Indra K Nooyi spurned GE's Jack Welch, went for fizz, won

MUMBAI: At 50, Chennai born Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi has shattered the ultimate glass ceiling, by moving into the corner room at PepsiCo Inc headquarters in the US.

But everyone knew that the freshly anointed chief executive officer of Pepsi was always different.

Who else would thwart an offer from the legendary corporate chieftain, General Electric’s Jack Welch in 1994, to change the fizz at Pepsi?

Pepsi’s then CEO, Wayne Calloway, wooed Nooyi, according to BusinessWeek, by saying, "Jack Welch the best CEO I know, and GE is probably the finest company. But I have a need for someone like you, and I would make PepsiCo a special place for you.’’

V J Philip, former principal of the Madras Christian College, where Nooyi studied chemistry and physics 30 years ago, remembers Indra as “always a go-getter who had the capacity to rally around people and get them excited”.

He remembers how when a tough test paper was set up, Nooyi, who was then in the first year, got her class to solve it.

She then barged into the lecturer’s room to show him why everybody had performed badly.

Audacious?

“Far from it, we had a re-test,” says Philip, who was one of her chemistry lecturers.

In fact, standing up for what she believed in is a quality that Nooyi inherited from her mother. Along with sister Chandrika, who went on to work at the Citibank, the World Bank, the New York University’s Stern School of Business and then set up Tandon Associates, the Krishnamurthy girls were honed in on the art of leadership at a very young age.

People in Chennai say that as part of a daily post-prandial drill at home, the girls were asked by their mother to deliver a speech on what they wanted to be when they grew up. The most innovative was rewarded with a chocolate. “It didn’t matter what they said, but it instilled in them a sense of pride and the urge to dream big and chase that dream. It made them achievers,” says a family friend.

A people person, Nooyi’s negotiating skills were obvious from day one. Along with sister Chandrika — who was a singer — the Krishnamurthy girls were regulars in the cultural and social activities during their college days in the early ‘70s. Running around for ads for the college magazine, she would convince tight-fisted company managing directors to part with ads.

“She used her logical power to advantage,” says her college friend.

“Behind my cool logic lies a very emotional person,” Nooyi told an American business magazine six years ago. Today, as the highest-ranking India-born woman in corporate America, Nooyi has a track record of delivering  time and again in PepsiCo’s global sweepstakes.

Working closely with CEO Roger Enrico, she was at the forefront of many of Pepsi’s business decisions, be it hiving its food chains, acquiring Tropicana, the merger with Quaker Foods, and taking the Pepsi Cola bottling group public. “The energy and time she puts in are incredible,” Enrico once said.

That’s why, like  most workaholics, the office, remarked Nooyi once, is like her extended family. Her younger daughter often drops by, even when she isn’t in. Nooyi has said that she comes in to play Nintendo or do her homework  or just chat up the big bosses. “There is always somebody or the other to help out,” she said.

While such help is welcome where her family is concerned, Nooyi has had a solo march up the corporate ladder. After a post graduation at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, she worked at Mettur Beardsell and then Johnson & Johnson in Chennai, as product manager for Stayfree sanitary napkins.

“That was a fascinating experience and I learned a lot,” she said, hawking personal protection products in a country where awareness levels were zilch.

And when she applied “on a whim and got” a management seat at Yale, the penniless Nooyi said, “she came as an intelligent person and left an educated person”.

Being a “poor Indian student”, most of the summer jobs were done in a sari. Once, she even went for an interview in a cheap $50 business suit and orange snowboots like “the ultimate country bumpkin”.

When a career counsellor advised Nooyi to wear what she was comfortable in, the sari became her trademark.

The attire, however, was no impediment to her first major job in corporate strategy at Boston Consulting Group.

Then over the next decade until the mid ‘90s, other senior management positions followed, first at Motorola and then Asea Brown Boveri.

Even today, Nooyi wears a sari to most of Pepsi’s functions. “Never hide what makes you,” she once said.

And last year, when she addressed students at Columbia University, her speech elicited brickbats for its supposedly “anti-US stance”.

Both Nooyi and the university were forced to make damage control statements about how it was misinterpreted, and how “she loves America dearly”.

But there are many who point out to the timing of the announcement.

“Pepsi is one of the largest funders of the US government. When something like this happens, it could be either co-incidence or an outcome of lobbying,” Miguel Loureiro, lecturer in developmental studies in a Pakistan university, told DNA Money.

He points out how only two days ago, the US government had reacted to the Coke-Pepsi controversy over the use of pesticides, by saying that a ban on the two players would affect trade.

“And now an Indian heads Pepsi,” he adds.

To be fair to Nooyi, her appointment to the Pepsi pinnacle has not come as a surprise. The Pepsi bosses had always singled her out for accolades. That’s not coincidence.