My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

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I developed my own research routines. For a company that made citrus processing machines, I crawled through juice plants in Brazil and Florida and learned the intricacies of squeezing oranges with different commercial machines. I hung out in a bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, nursing a lemonade, to listen to competitors' factory workers talk about their troubles on their tissue lines, and then drew lessons for my clients. (Alok - Meaningful insights take tons of hard work to gather!) I’d never had a close woman colleague with a job like mine and had never seen a woman in a workplace who was senior to me.

Second, while you’re early in your career, especially if you’re ascending, create a digital record of your entire life: every speech, every photograph, every piece of tape that’s available on awards you might’ve received. Collect all of that. Whether you write a book or not, collect all of that information because you never know when you’re going to use it. When I changed my clothing and went with more tailored outfits—and it wasn’t high fashion, it was just elegant corporate outfits—a board member told me that he found me intimidating, whatever that means. I don’t know. I don’t care. But the fact of the matter is somebody actually said they found me intimidating. If a man shows up in a business suit, is he intimidating? I don’t think so. Why is it when I showed up in a well-tailored business suit, I was intimidating? My conclusion is that our society can leap ahead on the work–family conundrum by focusing on three interconnected areas: paid leave, flexibility and predictability, and care.” I chose Indra Nooyi's recent book, My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future, to read this January. She is one of a few immigrant women of color who ran a Fortune 50 company. I enjoyed her book very much as she wrote about her struggles with Kids, parents, married life, and her demanding career. Her memoir is quite honest and down to earth as she spoke frankly about her privileges and limitations. talent? What does the retention number look like? How many [diverse employees] are getting developed and promoted? Let me see the organization’s health scores. Do diverse people feel included? Does everybody feel included, but particularly the diverse people? Are they underrepresented in the country?”I had a 12-year tenure as CEO, and you can either say I ran three four-year tenures or two six-year tenures. In the first six years of my CEO-ship, I was navigating through the financial crisis and creating a more I never set out to write a memoir. I started off wanting to write a bunch of policy papers on how to grease the skids for women to reach the top of a company. And then, coming out of the pandemic, I wanted to make it easier for our frontline workers to be able to do whatever they do and still have a support structure for them to take care of their families.

women. Women are a potent force in the economy. As somebody said, they represent the biggest emerging market opportunity in the United States. inclusion [D&I] vice president alone is the right approach. Diversity and inclusion cannot simply be delegated to one individual. That is a cop-out. It should be on the CEO’s plate as a priority andWhat a ride. First of all, Nooyi's work ethic and discipline will put any CEO, manager, and policymaker to shame. My jaw dropped. This is a must-read guide-book for anyone interested in management, policymaking, and resource allocation. Nooyi brilliantly highlights the importance of connections between private and public sectors, governments (and their agencies), academia, science, community groups, and philanthropic organizations. These entities are not mutually exclusive and decisions must be made utilizing the interconnectedness between them. With candor and good humor, Nooyi has written a wonderful book that brings her story to life, from her early years in India, surrounded by love and high expectations, to her determined efforts to succeed in the corporate world, all the while questioning the tradeoffs she had to make. She reveals just how our society continues to sacrifice talent instead of changing how we organize work to maximize everyone’s potential to live full and productive lives. A must-read for working women and the men who work with us, love us, and support us.” An amazing read, filled with lessons, optimism, warmth, and heart, about an extraordinary woman who rose to be a fantastic role model for all women.”

To solve the work-family conundrum, Nooyi's points on interconnected areas of PAID LEAVE, FLEXIBILITY & PREDICTABILITY, and CARE are crucial. Repeat after me: Paid maternity and paternity leave must be mandated by ALL governments, but especially the US government, ASAP. Writing this book has been a new experience for me—a journey, a labor of love, a different kind of hard work. I didn’t intend to write my own story in such detail when I started out. I thought that I would write a few articles filled with facts and figures on how we must support women, young family builders, and our collective well-being, and family. Today we are in a war for talent. Women are 70 percent of the valedictorians in high school. Their graduation rate from college is ten percentage points higher than men’s. In STEM disciplines, their GPAs are one whole point higher than men’s. They are getting the majority of professional degrees. Even in engineering, MIT is 47 percent women. Caltech and Georgia Tech are more than 30 percent I knew we could have done even more—or done it faster—if the financial crisis hadn’t tossed us around like the rest of the global economy, but we’d handled that well too. I had worked as hardNooyi takes us through the events that shaped her, from her childhood and early education in 1960s India, to the Yale School of Management, to her rise as a corporate consultant and strategist who soon ascended into the most senior executive ranks. The book offers an inside look at PepsiCo, and Nooyi’s thinking as she steered the iconic American company toward healthier products and reinvented its environmental profile, despite resistance at every turn. The best part of the book is the 1st part, her childhood and early days in America. Here also she fails to recognise that she indeed belongs to a privileged family. As not many Indians at that time had a grandfather who is so highly educated(law professional) , but in my opinion she underplayed it. I am now more appreciative of efforts put in to ensure employee welfare such as paid leaves, encouraging diversity and inclusion, pay disparity and level-playing fields for women. My knowledge about these issues only touched the surface but through this book, I could wade into these topics. Men hold most of the positions of power, and it’s very, very important that they come to the table to talk about how we can make it easier for all family builders, not just women, to integrate work and wanted to understand that better. I went with some members of my team and spent multiple weeks there. But I was told that you don’t go to China and spend multiple weeks without taking some time to

Mine is not an immigrant story of hardship—of fighting my way to America to escape poverty, persecution, or war. … Still, I do feel connected to everyone who streams into America, whatever their circumstances, determined to work hard and to set in motion a more prosperous life for themselves and their families. … I still have that fear—an immigrant’s fear—that presses me to try to do well and to belong.” I’ve always heard how important it is to innovate and think ahead of one’s time and have thought it to be something only extraordinary people are capable of. Through this book, I feel it was empowering to realise that foresight is not something out of my reach - it can be achieved by unfaltering dedication to a cause, experience and good education. Innovation and bringing about new changes only requires courage and strong belief in your ideas. When you’re a CEO, you’re always thinking about weighty things about the company—either a decision you have to make or data you’re looking at that could impact the quarter or the year. You’re in possession of a lot of data. You have to make sure that, whether it’s at home or anywhere, you don’t leave the data for people to see by accident and then blurt it out. People don’t realize it’s highly confidential, even for family members. I believe in companies. I think the world is better off with large, private organisations, not only because they add stability but also because they innovate.

Success!

I think that leaders need to understand the details behind what they are approving before they affix their signature to anything. This is not about trusting the people that work for you. It’s about basic responsibility. Don’t be a ‘pass-through.’ … I know I drove people crazy with questions, but this was my job.” At any rate, Nooy's family cathechization clearly did not include the basic Buddhist/Indic moral axiom of "right livelihood": thou shalt not market junk food in developing countries, especially your country of origin! That’s why I use the term work juggle. Work–life juggling. Are you constantly trading off priorities? It’s when you’ve constantly got multiple balls in the air and you hope nothing drops. It’s not easy for a stay-at-home mom who’s juggling so many home priorities. It’s not easy for a working woman without a family who’s also juggling other priorities—it could be an aging parent or a relative she’s looking after or a work environment that’s hostile. Everybody’s juggling all the time. For a period of six months, my team designed a training program for me. Every two weeks, a different speaker would come into my office—could be a professor, could be a China expert. They would come into my office and give me a two- to three-hour seminar session on China, along with a bunch of readings I had to do. Then the next person would come, and the next. They put a whole curriculum together. The final session was Henry Kissinger coming in and wrapping everything together to tell me the integrative picture on China. We still have relatively few women with the experience and fortitude to be considered for the position of CEO of a multibillion-dollar enterprise. This is a real issue because we are not enabling so many talented young women to achieve their full potential—a loss for the overall economy.”