My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

Product Information

something negative about, I didn’t want that, so I stopped discussing anything negative with my husband. I was also supercareful around my kids because one was already in business school and the other was in college. I did not want any of my stuff to get to them, for fear that they would say something. Gritty, joyous, and visionary, Nooyi tells the story of an everyday person living an extraordinary life, leading beautifully and confidently from the front. A must-read for all.”

When I was a little girl, my mother asked me to make speeches pretending I was India's prime minister. She also worried about finding me a husbandNooyi 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. I would sit up reading mail and reviewing documents until 1 or 2 a.m. I was almost never around for dinner. I didn't exercise. I barely slept. I left home for the airport at 4:30 a.m. on Mondays and lived in a Marriott hotel room until Thursday night. (Alok - lots of examples of EXTREME sacrifices :) Bottom line is, in this book you won't find any major revelation, as very less REAL life is disclosed. As a reader you hardly have any professional take away from such a successful person, apart from "working passionately/hard can be key to success" . Whenever we talk about a successful woman, we talk about all the hurdles she jumped over to reach there. While Indra Nooyi also mentions about the unfortunate situations she faced being a woman, the book is mostly about her career growth. She mostly talked about how she had been fortunate enough to always have help and support from people around in both professional and personal life. She was humble, and she appreciated people’s contributions which I believe made her a great leader. 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.

She is the woman who broke the glass ceiling, an immigrant who became CEO of a Fortune 50 company, and an inspiration to so many around the world, including me. So, my boyfriend gifted me this book. In the book, Indra Nooyi talks about her life, starting from her early childhood, telling what moulded and prepared her to reach the heights in her career. One of two things has to happen for us to really make boards think about D&I in a wholly different way. Boards need to change their mindset so they can start to embrace these notions, and they need 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.” Anyway, when I was at IIM Calcutta I was a year junior to Nooyi, who was then stylishly skinny unlike her wellfed American avatar. Or perhaps it's just that she has been excessively sampling Pepsi's 'food' products, like the ten yearold daughter of my impecunious household help who is already suffering from child obesity, along with countless other victims of Pepsico's successful implementation of her strategy of targeting so-called Third World countries as "profit centres", given the saturation of her North American home base. For the lady who worked day and night, having almost equally ambitious husband, her family life seems to be too much trouble free, except for the housing and schooling issues, rest i assume is kept undercover.

Watch the full interview

When you include work, home, and children—if you put all three together—that’s a lot to juggle because everybody wants you full time. And if you look at the CEO job as an “N minus two” position, when there are typically about 30 or 40 people, and many of them vying for the top job, all bets are off. It’s a slog. Whether you like it or not, to hold your job at the senior level, you’ve got to work extra hard. In that level, it’s either up or out. To compete with others, and contribute, and be noticed is a tremendous investment of time and energy. That’s why I think the Now coming to the book, for an autobiography it has too much of filtered content. I can totally understand if a biography, being a serious read, is not written in engaging way, which is true in this case. But from content perspective, one expects to understand highs and lows of the life of a given person, real challenges, obstacles on personal and professional front, along with a strategies to overcome the same. This book doesn't reveal anything of that sort. The most dramatic problem Nooyi had, was her bad dressing sense. A bit of problems here and there, because she was a woman and immigrant. Rest is all about, how hard she worked and how does it paid her. About Pepsi days, which is 1/3 rd of the book, it's just too much technical details and series of events. 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 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. For the first time and in raw detail, Nooyi also lays bare the difficulties that came with managing her demanding job with a growing family, and what she learned along the way. She makes a clear, actionable, urgent call for business and government to prioritize the care ecosystem, paid leave and work flexibility, and a convincing argument for how improving company and community support for young family builders will unleash the economy’s full potential.