Newsmaker
Introducing a woman's touch
By Ding Qingfen (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-21 10:01
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Indra Nooyi, the India-born chairwoman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, is "an accomplished leader, good at numbers, strategy and operations. She has high expectations of herself and her team," said Bryant Daniel, PepsiCo senior vice-president of global public policy and government affairs. |
Nooyi was born to an ordinary family in Chennai. She said: "My parents made us dream that we could be anyone that we wanted to be."
Joining PepsiCo in the 1990s brought her into the limelight of business. After becoming CEO in 2006 she introduced strking changes to PepsiCo worldwide.
Three and half a years ago, PepsiCo launched a new corporate slogan - Performance with Purpose (PwP) - under Nooyi's leadership. It was designed to emphasize the company's commitment to doing business in the long term, not the short term.
"The American industrialist Henry Ford said that a business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business. We must think carefully about how we can be a force for good - to be a catalyst for social and environmental change," Nooyi said durng a recent visit to Shanghai.
For Nooyi, performance is the "lifeblood of PepsiCo", but "we want to go a step further". She continued: "On purpose, we articulated three planks - human sustainability, environmental sustainability and talent sustainability. This purpose has to be driven inside and it has to be with passion."
PwP encouraged employees to realize they were first wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons and citizens of every community and country in which they lived and worked.
"This has unleashed their deepest emotions and brought them closer to PepsiCo and, thus, "They not only love coming to work at PepsiCo, but they are also really proud to be part of PepsiCo," she said.
"It's very important for any company to communicate with their audiences that their mission is not only about profit, but also its role in society. PepsiCo is doing the right thing," said Jonathan Chajet, managing director of Interbrand China.
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Apart from PwP, Nooyi last year successfully led the team implementing the acquisition of its two largest bottlers for $7.8 billion, a move that helped PepsiCo to control distribution of the majority of its products and be quicker to undertake marketing initiatives.
But analysts said the deal's benefits have yet to kick in and the company was under pressure from stakeholders, especially when it released the first-quarter financial figures, widely considered to be disappointing. From January to April, revenue for PepsiCo jumped by 13 percent but still missed Wall Street estimates as sales volume in its Americas beverage business fell four percent.
Nooyi said the results reflected long-term strategy. "Balancing the long-term and short-term is a constant struggle. It takes courage to keep a steady hand and keep one's eyes to the future while delivering quarterly results, but it is something PepsiCo has always worked hard to achieve," she said.
Nooyi was actually a key driver in several key PepsiCo decisions even before she became the CEO. As a vegetarian, she encouraged the spinning off of the fast-food Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, and helped the company expand its portfolio by buying in Tropicana and Quaker in a bid to build PepsiCo into a brand that translated into health and choice.
"What PepsiCo wants to do is to provide consumers with a complete portfolio of products. PepsiCo is for fun. It's for good health and it's for you," she said.
But Chajet from Interbrand was critical of the multi-category strategy. "It's true that PepsiCo has become more aggressive and energetic and PepsiCo is closer to consumers" under Nooyi's leadership, but "the company still has difficulty staying consistent in sending one single message" with so many categories under the brand, he said.
Taking seriously a commitment to the long term, according to Nooyi, has important implications for the business leaders of tomorrow. "That kind of hard-edged leader delivering a return on capital no matter what the emotional social cost is, I believe, yesterday's leader," she said.
The new CEOs have to "create sustainable value, have a deep understanding of public and private partnerships, think global but act local and keep learning", she continued.