[♪] david: did you think you were gonna grow up to be ceo of a large company like pepsi? it was like a dream come true. i pinch myself every day to say, "is this really happening to me?" do you get advice from people all the time and do you ever listen to it? you never know if a nugget of an idea can actually translate to big success in the company. not long ago, an activist showed up. my job is not to keep an activist happy. my job is to make sure this company is performing very, very well. suppose somebody has a product from a company that's based in atlanta and you see them in their refrigerator. what do you do? i let it be known that i'm very unhappy. woman: would you fix your tie, please? well, people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed, but okay. just leave it this way. woman: and they-- all right. [♪] david: i don't consider myself a journalist. and nobody would consider myself a journalist.

i began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. how do you define leadership? what is it that makes somebody tick? you have been the ceo of pepsico for more than 10 years. did you think when you were a young girl in india you were gonna grow up to be the ceo of a large company like pepsi? well, i'll tell you something. it is like a dream come true. i pinch myself every day to say, "is this really happening to me?" because if you trace my roots and go back to where i was born and brought up, and to where i am today, those two points will never connect. and now to be here in the united states running such a large company, it's almost in incredulous thing that's happened to me. so let's go back to india for a moment. so you grew up in a very close family, and when you were very young your mother would-- at the kitchen table say, "well, why don't you pretend you're prime minister of india or something,"

what was the drill that she was trying to exhibit to you? i think she-- she was a very-- she is a very bright woman, and she didn't go to college because her parents didn't think girls should go to colleges, and they couldn't afford to send her to college. so in a way she lived vicariously through the daughters. so she kept pushing us to be whatever we wanted to be, dream big, but she'd always tell us, "but at 18, i'm getting you married off. but you can dream big until then." so at dinner table, virtually every day, she'd sit down and have this conversation about, "give me a speech as if you were the president." one day it would be prime minister, one day it would be chief minister. and she'd always critique us. she never gave us a compliment. she'd just tell us, "oh, no chief minister will do this. no prime minister will do this." so she kept pushing us to be better and better and better. and if we got one compliment from her, we said, "wow, we must have done really well." so she really raised the bar constantly on us. and i think she gave us hopes, but then anchored us firmly into the conservative, south indian brahmin values

of "you've gotta get married at 18." didn't happen, i wanna tell you. but that's what she kept telling us. so if you don't get married at 18, it's a disgrace at that time? [laughs] it-- or not? you know, that's the way she positioned it for us. but i think the other side was my father and my grandfather said, "do whatever you want. dream, do whatever you want. but just get a good set of grades in school so that your mother can get you married off." so that was my upbringing. okay. so we had these checks and balances at home. so you did get some degrees in india. and then you decided to get a degree from the yale school of management. mm. when you said to your parents, "i'm gonna go to yale," which is in connecticut, in united states, what did they say? this is perhaps the biggest mystery of them all because my conservative mother and my, you know, supportive father actually allowed me to come to the united states. shocked the hell out of me. because i would have thought my mother would have fasted for days and thrown a temper tantrum. absolutely not. she actually came to the airport and saw me off.

they even bought me an airline ticket, which even today i wonder how they did it. what caused them to do it. but they both were very supportive. they had enough people around here to sort of look up on me and make sure i had a support system. but they encouraged me to go and live out my dreams. how did you pick yale? you know, it's interesting, there was in article in a time magazine or something like that which sort of talked about the yale school of management, the master's in public and private management, how to bring together the different sectors, and it was a beautiful article. and i read about it that the usis library in the consulate office in madras where i was growing up. i was so intrigued by the approach to education from yale som that i decided to apply to yale. all right. so when you graduated, you then began to go into various strategy kinds of positions. where were you initially? i left yale and went to the boston consulting group in chicago right. and spent six and a half years there. and perhaps one of my most formative experiences

because being in strategy consulting, especially in bcg at that time, which was sort of the father of strategy, allowed me to see problems of companies in a holistic way. it wasn't just marketing or just operations or supply chain or whatever. i saw every aspect of the company. and it sort of gave me ten years of experience in six years. and i became a better person because of that. how did pepsico hear of you? a headhunter called me one day and said, "pepsico would like to talk to you." and i came in and talked to pepsico and the rest is history. and they gave you the job of being in charge of strategy? head of corporate strategy. okay. so you did make some acquisitions that-- under your leadership as the head of strategy. one of them was gatorade. and-- or quaker oates which came with gatorade. was that a good acquisition for you and were you happy to do it? it was one of the most brilliant acquisitions that we did as a company. because it gave us gatorade which was an amazing isotonic beverage. probably the best isotonic beverage in the world today for athletes. isotonic means...? sports drinks.

sports drinks. okay. and so it gave us access to gatorade, and we could do all kinds of things with gatorade. we didn't have a good product in our portfolio. so that was good. but the bigger attraction was the quaker oats brand. in pepsico, we had no food brand that was good for you. and we needed a good-for-you brand in our portfolio. and we looked at the world, the best good-for-you brand, even today, is quaker oats. and we wanted the brand badly. so what was interesting is we wanted quaker oats and gatorade. other beverage companies only wanted gatorade, didn't know what to do with quaker oats. because we had both businesses, for us, the quaker oats company, which included quaker and gatorade, was an absolutely logical acquisition. so when i was a young person, i played sports, and in those days it was such a long time ago that the conventional wisdom was you were not supposed to drink anything during halftime because you would get a cramp. and so you were just supposed to sweat.

and the idea of hydrating hadn't come along. so one time we played a team in australia, in lacrosse, and they had a different idea, to drink beer during halftime. [laughing] it worked. they did much better. we went to that approach. gatorade's better. somebody gave you wrong information. you should actually hydrate when you play to avoid the cramps. but actu-- that's how gatorade was created. that's right. but at that time or-- before gatorade, people didn't know that as much. what about tropicana? that was one of your ideas as well. how did the come about? 1997, we bought tropicana because we had no brand, no beverage brand, that was serving consumers before 10 a.m. in the morning. the first time somebody reached for a pepsico beverage was at 10 a.m. which was either a pepsi or a mountain dew. so the first early hours of the morning, we had no product. and so tropicana, for us, was always on the radar as a brand that we needed in our portfolio for a breakfast beverage. so when tropicana came up for sale we grabbed it. i assume everybody comes up to you and says, "well, make pepsi taste differently," "make the frito-lay chip different."

you get advice from people all the time and do you ever listen to it? they give me ideas on products, how our existing products taste and what new products we ought to be developing. they give me ideas and feedback on our commercials. they give me ideas for commercials, packaging. i get ideas for everything. the most important thing is to keep both ears open. because you never know if a nugget of an idea can actually translate to big success in the company. so one of the things i've learned is not to dismiss the ideas. i catalog all the ideas i get. then i send it out to my people saying, "hey, i listened to this group of people "talk about our products and this is what i heard. "is there something here? should we be doing something about it?" so i listen to everybody. you do all the testing or some of the testing yourself? one of the greatest things about my job is i can actually taste and test products when they're in their early stages. so just to give you an idea, during our annual planning cycles, i must taste somewhere between 50 to hundred products over three days. whether snacks or beverages or quaker products or tropicana products.

everything that they're thinking of launching over the next three years or five years, they'll show me prototypes. and, you know, i can give an opinion, not that my opinion is the only thing that counts, but i can give an opinion. on top of that, almost on a, i'd say, twice a month basis, our r and d people are bringing in new products for me to try. because some technology breakthrough has happened or a product that exists in our system has been improved. so they wanna make sure that i get a sense that they're moving forward. so actually this morning, for example, i was tasting products. so i'd say almost twice, thrice a month i'm tasting product and giving my points of view. and do you ever taste the products of some of your competitors? all the time. all the time. in fact, i was in paris the last two da-- last week. and when i came back, i brought with me a whole, you know, cartons of products just to have our people taste competitors' products. we do that regularly. because, you know, you can't live in a bubble. there's something else i do. might sound corny, but i'm gonna tell you.

anytime i visit anybody's home, within the first half hour, i make it a point to find my way into the kitchen. and i'm opening cupboards to see what products they have. because, to me, it's very important that if i visit somebody in their homes, anybody who invites me, could be a friend, anybody, they've gotta have pepsi products. well, suppose somebody has a product from a company that's based in atlanta, and you see them in their refrigerator, what do you do? i let it be known that i'm very unhappy. okay. so if you ever invite me, you know what to do. i will change everything. i don't have the other products anyway, but don't worry, i'd have your products. thank you, appreciate it. so you've been ceo, as i mentioned, for more than 10 years, which most ceos of fortune 500 companies are probably for five years or so, is it harder to be a ceo now than it was 10 years ago? i think when you look at the world in the last decade, the financial crisis, in fact, changed the world enormously, because you've had-- since then. really, the world has not recovered from financial crisis. you've had geopolitical upheavals

all over the world. on top of that, technology disruption is absolutely rewriting the rules of most companies. what kind of jobs are you gonna keep in the company, how are you gonna digitize your value chain, how is e-commerce gonna impact your business. there's some technology that's impacting every part of the company. so in this last seven years in particular, it's been a real challenge to run a large company because you've got to be a foreign policy expert, you've gotta be a technology person, you've gotta be able to talk to the frontline, you've gotta be able to talk to world leaders. ceos have had to do a lot just to be able to manage their companies and keep them going in this incredibly troubled global environment. so it's been a challenge. and not long ago, an activist showed up. mm. and the activist said, "well, maybe you should spin off your frito-lay business, your snack business." what was your response, and how did you happen to keep the activist pretty happy? i-- my job is not to keep an activist happy.

my job is to make sure this company is managed for the next generation and is performing very, very well. and if the activist is happy in the process, so be it. let me just say something, david. i am an internal activist. i own 33 times my salary in pepsico stock. my entire net worth is in this company. so if an activist or anybody in the outside had a great idea on how to improve shareholder value that's sustained, i listen to them. so i listened to the activist, i had my own personal convictions, and i have a superb board of directors. so i shared with them the strategy of a company, which i-- you know, i'm very transparent with them about. and i told them where we're headed and where the activist wanted us to go. and it was very clear to the board, as it was clear to me, that that was more of a short-term strategy. and what we were embarked on is really the long-term strategy. the board backed me, the courage of our convictions prevailed, and we are, you know, exactly where we were, before the activist came in, and performing very well.

so one of the main things that you sell is pepsi-cola, mm. mm-hm. and there's another company, coca-cola. mm-hm. if you have a blindfold test, can you tell the difference? indra: yeah, absolutely. have you tried the two beverages? david: well, i'm told that years ago when there were blindfold tests, more people liked pepsi-cola. indra: yeah. and therefore, coca-cola tried to reformulate its formula, and it didn't quite work out. the secret formula for coca-cola is said to be in some vault somewhere. pepsi-cola formula--? yeah, we have a formula in the vault too. but i tell you, having-- you know, i'm a chemist by undergraduate degree. so i'm always testing competitors' products. the pepsi-cola product was-- which was invented by some chemist way, way, way back, is one of the most complex, refined, amazing formulae. let's say it is very good, yeah. but most people would say that pepsi-cola and maybe coca-cola are not that healthy for you. mm. so you must have heard that argument before. [laughs] yeah. and how does pepsico, under your leadership, try to make products

like pepsi-cola healthier? what is your plan to do that? products like pepsi-cola were invented many, many, many years ago when society was completely different. there was more undernutrition than there was overnutrition. and at that time, people felt that drinking products with that much sugar was all right. society has changed. and it behooves us to change with society. so, what are we doing overall? we are launching more products with zero or very low sugar. we're taking pepsi itself and reformulating it for lower and lower sugar levels. and so the idea is to train the consumer to start accepting carbonated soft drinks with lower sugar levels. now, the challenge is overnight you can't train the consumer to do that. you've got to step them down piece by piece so that when we get to a level, which is, you know, like 50 or 60 calories per 8 ounce or 70 calories per 12 ounce, they're comfortable with the product. so that's the journey we're on. what about snack products? they've been criticized for having a lot of salt. how are you trying to make those healthier?

indra: so let me just give you a good piece of news. a single-serve bag of lay's has less salt than a slice of bread. really? yes, because it's surface salt. for bread, you need it as leavening agent. in soup, you need it as a preservative. with potato chips, it's a surface salt. so it's actually three ingredients in a bag of lay's. a little bit of salt, potatoes and heart-healthy oil. so you should eat your bag of lay's with a smile on your face. my first advise. i'd eat them with a smile on my face. i wonder whether i gain some weight. i won't? no, no... you exercise, you play, uh... not enough. whatever. you should be fine. suppose somebody says, "i don't care about being healthy. i just wanna have a great time. i wanna eat a great snack." what is your snack that's gonna make me the happiest? oh, fritos. fritos? fritos. oh, my god. you'd feel like you died and went to heaven. i have tried that, and yes, they are pretty good. [laughs] people are really the heart of pepsico. david: now, you have over 200,000 employees? so how can you possibly relate to them?

do you do it through e-mails? how do you keep your employees informed? you have so many employees. so we do videos, we do e-mails, we do town halls and forums every quarter. every time i travel, you know, we meet with the employees, and i do town halls in that town or country that i go to. occasionally, i write very personal letters to the employee base as a whole. for example, my kids were going to college. i wrote a personal letter to everybody saying, "i'm going through tremendous separation angst." or if i felt our employees were not calling their parents often enough, i'd write a letter about why it's important they call their parents. so whatever is on my mind on a personal basis. i want them to know me as person rather than just an executive. so i'm very accessible to them, and i talk to everybody from the frontline to my senior executives. david: a number of years ago, you spoke at the economic club of washington, and you made a speech that i thought-- it really captured a lot of people's attention. and one of the things you said was that you write letters

to your senior officers' mothers mm. to kind of give them a report card or how their children are doing. do you still do that and what was theory behind that? so i have to take you back a few years when i first became ceo, i went back to india to visit my mother who was in india at that time. my father had passed away and my mother was there, and i stayed at a hotel because, you know, the home was a little bit more rugged and i wanted the comforts. so she told me i had to dress up and show up at home at 7 a.m. in the morning, and i wondered why. but when mom gives you instructions, you just follow it. when i got home and i sat in the living room, stream of visitors and random people started to show up. they'd say hello to me and then go to my mom and say, "you did such a good job with your daughter." you know, "compliments to you, she's ceo." but not a word to me. and when i watched this interplay going on, i realized that i was a product of my upbringing. and my parents, if my father had been around, they should get the credit.

because it's what they did for me and to me that allowed me to be who i was that day. and it occurred to me that i had never thanked the parents of my executives for the gift of their child to pepsico. so i came back and i started to write to my director boards and, you know, other senior executives narrating the story. my cultural background, what happened when i went to india, and then i wrote a personal paragraph and what their child was doing in pepsico and said, "thank you for the gift of your child to our company." and it opened a floodgate of emotions. parents just started to communicate directly with me, and it's been an amazing experience because i now write to about 400 executives. you write to their parents, what do the executives say? they say, "don't do that"? or "i'm glad you told my mother how well i'm doing, or my father"? so our executives actually get very emotional about it. because their parents have never received such a letter. and their parents are now getting a letter, which is always a positive report card, right?

i mean, i'm not gonna write anything else. so their parents are so delighted about receiving this letter. they tell their neighbors, their uncles and their aunts. and then the executive says, "my god, this is the best thing that happened to my parents and the best thing that happened to me." so the executive feels proud, the family feels proud. and let me give you an interesting one. one of executives in europe called me and said, "you wrote to my parents, that's great. "but my in-laws helped me too. can you please write to my in-laws also?" so i wrote to his in-laws. and he says, you know, "thank you for doing this because i'm-- i've got every part of the family happy right now." well, suppose one of your executives gets an offer to go to another company, do you ever call the mother and say, "make sure that your son doesn't go"? i haven't done that as yet, but when i was trying to recruit an executive, he had a competing offer. and i felt that he should come to pepsico and not accept the competing offer. so i called his mom who was in atlanta, i said, you know, "mrs. so-and-so, you don't know me, "but this is who i am, "and your son has two offers,

"and let me explain to you why pepsico is a better company for your son." so when the son went back to atlanta and he said to his mom that he had visited both companies, his mom said, "you're gonna go to pepsico." he goes, "what do you know about pepsico?" she said, "i just spoke to the ceo of pepsico. "i don't care what you do, you're gonna go work for pepsico." and he's with us and he's doing brilliantly well. so have you ever written letters to the interviewers you've ever had, their mothers? no. no, no. not yet. not yet. not yet, okay. some people who might be watching this who have heard your story would say, "this person has it all. "she's a woman who's become the ceo "of a great company. mm. "she has a husband she's married to "for more than 30 years, two happy and healthy daughters who are gainfully employed." is it possible for anybody, certainly a woman, in our society, to have it all? and do you think you've had it all? well, on a relative basis, yes, i've had it all, okay? on a relative basis, i'm very fortunate to have a wonderful husband, two great kids, a very tight-knit family, an awesome job with a great team.

but, you know, to get here and to stay here, i mean, lots of trade-offs, lots of sacrifices, you know, under the water, a lot of collateral damage. but i think somehow i've had the strength to power through all of that. can you have it all? that's the big question in this definition. i think if you have the right support system. if you have an understanding spouse, if you wanna be married. and if you're willing to make all the trade-offs that you need to make, you can have it all. but while you do all that, there will be heartache, there will be pain, there will be some collateral damage underneath the surface. you've gotta live with it. when became the president of pepsi, you came home one day and your mother was there, and she asked you to get some milk mm. and-- well, maybe you could tell the story better than i could. well, you know, it was way back in 2000. and i was just informed about 9:30 in the night from a phone call that i was gonna be president of the company. and so i went home because i was working on the quaker oats deal,

to tell my family that i was gonna be president of pepsico. and i walked in the house and mom opens the door, she was living with me at that time, and i said, "mom, i got news for you." and she said, "well, before your news, go get some milk." i said, "it's 10:00 in the night, why should i get milk?" and i noticed my husband's car was in the garage. i said, "why don't you tell him to get the milk?" she said, "well, he came at 8, he was very tired. so i let him be. now you go get the milk." and, you know, you never question your mom. so i went and got the milk, came back, sort of banged it on the countertop and i said, "i had big news for you. "i had just been appointed president of pepsico, and all that you cared about is the milk." she just looked at me and she said, "what are you talking about?" she said, "when you walk in that door, "just leave that crown in the garage "because you are the wife, the daughter, "the daughter-in-law, and the mother of the kids, "and that's all i wanna talk about. "anything else, just leave it in the garage. so don't even try this with me anymore." so i think with mom, you don't try anything. but she must be very proud that you're the ceo of pepsi?

i think she is. but if you go to her and talk about the ceo or any award that you get, she'll say-- this is what she says to me-- this conversation this morning, she said, "let me tell you why you got the award. "last week, i prayed four hours a day. all week. "and it's my prayers that got you the award, not your efforts." i said, "mom, whatever it is, i just wanted you to know, i got this little award." so she keeps me very grounded, david. what is more difficult, being a woman being a ceo, or being an immigrant being a ceo, or being a combination? what do you think has caused you more difficulty, and what did you have to work--? overcome more? i don't know if it's difficulty, i think being a woman, an immigrant, has-- had its positives and its negatives. it's had its positives because you sort of-- people take notice of you because you're so different. you walk in the room, people go, "oh, she's a different sort of a person." female, immigrant, tall. you know, all of these work together. it's been difficult because they go, "how will she know how to run this great american company?" so i think it's been both a positive and negative. but i say, on balance,

more of a positive than a negative. okay. do you think a woman today has it easier than when you became ceo? or do you still feel that you still have to work harder to be a woman ceo than, let's say, a man who is a ceo of an equivalent-size company? i think easier today only because there are a few more of us in positions of power. but i think from a personal perspective, it's got nothing to do with women or being in this position. i have the immigrant fear. so i'm always afraid that if i fail, i may have to go back to something that i don't wanna go back to. and so that fear always motivates me, and i drive myself to be better and better and better at my job every day. so you're a role model, obviously, for many women. do you see yourself as a role model? particularly from women from india or from outside the united states. i don't have choice but to be a role model. and i feel a privilege to be the role model, whether it's for women, for minorities, for indian women, for sure. everybody looks up to me and, you know, wants to learn from me and get my advice.

i-- you know, i can't, you know, give them all enough time. that's the thing that makes me feel very bad because i get letters every day asking for advice, so... whether i'd be a mentor to people. i can't do it all. so i try to do my best by speaking in public forums and try to disseminate information on a large scale. but i think... because there are so few of us, we have to play the role of being the role model. and we have to make sure we do a good job. because we have to set the standard for others who might follow in our footsteps. right. and would you like your two daughters to become a ceo of a publicly-traded company, or you're not sure they would want to do that? i don't know what they wanna do because they're very smart, wonderful kids, but i've told them that they should do whatever their heart desires. and if that means one day they'll be ceos, you know, more power to them. so one time, i think i read, mm. when your husband was saying, "well, indra, you're spending all your time "on pepsi, pepsi, pepsi, [laughs] and what about me?"

and what was the--? your response? well, he always tells me-- even today, he'll tell me that. "your list is pepsico, pepsico, pepsico, "then the kids, then your mom. and somewhere at the bottom, i sit there." and i keep telling him, "you're on the list. just be happy you're on the list." but, you know, he knows that i love him dearly. he knows that he is my rock, that, you know, i just-- he is my life. but, you know, he likes to be higher up on the list. ♪ be more pbs find more ways to explore at pbs.org slash anywhere

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