so the discussion was more we are not a company with these capabilities how are we going to deliver our financial commitments and make all of this happen so selling the transformation was emotionally easy practically difficult we didn't have a burning platform if we had had a burning platform selling the trans transformation have been easy on every front we didn't have a burning platform so I had to appeal to the emotions to make the change
Suparna Mitra: And in a way the burning platform doesn't exist for us also as a company we are doing very well and it's really for us to think about what are the big future Mega trends that are going to change consumer Behavior business Dynamics in the next 10 to 15 years in that kind of timeline
Indra Nooyi: Well you know I tell you the wonderful thing is you're doing very well but it's when you're doing very well you should have a healthy dose of fear and you know I sent on the board of Amazon as many of you know and in Amazon we have a saying that you know every day should be day one because day one is a building in where Jeff started Amazon and he's paranoid about the fact that Amazon might lose his Edge might lose his entrepreneurial Spirit become a lumbering machine be caught up in process as opposed to Rapid decision making and lose at entrepreneurial Edge
Indra Nooyi: And so we're very very cognizant in Amazon of being of having the day one culture so I think successful companies should have that day one culture because the day you get caught up too much in saying oh we have enough opportunities things are going to be okay is when you lose sight of all the changes that might be coming in front of you or you might be looking at it but just ignore it because you're just delivering on what you got I'm not saying you shouldn't focus on what you've got you should but you should also be having one foot and looking at what changes are coming and make the changes inside your business model because you know when you have to invest in new capabilities they take time a lot of time and you can't do it just in time you've got to do it ahead of time
Suparna Mitra: Yeah so that brings me to the two very intriguing and highly impactful hires that you did in actually executing this new Direction you hired a chief design officer for PepsiCo as well as a great R&D Chief and you had to really convince them because what what is the role of design in a in a you know food and beverage company and it would be kind of difficult to Fathom but those are the moves that have that really paid off right
Indra Nooyi: I think so because the biggest issue we had and as a company was we had lot of development people so for example those of you who've been in the United States know this you know we own Frito-Lay the snack company and for us Innovation at that time was you take Doritos nacho cheese Doritos nacho cheesier Doritos nacho even more cheesier Doritos Flaming Hot Doritos flaming hot cheesy Doritos this would go on endlessly those are line extensions which give you hardly any incrementality so we had to tell people hey guys stop I know that a cost of failure of an incremental Innovation is very very low keep doing that but we also need new platforms we need new products new form functions and we have to think about them deliberately
Indra Nooyi: Yes it requires retooling the lines it requires putting in capex but we're willing to do that and if you develop a new platform a new platform leads to new products which then gives you tining opportunities for line extensions example Tostitos I'm sure many of you have heard of Tostitos the problem with Tostitos is when you eat the corn chip it's very dry so you best eat in with a dip but if you took a regular Tostito and ateed with a dip it almost inevitably spilled on your clothes everybody knew that so you'd put a napkin here or something like that and eat a Tostitos if you want to really enjoy a Tostitos on the other hand we developed a Tostitos Scoops where the Tostitos is now shaped like a spoon without handle but but a scoop it required a new mold new packaging because now the corn had to be shaped into a scoop and then fried or baked so was a brand new platform but think about this the minute we developed Tostitos scoop as a new platform or
Indra Nooyi: The Scoops platform we could do corn Scoops potato Scoops rice Scoops wheat Scoops we could have a whole range of new products we could put vegetables into the Masa you know so because it's a flour right it's not a sliced chip so all of a sudden new products started to emanate massively and we could pair it with all kinds of dips liquid dips more solid dips because it gave us that vessel to you know eat the product and you could eat soups with the scoop now so we had to get people to think about new platforms new products and line extensions very deliberately in order to do that we needed a head of R&D who could come up with new platforms example if we had to reduce the sugar and Pepsi okay it's not easy because Pepsi's been optimized over 100 years if I reduce the sugar one shot by 10% the consumer is going to say it tastes terrible
Indra Nooyi: So what we have to do is reduce it a tiny bit every 6 months so that you will not recognize that the sugar has been reduced because theoretically even reducing it by 20% if you if we train you right you shouldn't be able to tell the difference but to do that some knowledgeable scientist has to figure out the biology of the tongue if you want to call it and figure out in what increments to reduce the sugar levels which is what Mahmood Khan the research scientist we hired to head up R&D was doing developing new platforms we had a Sea Lab where we didn't let anybody go in to think about new ways to develop products for example let me give you more examples when you open a box of Quaker Oats you should get the aroma of Oats yet we work hard to take out the aroma so how do we put the aroma back in oats you know that existed with the oats so how to engage all the senses these were all the things that the scientists worked on to be able to bring food back to food okay and so it was new Investments it it was also speculative of Investments but how do you build a company without making these investments in platforms I'll talk a little later about Investors and the board but we had to make those investments from a design perspective we had lots of issues the company was doing very well but we had a product called Sun Chips have you heard of this product called Sun Chips in the US it's a great product I went to Frito-Lay review and you know they show it to us as an experience so when I go for a review at Frito-Lay I might walk into a Dorito's room it'll be set up like a college dormatory because college students eat a lot of Doritos the whole room will be set up like a college dormatory there'll be college kids lounging around eating it you know pouring the product into their mouth i' see how the product is being used and then they'll show me the new products so everything is immersive experiences I get to Sun Chips the Sun Chip is 2 in x 2 in big and they tell me it's oriented towards women which woman is going to eat a 2 in x 2 in snack which crumbles and falls all all over herself so I looked at them and said what's wrong with you guys did you design this product with a consumer in mind or do you just design it based on what you can do they said well our mo le's only cut 2 by two I said who the hell cares if your mole Cuts 2 by two what does the consumer want similarly the cons you know if you look at Doritos when they reach the end of the bag most men will pour it into their mouth and then lick the cheese off their hands and when nobody is looking they'll do that okay that's a normal cycle we've seen it all women are the opposite they do know most women do not pour it in their mouth because if it spills it's a lifelong memory and they definitely don't lick their fingers in public and they definitely don't put it on the sofa at least people in my generation I don't know about you guys we don't do that so now think about this how do we design a snack for women that's a Doritos that's that tastes as good as Doritos that has a brand called Doritos but does not have all of those sticky properties Challenge and how do you create a snack which women put can put in the purse and it doesn't crumble to a powder so these are all interesting design challenges that you bring the design guy and say I'm going to embed you in the Innovation process very early in the process so we go out and hire the best guy he builds a massive team which is not incremental we just remove all the Consultants who are working on design we replace them with internal people but now really designed people embedded inside the Innovation process so they're part of the early thinking the consumer work they're doing all of the U you know work going into consumer homes to see how they buy and stock our products and pretty soon design and Innovation and R&D come together and develop products and platforms for everybody all of that is investment patience which is you know we had to do it if we wanted to build a company for the ages
Suparna Mitra: I think there are a lot of learnings for all of us in Titan on the way Indra has you know talked about Innovation and how it should be I think thought I think it's about what how you think about Innovation you did talk about how you know the the
product was 2 by two whereas you know women don't have so that actually leads me to the next question as woman what were your learnings how were your experiences of navigating Corporate America what roles were played by your mentors you mentioned that they sought you out and I think the most important question is what was your lived experience of the actual business benefits of diversity and diversity not just gender but generational maybe nationality how did it how was the sum of the whole become better than the parts
Indra Nooyi: That's about three questions rolled into one but we're going to give it a shot first of all when I came into Corporate America I'm now talking about 1980 when I graduated from Yale and started to go to the to Boston Consulting Group when I went into the corporate world there were hardly any women in the corporate world and when I was at BCG maybe two or three women who sort of bubble past a Consulting phase and went to manager and principal and so I didn't have a woman role model I didn't have a woman boss had very few women peers and so it was a lonely world out there and on top of that you know I was a person of color an immigrant from an Emerging Market at that time trying to go toe to- Toe with people who were sitting in boardrooms and the seats of power so the minute I walked in people would look at the partner on the job or whatever and say god what have you brought into this room to talk to me and I could feel that you know you could feel that U sort of what the hell is she going to tell me about my business but what they didn't realize is I had done more of the work I had remember what I talked about zooming in I had done a lot more zooming in and zooming out back and forth and I knew more about what I needed to get done than the other people on my team because i' invested an extraordinary amount of time talking to the people in the company the clients and really figuring out what needed to get done and I would start to see Trends where sometimes the other people would get edged out of the team and I'd be the only one standing the best example is my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and I was working on a big assignment for an artificial sweetener at that time aspartame and the client you know was a very important assignment for GD Searle that owned aspartame and I got a call that my father didn't have long to live and I decided to come to India to be with him and bring him to the United States with me hoping I'd get some treatment but it didn't work first BCG called me and said we're giving you 6 months off with pay I didn't ask for it because at that time we didn't have paid leave in the US and you know we just didn't have any programs and I was too Junior to ask for it knowing that if I didn't have that pay parachute or safety net I should say we would struggle as a family because my husband was in business school
Indra Nooyi: At that time and so I was worried stiff but BCG called me out of the blue and said we're giving you 6 months with pay now my father only lived 3 months after that and he died and I went back to work 3 months and one day later so it's not that I abused the pay leave but what was more interesting the clients that I was working on who could have had another team continue the work basically called BCG and said we'll wait for Indra to come back let's put the assignment on hold I'd rather she came back and finished the assignment so you see by earning my rights to be in the company they in turn gave me the business and stick stuck with me but I had to prove myself so that was the first one the second is you know in companies like PepsiCo I was in Motorola AA Brown B which are very male dominated companies not pepsico but Motorola and ABB there were hardly any women and I still remember my first meeting in the boardroom floor at Motorola I came out at a break and they were all men I was the only woman I went up to Bob Galvin who was the chairman and as a joke I said hey Bob where's the women's room is there one on this floor he just looked at me smiled and said I just want you to be one of the guys today so you know he was joking obviously there was a women's restroom somewhere but what I'm saying to you is I had to even wonder whether there was a women's restroom it was that bad but in every place there was a mentor Gat schm at Motorola and ABB who basically said forget the fact she's a woman when she does work it's so good and I can trust it I don't have to double check it or worry about you know just reading the deck let her present it to the board because it's perfect so when you proven yourself and they in turn give you their confidence you feel even more driven to do a better job which is what I did so these mentors played a huge role to the point where when I was at PepsiCo and Steve rhinaman was my predecessor I had two daughters one in boarding school and one in school near Greenwich and my husband was in India taking care of his father who was dying and there was a problem in the boarding school they called me and said show up now I'm thinking okay if I go to the boarding school who's going to pick up my little one from school how is she going to get home have a meal I don't know and I tell Steve I'm worried he says don't worry you go to the boarding school I'll go pick up your daughter take her to my home my wife will take care of her and then when you come back pick her up or I'll go to the boarding school I'm a marine I know how to take care of any problems you go pick up your daughter can you believe this is just Venkat tomorrow everybody's going to come to you I'm sorry but don't you have to figure out how to do this but Steve rhinaman went and picked up Tara and School took her home his wife fed her she did the homework with Steve she loved him and I went to the boarding school and came back and it was seamless parenting and so I say this to you because these mentors played an outsized role in my life and all of this helped me navigate all these difficult moments and sort of emerge stronger there were also negative instance but let me focus on the positive because I think 80% of my experiences were positive 20% were negative it hurt I went into a rage but I kept it to myself but I chose to go to the US I chose to be in Corporate America I cannot expect 100% of it to be perfect what was the third part of that question
Suparna Mitra: What
Indra Nooyi: Oh diversity yeah how does it actually benefit this is a request observation suggestion I making from my perspective so take it for whatever it's worth don't change anything about about what you do at unless venkat says you should change all that I'm giving you is my observation I actually think labeling a program Dei has done more harm than good for diverse people because what happens is when somebody comes in the non- diverse people go oh this person must be a diversity hire Dei hire and you take away from that person's capability I think we have to talk about hiring the best and the brightest talk about hiring top-notch talent I don't know what the numbers are in India in the US 70% of high school valid victorians are women 60% of the people graduating from colleges and universities are women 60% of the top grade getter are women I just got an honorary degree somewhere about 3 months ago as I was sitting on stage and walking everybody get the degrees 70% of the people who are Magna and summa cum laude were women 70% of them were women women are hungry they want freedom they want the power of the purse why do we think that we need a Diversity Program to hire them the only reason you do that is because you believe there are too many biases in the company which prevent you from hiring the women because you look at the women differently if you remove those biases and you focus on hiring the best in the brightest because that's what it takes to move the company forward especially for a company like Titan which is so female friendly in terms of your products you should be able to not have a Dei program but make Dei more a talent development and a state of mind as opposed to a specific program now how you make the transition is up to you but I think that calling out Dei program and pointing out a numbers makes the majority say like I can't get a job anymore because all these Dei types are getting the jobs we have that in the US they'll say I can't get into the top universities because they're getting Dei people in what rubbish that's a high school Victorian you lost out to them what's the big problem in normal cases had have gotten it yeah your papa would have got you into that University nobody talks about that you've got to change what happens inside the company where people feel there's a barrier to hiring a woman or a diverse person I mean I'll give you two examples in India.
Indra Nooyi: When I was CFO I remember looking at the CFO in PepsiCo India he was looking for a new CFO and I said why aren't you looking at any women for the CFO job because it's a job that a lot of women do accounting and finance he said oh because women get transferred I mean women's husbands get transferred and they get transfer transer with them or they leave to go with the husbands I said oh really what happened to the previous CFO his wife got transferred and he moved I just look at him I go did you hear did you hear yourself it's okay for the guy to move when the wife gets transferred but it's not okay for the wife to move when the husband gets transferred because that's a ding on the wife but it's not a ding on the man because the men look at everything through the men's perspective look at it through a talent perspective your whole mindset will change so I think the Dei program was meant to remove the unconscious biases in organizations we called it Dei Sunset the program call it something else the spirit of it is correct but work on removing the unconscious biases and all the barriers you throw at people who are different to succeed in the company focus on that
Suparna Mitra: Thank you I got now move on to you know your lasting Legacy in PepsiCo was performance with purpose and you practice multi stakeholder capitalism much before it became a thing nobody even had a word for it and you had the nourish replenish cherish Mantra this is a little bit of a selfish selfish question of course you talk about what you did but in your understanding of where Titan is how do we become bigger and better and do all that with this multiple stakeholder approach Beyond just the ESG governance Etc what do you think will be required in the next 5 to two year 10 years for Titan to become much better and much bigger
Indra Nooyi: I mean first of all you're an awesome company okay I wish I was younger so I could apply for a job I may not have gotten a job at Titan I'm not good enough but I got to tell you you are just a spectacular company your products your quality the fact that you're part of the Tata group you know I don't look at Titan as being in fragrance and watches and all that stuff to me as a woman I say you give me confidence that's what you're doing you know you are a confidence Building Company you do wonderful things I mean I look at myself in my youth nobody taught me how to dress nobody taught me how to wear accessories how to shake off the Indian curry smell and wear fragrances not on top of the Indian curry smell but you know one going away completely nobody taught me how to buy good clothes my parents bought me the clothes I wore it some of them are pretty yucky but what I'm saying to you is that's not the route to have confidence in the world today and I think in many ways I look at your portfolio of businesses existing and what could come you are in the business of building people's confidence and at a time when they so badly needed okay and confidence comes with being healthy confidence comes from being you know energetic through the day sleeping well dressing well accessorizing well smelling good everything but today the world needs more confident people me needs more confident women okay because all of you have daughters how many of you have daughters a lot of you let me ask you a question when you gave birth to a daughter did you say I'm just giving birth to an unpaid laborer for Life how many of you thought that anybody do you realize that's what you all do when a woman is working with you or women just stay home and have no Economic Security no Financial Freedom it's like having an unpaid labor for life and my husband and I have this conversation always if one of my daughters came home and said you know this guy in the office was rude to me talked over me when I was presenting what do you think my husband says first I'm going to punch that guy out all of you fathers should want to punch that guy out who stripped your daughter of confidence yes or no yeah yes okay hey you know what all the women you work with is somebody's wife or daughter or sister or niece or nephew so you should not be having those behaviors in the office because they could be your daughters or your sister so what I plead with you is that you know these young women come into the office and it's in your hands to build confidence in them because when you strip confidence away from a person you strip their competence away confidence and competence go together so you are in the business of selling confidence through your external appearance how they are healthy how they remain energetic every aspect ECT of it so I have great hopes for Titan in terms of what you're going to do for society now let me get to a second part one of the words I struggle with is this notion of maximizing shareholder value and let me speak to this I was teaching at yale about maybe nine months ago and one of the professors asked me a question Indra when you were running PepsiCo did you maximize shareholder value or optimize shareholder value I looked at said I refuse to answer this question because it's a trick question and he came from the University of Chicago and he was hoping I'd said optimize then he can tell me how awful a CEO I was and if I said maximize he could say see that's the way to run a company now let me tell you why I said it was a trick question if in running PepsiCo I decided to maximize shareholder returns let me tell you what I could have done I would have taken all my full-time employees and made them contractors hey all the benefits I can take away I can cut people's benefits.
Indra Nooyi: I can remove all programs that are employee programs that you know that you do so well in Titan I looked at your child care programs baby and mother traveling programs you can cut all of that and make a lot of money right hell why do you need to provide all that other companies don't I could have outsourced and offshowed every job that could have been outsourced and offshored and damn the investment in design and R&D will just keep doing what you're doing why should I transform my portfolio because I can go for 5 years the next CEO can pick up the crap and move ahead that would have been a profit maximizing shareholder value maximizing strategy for my tenure as CEO but if you put the company before you you don't run the company for the duration of the CEO you run the company for the duration of the company and for those who've read Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Brook in that the stanza the refrain says for men may come and men may go but I go on forever talks about a brook going through towns for men may come and men may go but I go on forever companies are the same CEOs may come CEOs may go but venkat I'm sure you don't run the company for saying okay I'm going to be CEO for so many years how do I milk this to death you're talking about how to set it on this Perpetual growth cycle so that it could be the most phenomenal Enterprise well into the future so everybody has to put the building blocks in place to make that happen so it's not about maximizing shareholder value Without A View to all of this it's delivering great shareholder returns with a view to the longevity of the company with a view to
the future success of the company because making investments just in time for Transformations formula for disaster you have to anticipate Transformations and keep making them especially in today's disruptive world all the time so In My Time Performance with purpose was ahead of its time I agree the first so I run the company for 12 years which was too much for a CEO but I did it in two six-year terms not contractually but the way I think about it the first four or five years was cleaning up the company because the world was changing in front of us and the financial crisis Came Upon Us in those five or six years I thought I was going to lose my job every day because there was so much criticism about performance with purpose they said to me what are you Mother Teresa why do you have to do this we are Americans we love our soda and chips don't make them any healthier and I look at them and say have you changed your eating and drinking habits oh yeah don't touch the stuff what are you doing now oh I eat healthy now I go let me make sure I understand you've changed your eating and drinking habits but you don't want me to tweak the portfolio well I'm going to give you all the old stuff but I'm going to give you new stuff too they look at me and say well if I want that I'll go buy some other Company's stock you keep doing what you're doing here's the problem if I don't transform my growth will suffer growth is oxygen for a company so how do you feed a company you have to grow you have to grow faster than the market so I had to keep explaining that so the first five or six years were brutal it's because I had such a fantastic board of directors who said this is the strategy.
Indra Nooyi: we're supporting the the CEO keep doing what you're doing then the next 3 years was people saying oh my God she was so present how come and the last three years and after I retired I don't think there's a single prize that can be given that hasn't been given to me not one they've got my portrait in The Portrait Gallery in the United States which I didn't even know existed as somebody who was so ahead of a Time on shareholder Returns on how to think about shareholder returns so sticking it out the first five or six years with the help of my board allowed me to get this company transformed so it was painful but you know at the end of the day I believed so much in what I was doing I didn't care if I lost my job because we didn't live the high life we still lived a simple life so if I lose my job that's fine I'll go back and do some other job for some other company I didn't care I might have even applied for a job at the old Titan so what the hell so for me I was determined to stay on the pathway
Suparna Mitra: So I have a question what did you feel when President apj Abdul Kalam pinned the padmabhushan when he gave it to you how did you feel about it
Indra Nooyi: It was surreal almost because you know in my mind all these Padma bhushan the Padma Awards was only for the tippy tippy tippy top right then I look at all the people in the room The Luminaries and I'm like what the hell am I doing here and so it was it was a surreal moment actually when he pinned the Padma bhushan on me I was more scared than anything else but afterwards when I came back to the US I went back to the US the whole thing dawned on me and I don't know it was a feeling of not arrived maybe somebody recognizes you for what you did more importantly India's proud of me that's the way I looked at it and so it was more a feeling of I'm glad I didn't let India down that's what i feeling
Suparna Mitra: Ladies and gentlemen padan award Indra we are really blessed
Indra Nooyi: But I have to tell you on the padhan event I was sitting next to Javad akhtar and I didn't know who he was and so he sitting next to me and he was also Padma bhushan recipient he introduced himself and he said some nice things about me so I looked at him and said with you respect who is Javad akthar and he said oh okay I'm a Lyricist and I said I still don't know who you are he tried some other things I still I still didn't know who he was then he said okay I'll try this I'm the husband of Shabana azmi as me I said oh now I know who you are and so every time I run into him he goes remember me I'm the husband of Shabana Azmi so you see how little I knew about the other awardees that day so
Suparna Mitra: I have a question which is a little personal that you have been you know in public life for decades and you've have extremely busy very demanding schedule how do you keep yourself at Optimum physical and mental health and the reason I ask is that we are many of us who are mid-career mid-life and there are so many things that are happening and we would like to hear from you how you manage it
Indra Nooyi: Remember I grew up with no technology when I came into Boston Consulting the personal computer didn't exist there were only mainframes okay and there were mini computers not the tabletops yeah every graph had to be plotted by hand and set to production and they would convert it to a slide which you can show to clients so I grew up in a different time when I became CEO in 2006 the iPhone was just being launched so I want to put it all in perspective so all the technology you take for granted today which gives you huge productivity and huge Time Savings did not exist when I was going through most of my professional career so if the school called and said Tara sprained her ankle I couldn't say just put the FaceTime on her ankle let me see if I need to rush to school I just said guys I've got to go my daughter stained her ankle I was just out like a lightning to the school to see whether it was a serious injury or not of course they look at me and say no we just informed you why do you have to show up because it's my child I don't know how serious it is and so without the Technologies I had to balance all of these and juggle them I never balanced them I had to juggle all these priorities and there are two people that hurt the most in that process anything you can do for yourself you don't do because you there's only 24 hours in a day and you're doing so many jobs so anything that I had to do for myself it went and the other person that hurt through the process I think was my husband because you know you've heard the famous story where he always tells me your list is PepsiCo PepsiCo PepsiCo then your kids your mother somewhere in the bottom I'm there and I always tell him with a smile but you're on that list so don't worry about it but you know what it's painful for him to say that because when you come home the kids are waiting for you when the kids are waiting for you they are my priority one because I brought them into the world so they are my priority One you know there's stuff to do in the office and then as you finish I have to prepare for tomorrow's meeting said PepsiCo and those days there was no iPad where you could write on it hard copies and they used to call me bag lady because I used to walk home with two or three bags of material and I would read until 1 or 2 in the morning try to sleep for 2 or 3 hours get up in the morning you know get the kids ready for school read the rest of my stuff so it was this constant grind but when you select for leaders you select resilient people who can go through all of this senior management positions are not for the weak at Heart Senior management positions are not for people who can't take all of the stress and strain running a public company is a fabulously shitty job that's the best way I can explain it to you because it's Got Fabulous characteristics but you have to answer analysts who never run a company you've got to talk to investors who've never run a company who are asking things of you today which you can't give and so it's a fabulously shitty job and so you've got to be an unusual personality who puts the company before themselves who wants to run the company for the duration of the company who loves their people who are willing to zoom in and zoom out who are willing to be great citizens because you've got to run the company to be a great citizen in every country who can think shortterm and longterm one foot on the break one foot on the accelerator that's what we're asking our leaders think of the challenges it poses many people come to me and say I want to be a CEO what do I need to do you really want to be a CEO let's talk about it are you willing to do what it takes to get there it's not easy and so in my case because I could speed read didn't sleep much yeah once in 6 months or 9 months I'd collapsed for a day or two but somehow I pulled it through because I realized that too much was riding on me and I could not afford to fall apart
Suparna Mitra: Right what do you think of technology and what tech technology I know you know we talked about technology not having been there earlier but crystal ball gazing right now and also in terms of Trends how is this going to play out as
Indra Nooyi: I wish had a crystal ball where I could tell you exactly how it's going to play out you know sitting on the board of Amazon I see you know the whole world of technology how is going to play out or could play out as they see it sitting on the other boards I do in Medtech or whatever I see how technology could play out there the one thing I tell you is we are on the cusp of extraordinary disruption extraordinary disruption I think there's so much technology out there that's going to result in more productivity it's going to improve the customer service aspect in profound ways is going to force companies to strip out inefficiencies because all those tools are going to be available but those same technology tools are also going to disrupt Society in a profound way what do I mean by that all these technology hallucinations that come up either through bad use of chat GPT or what social media is doing to create fake videos and things like that are going to create problems for society it's also creating a very lonely Society you know we have a I don't know how many of you have read the book The anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt if you haven't read it please get a copy and read it and I say that because I was just talking with Jonathan last week There's a movement now in the US where we are Banning cell phones in schools and in my state of Connecticut we just putting that in place for this school year and what's happening is teachers are now saying at the break after class they can actually hear the sounds of students and children laughing and talking to each other where in the past all that they would have is silence because everybody went to their cell phones and their airpod to check their messages and if you walk on the streets children are talking to parents and parents are only only on their iPhones they're pushing the strollers and there's an iPad in front of the one-year-old child and the parent has got a a a iPhone that they are scrolling through and pushing the stroller this way we have become a Humanity without the human in it and that's what's leading to a lot of loneliness so I think for us to say that technology is going to replace the humanness is wrong we have got to figure out a way to replace the human in humanity use technology where it can be used but don't try to take away the human to human interaction so in I'm going to give you us examples because I'm working with it now there's another sister book to the anxious generation it's called palaces for the people written by a sociologist called Eric Klinenberg in that book Eric argues that in every community in the US if barber shops a community centers Parks libraries are not vibrant there's no connection between people and so put the Palaces for people back together and once you do that you can take away some of the loneliness and I don't know what the equivalent is in India but I think technology is going to be a force for good it's going to be a terrible Force for negative Force for taking away the humanity we've got to figure out non-technological solutions to bring connections back talking to Alexa or Siri is not conversation you know it's not conversation please don't even think that you give an old person an Alexa resilienceI and say you've got somebody to talk to is not the answer okay so we are at a reckoning point we have to think about the role of technology in our lives and For Heaven's Sake don't strip the confidence out of people because of Technology remember you're in the confidence giving business not the confidence taking away business
Suparna Mitra: That's such a big shift in my head about what business are we in the question I have and this goes back to the theme of accelerate is how do we look at business and markets for our current businesses how do we look at who we are how do we give all of us our leaders permission to dream audaciously and insanely maybe how do we create that big big picture dream which is really expanding our minds
Indra Nooyi: I mean you guys do a very good job already I mean just talking to venkat as part of this session the way the Titan group has been set up you know is is a wonderful construct if you want to call it that when we had PepsiCo we had decentralized divisions and then we had to create something called power of one that brought everything together because the power of one was way more than the individual businesses because when you consume a snack you had to have a beverage so we have both businesses so when we sell a snack why don't we give them a queue to buy a beverage in Super Bowl in the big holidays people bought snacks and beverages to watch television hey we'll give you the whole bundle we'll have Lobby displays that put the two together how do we pair a flaming hot Cheetos with a Pepsi Max that is formulated specifically with the Flaming Hot Cheetos so we started really think about synergies for new product development on both sides and how we bring the together how can we take a Michael Jordan or a Christina agilera who are advertising Gatorade or Pepsi and say could you also advertise Quaker roads and say this is what I have in the morning why do we have to have a dull old person to do Quaker roads and all these aspirational people doing snacks and beverages so we had to think about the whole business very differently now let me come to you what you know when you're invited to speak to a group you start to get more sensitive about ads and displays and billboards and I’ve discovered something interesting U just as you for those of you whove been in New York when you get off the bridge and take the curve to FDR there's a gigantic David yurman
Indra Nooyi: Billboard for those of you who've been in New York recently David yurman the jewelry company which also makes watches has decided that they are going to own 6 in of the wrist of the of the arm rather they're going to own that real estate if you want to call it that so they'll show a watch with two pieces of jewelry stacked bracelets with a watch and they're showing men with this now typically they show women with all this now it's men men in Artful positions with a watch and jewelry and I'm saying to myself hey I know what Titan is going to do they're going to own the 6 8 in of the arm but think about this if now that Bulgari Serpentine watch is both a jewelry and a watch and could also be a wearable because now sensors are small enough it could be underneath the watch or in a piece of the serpentine jewelry and if that is now hooked up to some hearing device in your eyeglass all of a sudden you've got every one of your businesses servicing customers differently but basically what you're saying is that are parts of the real estate of the body you're going to own and I don't know how you think about all that I'm sure you guys are brilliant people who think about how these businesses come together but if you think about the fact that there's limited real estate in a person's body and the I'll give you the analog look at consumer products companies they sell you a coffee machine a mixer a coffee grinder a soda machine they sell you all of these who has got a kitchen counter that's miles and miles long that you can put all these machines you can't you have to think about how to integrate all these machines with intelligent modular editions so they can fit in a finite real estate on the kitchen counter otherwise you'll have a factory in your kitchen I think the business of integrating all of these aspects to build somebody's confidence is going to start coming together why did the Apple watch become so successful think about it it integrated Communications and control for people on the move all of a sudden you can get your messages you can control your home you can do whatever from your watch and so you have to think about what streams are going to come together on an individual's body to allow them to build confidence and be healthy or whatever else they have to do recognizing that everybody's trying to buy to spend more but buy less you understand what I'm saying spend more buy less and integrate as much as you can so that you get efficiency and Effectiveness while looking good and being confident you know we were thinking about something the other day were brainstorming some ideas you know we all buy evening gowns to go to galas in the US and when I was CEO I'd wear an evening gown I must have owned about 25 of them I hated them because they're so expensive and you can't wear them often I I repeated a gown about 3 years after I had been in the first event and a photographer when I was walking the red carpet because I had to said Mrs new why are you wearing this gun you wore it 3 years ago I said what's your problem he said but my photograph section collection I need different photographs of you wearing different gowns I said I'm not in your business I'm in my business I love this dress I wore it again why am I bringing that up as an example he's right I'm right why can't I have a dress where I have different tops and different bottoms of the dress connected with zippers so I can mix and match any of my evening gowns with each other we don't have that because the designers all want to sell you new gowns yeah but if you looked at it through the efficiency of the consumer all that we would have is five tops five or six skirts and maybe a couple of accessories all with interesting attachments and you could go with the color of the Year color of the Season bling bling of the Season that you want on your dress and you save time and money and you'd have more space in your closet okay so we have to disrupt everything so you guys have to start thinking about how is the Titan group going to disrupt yourselves and come together the power of one to give people more confidence efficiency efficacy employing all the new technology without losing your fashion sense don't lose your fashion sense so it's your challenge but what a brilliant challenge to have
Suparna Mitra: It is
Indra Nooyi: It is the most exciting place to work in yeah
Suparna Mitra: I have one last question before we open up to the audience and actually the audience is already pre you know they've already given some questions right
Indra Nooyi: All About Cricket
Suparna Mitra: Sorry
Indra Nooyi: All about Cricket the questions
Suparna Mitra: One is about one about Cricket okay so Titan as you know as you sensed is a very people Centric company and we are very nurturing and this goes back to the theme of accelerate how do we really accelerate the culture of performance and of Excellence while remaining quote unquote people oriented how how did you do this
Indra Nooyi: Excellence is modeling and walking the talk I mean from the top it starts with the Top If you guys model Excellence if Venkat models Excellence the people reporting to him model Excellence the day he stops modeling Excellence he's not a CEO cuz it's he's the leader of the company sets the tone and I heard the speech this morning he feels the company he's setting the tone it's up to you guys to model that behavior because everybody's looking at you the day you say Chalta hai Let It Go who cares if you become a boing it's over it will catch up with you the brand will be destroyed so put the brand before you put the performance think of it's your money buying every product think of yourself as every consumer do you want to buy a product with a company cut Corners no you want a high quality product right it's your hard-earned money you're spending on that and so you have to model the Excellence in every step of the way when it comes to growth growth without oxygen I mean growth is oxygen if you don't think about reframing the business constantly to grow it's a problem you know the problem is when you're successful you think success is a linear progression it's not a successful company should always create a burning platform for itself imagine that something is going to go wrong you know Frito-Lay I hate to bring these examples up but that's where I was CEO they taught me a lot one of which was Frito-Lay had a very very large share of the US market and we had no meaningful competition the largest competitor National competitor was Pringles which at that time had like three share or four share of the marketplace that was that largest national competitor there was some Regional competitors Frito-Lay made door mats with a Pringles mustache man on it with a line every employee who came into the office would stomp that mat before they walked in wow and if there wasn't a competitor they would invent a competitor and they would stomp that chair or stomp it because it always helps to have a competitor who takes you to a higher level of performance in a way I'm grateful that red company exists because they drove us to a higher level of performance okay and so invent a competitor invent somebody else is doing things better than you it's got to be re you know real don't say it's a mythical company but use those best practices to make you better because they are doing it versus you they're saying look and see how Titan is doing it we should do it better than Titan so you've got to do the same and say hey this industry is doing it so well why can't we lift and shift ideas from them so you've got to have the motivation to learn to push yourself to higher levels of performance and model the behavior yourselves look the owners for Titan success rest with the CEO but all of you in this room when I was in senior executive meetings in PepsiCo which we did once a year like you're doing and people said well you know our process is not okay our Innovation is not good I'd look at that person and say so what are you doing about it you know don't upwardly delegate upward delegation is this illness you own the company and its results so whatever you can do do it yourself so and the last point is your performance development and Appraisal process is how you develop great talent if you don't set the right objectives if you don't hold people account accountable for those objectives and give people honest feedback and you know we always talk about buying building talent but we should also talk about bouncing Talent bouncing yeah when they don't work out they got to go because companies are tough places you expect a high level of performance this is not a holiday job so we always focused on buy build bounce buy build bounce so you bought the talent whether from Business Schools or from other companies we built them we invested a lot to build them but the performance appraisal development process was so thorough that we could also bounce people who didn't step it up so that was the success Loop that we maintained
Suparna Mitra: Thank you for all those nuggets of wisdom Indra there's actually such an avalanche of ideas I'm kind of filtering through them it take me a few days to kind of process all of that
