Indra Nooyi wants us to reimagine the return to work (part 1) (Transcript)

Adam Grant (AG):
Hey WorkLifers, it’s Adam Grant, and this is Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist, and this series is about rethinking assumptions we often take for granted about how we work, lead, and live.

Today’s guest is Indra Nooyi, the longtime CEO and chairman of PepsiCo. She’s been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and one of the world’s most powerful women, and she’s one of the leaders I admire most. She just released her memoir, My Life In Full, and this was our first conversation ever. Next week you’ll get to hear our second.

Adam Grant (AG):
Any questions or comments before we dive in?

Indra Nooyi (IN):
No, I just I'm nervous. Like how not to look stupid in front of you.

AG:
I think you've, you've already cleared that bar a few times in your career. Like you, I mean, you've, you've retired as CEO of PepsiCo. I think at this point you can't make any mistakes.

IN:
Well, Adam, you know, I'm still learning from people like you. So thank you for inviting me to your podcast.

AG:
Well, sentiments are mutual. I finished reading the book last night. And it is remarkable. And in how candid you are and how much you open up about your whole life, it really caught me off guard.

IN:
Well, thank you. I mean, and it's a tough journey to talk about because you sometimes bury a lot of the things from the past, or you don't talk about. And then when you have to write it, you realize that one experience led to another experience led to another experience and they all link. And you're a product of all your experiences.

AG:
One place I wanted to start is just with the contradictions in your own upbringing. Um, I thought it was, I mean, it was just riveting that on the one hand you grow up in this conservative home in India, where you have separate living rooms for men and women, your parents had an arranged marriage. What was that like?

IN:
You know, in those days, growing up in India in that environment you just talked about was the normal environment. Nobody's parents hugged them or told them, "I loved them." I think it was almost like a new phenomenon to have parents hug and kiss and say, "I love you." Uh, the emphasis was on providing a stable home life, creating a frame, giving you freedom within the frame. Uh, but at the end of the day, it was, how do we give you the wings to fly and teach you to fly?

And that's about it. And there was nothing else involved. Uh, and if you had, uh, any concerns or issues, you wanted to talk about everything resorted to, "okay, go pray," or just, "ask God to give you a way forward."

So that was the upbringing we had. We never questioned it because there wasn't another model we could look at, you see? So we never questioned it.

AG:
I love the question that your mom asked you when you were growing up. It wasn't, “What do you want to be?” What was it?

IN:
It was, "Well, how are you going to change the world?" You know, um, she always pushed us to say, "what do you want to contribute to the world? How are people going to remember you?"

My grandfather was the same way. He'd say, "if you're not going to make a difference in anything you do, don't do it. Why bother to waste your time doing it?" So it was always this notion of, uh, think of a broader society, a broader canvas, and how you can draw a picture that people appreciate on that broader canvas.

AG:
It seems like early in your career, that canvas was mostly about solving problems in businesses. Did, did it feel like there was a disconnect between, "what's my contribution?" And, sort of, "wait a minute, I'm making companies more profitable, but am I really making an impact in a meaningful way?"

IN:
Interestingly, when I was selling thread as my first job, you can say ‘what the hell is purpose in thread?’ but I didn't look at it that way. I was selling thread to those cut-and-sew shops, which are five or six tailors making madras cotton shirts to export, that was their livelihood. And I looked at the thread as making or breaking their livelihood because color had to match, it couldn't run. So I had a deep sense of responsibility about those spools of thread.

Purposeful projects kept me whole, you know whether it was selling, uh, feminine protection to women and giving them all liberation without a belt. And their personal protection was a big thing. In India, selling branded personal protection itself was a big, liberating factor for women. And that gave me a sense of, uh, you know, great, uh, emotional involvement in that project.

So if you really put yourself in each of these business situations, Adam, you do a better job than saying, how do I maximize value for this company? Because then you might cut quality, which is really not what the company is hiring you for.

AG:
That mirrors so closely something that I've been telling my students for years, which is, "don't worry about the meaning and purpose you find in your early jobs. Go to the organization where you think you're going to learn the most, and the purpose and meaning will follow."

IN:
That's exactly right. And you know what, if you're in a job where there's no purpose or meaning, think hard about how to inject purpose or meaning into it. And if you can't do it, then it's time for you to rethink what you want to do with this.

AG:
Well, needless to say, I'm a fan of this rethinking topic, and it's been a big theme throughout your career. Let's start in the early days. I think there's such a clear portrait of you in your twenties and thirties as a voracious learner, um, you know, hiring outside experts to teach you about artificial sweeteners and paper and how a car works.

I have not seen anybody in their twenties and thirties do that. What, what drove you to, to engage people, to teach you about things that you didn't necessarily even need to know to be effective in your job?

IN:
Well, I just didn't even know how to do my job without knowing something about the underlying business, the technology, the details. Uh, doesn't matter if you're sort of in the middle management position. At the end of the day, you have to start at the bottom, because you've got to understand why people are doing what they're doing before you can make decisions that impact their life.

So when I started with, uh, paper, I mean, when I was in consulting and had to learn about next generation technologies, how do you know about next generation technologies if you don't understand the basics of how to say a tissue machine work, a paper mill, a paper mill work, uh, where could that technology innovation come from?

You know, I honestly believe business people should overlap with technologists, with R and D people, not just sort of superficially touch them because you've got to overlap and understand what they're doing. And they've got to overlap and understand what business is. And the best example I'll give you, Adam is when I was co-chairing Reopen Connecticut for COVID. I was co-chairing it with an epidemiologist, a public health guy, Albert Koh. He knew he had to learn about business and I had to learn about epidemiology. So we both invested enormous time in learning each other's disciplines, because we wanted to understand the impact on lives and livelihoods.

And I think that's the philosophy everybody should adopt because when you try to skate over issues, you come across as, you know, just being in a job as opposed to being involved in the job. Wanting to make a difference. And so I still feel that way about everything I do.

AG:
I wonder if you could just give our listeners a couple of sentences to summarize your early career.

IN:
Yeah so um, I did my summer job at Booz Allen Hamilton at that time in Chicago, Uh, you, know, love consulting a consulting bug bit me, but then BCG was considered the strategy guru of those days. And so when I graduated, I joined BCG. I spent six years at BCG, loved it. Then I was in a dreadful car accident that caused me to leave consulting, went on to work at Motorola for an incredible mentor, a German guy who didn't care whether you're male, female, whatever ethnicity, you only cared about the work you did, and really gave me all the wings I needed to perform and do well.

And, uh, I followed him from Motorola dicier brown. Boveri moved to the New York area, worked there for four years. And when he left AVB I decided not to follow him again. And PepsiCo hired me out of, uh, AVB in '94 and I spent 25 years in PepsiCo. I started off as head of corporate strategy. In '99 I became CFO. In 2000 I became president and CFO, 2006 I became CEO, 2007, chairman and CEO, and 12 years after I became CEO, I stepped down.

AG:
When you joined PepsiCo, it was, it was sort of an unusual place for you to be because you're a vegetarian and at the time they own Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell. Uh, did you, did you experience a conflict between your personal values and the organization's values?

IN:
Well, you know, when I joined PepsiCo, I actually told Wayne Callaway and Bob Declan, the people who were responsible for hiring me, and Roger Enrico had come back to run restaurants saying, "Hey, I I'm a vegetarian and how am I gonna help with these restaurants?" They looked at me and said, "we didn't hire you to develop the menu. We didn't hire you to taste the products. So what's with you? You know, we ask you to think about the economic drivers of value. You know, what, how do you make money in restaurants? Uh, you know, how can PepsiCo operate a restaurant business without, uh, not treating it like a service oriented company? So we're asking you for different skills that you bring to the table."

And then I realized that my urge to get into the details. Okay. I was getting in the way, because I had to get into the details in a different way, rather than try to get into... you know, it's like when I was selling thread, Adam, I never went and learned to sew. So that was the same thing… you have to focus on the details that make a difference to your job, not the details of everything.

AG:
And yet, after a few years you ended up setting up a health and wellness advisory board and said, "we need to do something about nutrition." And it sounded like initially you got people on board, but then the Frito Lay president kind of dismissed the idea and you ended up dissolving it. What happened there?

IN:
Well, you know, this one, I think in '98 or '99, maybe '98. Um, when I was looking at the trends, I said, we've got to do a massive push in health and wellness, and um, hired, uh, to pull the guy out of one of the businesses, put them in charge of health and wellness at the company level, we put a health and wellness advisory board and built a retail store inside one of the conference rooms with healthy products.

And I was so proud of it. Um, and I thought if I showed all this to our, uh, CEO and the division presidents had fallen in love with it. And some of them did, some of them said, "this is just not PepsiCo. You're taking us too far away from our core and the time is not now and you're wasting our time." Uh, and you know, sometimes you reflect back on some of your failures. I should have stuck with it. And Roger Enrico always referred to me as a dog with a bone. That's the one time I dropped the bone.

AG:
In my world, at least in organizational psychology, what you're describing is often called issue selling, where employees take on a personal passion and then they try to convince the organization that it matters. What have you learned about how to sell an issue effectively?

IN:
You've got to be engaged in that issue, head, heart and hands. Very often people just articulate an issue and try to get buy-in without being emotionally committed to the issue and the way you commit yourself emotionally to the issue is convincing yourself, the right decision-makers, like the board in my case, that this way to address the issues is the best way to future- proof the company.

So you're not doing it because you have a pet project, you're doing it because this is the way to make sure the company is going to be successful. And even though it may be unpopular in the short term, you're willing to take the blows. You're willing to stay confident, and courageous through it all because you're firmly convinced that this is the way this company is going to be successful into the future.

Put the company ahead of yourself.

AG:
You weren't content to sell sugar water. And when you brought in this new vision of performance with purpose, you said, we're going to take a traditionally while at least reputationally junk food company and turn it into something that's better for humanity and better for the environment. I imagine you faced a lot of resistance, especially from old-school shareholder theorists, how did you confront that?

IN:
Ah, it was interesting. This is the part that, one day, I hope all of those people come forth and write something themselves. Let me tell you what I mean, most of them had changed their eating and drinking habits. And yet they were looking at me and saying, "why are you changing the business model?" And I just look at them and say, "what are y'all drinking again?" You know, they would all be drinking diet Pepsi in a Pepsi, max Aquafina. And here they're talking to me about why didn't I put more advertising behind regular Pepsi? Why am I not selling more regular Pepsi? So I tried to tell them that they're also consumers, just because they're investors didn't mean they were not consumers and most of the consumers out there, but very much like.

I also told them that, uh, there was regulation in many countries, which I didn't like, because when there's regulation on your products, it creates a negative cloud on your products. I didn't like that at all. So I wanted to stay a step ahead of the regulation and say, let's make the changes before governments mandate changes and let's do it because it's the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do, because that's how you create the good company. And so, um, it required a lot of education. I didn't, when I, in many cases, people kept calling me Mother Teresa, and, um, you know, some guys were really, really tough on me, but that's okay. Uh, there was one guy, uh, major, uh, analyst at an investor, big mutual fund who was incredibly critical. And about four years later, he dropped off a DVD in my office on why you shouldn't consume too much sugar. And that was his way of telling me “I made a mistake. Here's the DVD that I want you to see, because this is what I'm practicing.” But that's okay. You know, um, Adam, you win a few. You lose a few. Big change requires you to be willing to take those big scars on your back.

AG:
When you first became CEO, you did something really unusual with your senior executives.

IN:
Well, you know, I ran home to India right after I became CEO and my mother was living in India at that time. And, you know, she asked me to sort of show up, dressed up and sit in the living room with her. And I did, and people's time would come in and, you know, people I barely knew came in, they just say, hello, uh, congratulations, like 10 seconds.

And then go sit with my mom and tell her you did such a good job bringing up your daughter. She's brought pride to the family prior to the country. Uh, you know, you should feel so good. But then it made me think to myself and say, Hey, once you turn 18, you don't get a report card on your kids.

So I came back and I said, you know what? Since my direct reports and their direct reports, the top two levels of the company have already made it. It's going to be a good report card. So let me write to the parents and say, thank you for the gift of your child to PepsiCo. So this was not a form letter though.

There's about six paragraphs, three paragraphs talked about why I'm writing them this letter. I didn't want them to get upset or what are you door? You know, why is the chairman writing to me two paragraphs, very specific to that. Very specific what they were contributing, why I thought fantastic. And then there was a closing paragraph and I copied the letter to every employee because sometimes parents didn't speak English.

And I wanted to make sure that when they saw the word chairman, they didn't get scared. And it was the best thing I did at them. Because over my time at PepsiCo, I wrote about to--to 400 executives. I wrote to the spouses and the parents. And I have to tell you the relationship that was set up between me and the parents was just unbelievable.

And the executives just love the fact that the parents now had something to celebrate about their kids on a regular basis. I remember one story of an executive who's of Indian origin. He said to me, his father made a hundred copies of the letters, Saturday, um, ground floor of the apartment building they were living in.

And everybody in the building who came home from work, he gave them a copy of the letter and said, I want you to see what the chairman of PepsiCo thinks of my son. So there was that level of pride that I had, and many, many executives in American companies who read that and then started to write to parents of their executives, said that it was one of the most emotionally amazing things they've ever done for their employees.

AG:
What an incredible way to show people just how much you've had. So I think it's, you know, it won't be a surprise to anybody who knows you, that you have a reputation for being extremely caring and having real concern about the people who work for you. Uh, you also early on, uh, ran into some roadblocks around being very direct and blunt. Uh, I think you, you would say things like, "well, that strategy makes no sense."

And you were warned at some point that you, you had to, to change your delivery a little bit. How did you adjust and what was that like?

IN:
Struggled. I struggled so much, even today. I struggle with that because I thought being pithy in the fewest words, giving feedback was the right thing to do. So, uh, I just say, "wait a second. I just saw a set of numbers on the next five years and I saw a strategy and those two don't connect. What's wrong with this?

You didn't put the investments in, how are you going to make it happen with these financials?” I just thought it's better to just say it and be done with it, until George Fisher called me aside and said, "you just threw hand grenades into that office, into that whole meeting. Why did you do that?" I said, "I was being pithy. I was telling it like it is." He said, "no, you could have said it this way. You could have said, let me make sure I understand what you presented. You presented a brilliant strategy, made a lot of sense, but don't you think that could require more investments, and have we constrained you with the financial goals we gave you that you're struggling with, how to think about investments and the strategy?"

He said, "same end goal, but you pose it as a set of delicate questions, which made them feel equally bad about their strategy and financial linkage, but they didn't go out saying, who the hell is she to beat us up this way in public and make us feel about the small." So I learned to use 10 more words to convey my message.

And I think it was the best lesson I learned, because I think you've got to think about the message you're sending and also how you're sending the message, because ultimately you're talking to people, not to machines.

AG:
Indra, I have to tell you I'm, I'm torn on this on the one hand. Yes, of course we should try to find the most effective way to deliver the message. On the other hand, this is such a classic example of the double standard that women face. I don't need to tell you this, but empirically there's such a clear backlash against women who are assertive and the same behavior among men just gets celebrated. So is there a risk that these kinds of adjustments just reinforce outdated gender stereotypes?

IN:
You know what happened after this? The advice I got from George, I started to watch every piece of feedback that the man was giving every male leader. I'd make a note. How would I have communicated the message versus how did XYZ communicate it? And I said, "wow, I'm really learning," because this is a different way to talk and act again, it goes back to mentorship. George wanted me to succeed. He wanted people to listen to me. He said, "here's a competent person. What if I give her the tools to communicate the messages differently, role played out for her and maybe she will be more accepted? uh, she was already accepted, but I want her to be respected as she moves along and not shut out of meetings."

But you're right, you are right in that. Women are usually, uh, you know, badged as too emotional, too passionate, too high-pitched, uh, you know, all of those badges and labels are given to women and nothing we do is right. Uh, you know, uh, she's too tall. She's too short. She doesn't dress right. She over- dresses. She's got too much jewelry, no jewelry. I've heard all those, uh, labels. My belief has always been, get down to saying I'm so goddamned competent. I don't care what labels you give me.

AG:
I thought some of the ways that you responded to bias in some cases, gender bias, in some cases, prejudice, because you're a woman of color, or an immigrant were, were just incredibly eye-opening. I was thinking of a situation where you discovered what it might've been a 5% pay gap and you were told, oh, it's just a little bit. And then you said, well, what if we pay women a 105% instead of 95%?

IN:
When I was CEO. When we started looking at the pay parity, there was somewhere between two and 5% difference and I'd say, okay, let's first fix all of these payback disparities. Let's just normalize the pay. And the typical response I'd get is, "come on Indra, it's so small. Don't make such a big deal out of it."

I said, "good, then we're going to be all the women two-to-5% more and fix it another way." And immediately the pay parity issue got fixed inside the company. But I raised this because, um, you know, you need leaders at the top to set the tone on these issues, whether it's unconscious bias, pay parity, um, discriminatory hiring.

If the tone at the top does not talk about creating a level playing field for everybody to bring their whole selves to work, and not feel like the confidence is being stripped away because of funny behaviors, then why be leaders?

AG:
It’s easier to speak up about these issues when you’re the CEO. How did you handle them before you reached the top?

IN:
It was actually um, we were sitting in the boardroom with our executive committee, I was not CEO at that time, and uh, every time it was not just one, several times every time I said something, it was like, uh, "Indra, good idea. But you know, it's just too theoretical." I'm like,"uh huh." I sort of the same thing one of the other guys would say, and the CEO would look at them and say, "you know, that was a brilliant idea."

So I said to myself, I said, " hang on a sec. Didn't I just say that?" I'm thinking to myself. So I said, "okay, I'm going to try something out for size." The next time I was going to say something. I turned around to one of the executives and said, "Hey, could you just mention that we could perhaps approach this problem this way?"

And he said, "why can't you say it?" "Because if I said it is going to be too theoretical, but if you said it's going to be brilliant. So go ahead and say it." And that was the last time I had to do that.

AG:
Wow.

IN:
Now. Well, let me give you the flip side. You have to have the confidence to be able to walk away from a job. If things don't work out, if you don't have that ability, you gotta be careful about what you say. In our case, we lived beneath our means. And we said, "we don't need to live like a president or a CEO. Let's just live what, you know, in a way that we're comfortable with."

And so we lived in the same house for 27 years at that time. We were very happy with that, so I could afford to save those things. And if I got thrown out, thrown out of the company for that, I could afford to walk out and get some other job. I wouldn't recommend it for everybody.

AG:
Indra, that goes to another question I wanted to ask you, which is you must get just countless people wondering for, for advice about when do I quit and when do I stay?

IN:
I get, I get asked that question all the time and I start off first figuring out if this person has marketable skills, because at the end of the day, you have to constantly upgrade your skills to develop some hip pocket ability that people respect and, uh, you know, like about you, because if you're just somebody who's a good pair of hands, but doesn't have a outstanding skill that you're known for, you're less marketable. Unless the job market needs, you know, just pairs of hands. So the first thing I explore is is this person, somebody that can afford to take this risk and walk out? Will they get another job quickly, especially if they need a job, right? Um, if you have that ability, then make sure that you're never put down at work. Never. If you're valuable on the outside, you're more valuable on the inside. And so I always probe for that. And then I give them advice on whether they should consider a move or consider doing something like quitting the job before they have another one. Because the worst thing you can do is to go and indicate that you want to quit, but don't quit, because the day you indicate that, especially if you're not on the very, very top, the day, you indicate you want to quit, you lose your credibility in the organization. You lose any leverage in the organization. Because people say she's already checked out. Don't do that. In fact, perform even better before you quit. So people really miss you when you leave.

AG:
So I want to go back to your early career in India. Uh, you had a pivotal moment when you got a huge promotion offer and then your mentor encouraged you not to take it. Can you tell us that story?

IN:
I was working in a British multinational called Tootles or Mitchell belts as it was called in India. And because of a textile strike, I left to go to work at Johnson and Johnson. I had a great career at J&J and, um, when I was there, uh, the textile company came back and said, "we want to give you a massive promotion and make your head of 60% of the company. Could you come back and run it?"

I mean, first of all, it was an incredulous offer because, uh, you know, I was too young to run this place, and, uh, here I was being offered that and would have been the first woman in such a senior job in most of Indian industry at that time, uh, it was quite intriguing and frightening.

But then at the same time, I'd applied to Yale school of management and gotten admission into Yale and the pull of the United States and what it stood for was also a pretty significant, so I decided to, uh, talk to Norman Wade who was my mentor from intervertebral. And I said, Norman, "thank you for giving me the offer. But I also have this offer to go to Yale. What do you think I should do?"

He just looked at me and he said, "if I were advising my daughter, I would say, take the Yale admissions." Um, but he said, "as a selfish business executive, I'd love for you to come back. But at this point, I'm going to advise you as my daughter." When I went home and I told my parents about the two, they said, obviously you're going to take the job offer.

I go, "no, I'd like to do the Yale offer." And they said, "but have you talked to Norman about it?" I said, "yes, I've talked to Norman. And he said, I should take the Yale offer." They said, "then take the Yale offer." Because they've trusted him a lot and said, "he cares about you and your future. So go ahead."

AG:
Wow. So you have, you have a mentor, not only encouraging you to act against his own interest, but also helping to talk your parents into it.

IN:
Well, you're now raising who is a mentor? What are the characteristics of a mentor, and who should be a mentor almost, um, you know, mentors should be confident in themselves. Mentors should care about people enough to say “I want them to soar, not just soar under my wing.” Cause that's kind of a, uh, almost a captive relationship.

Mentors don't want to captive relationship. They just want to see somebody soar. You want to give them the wings you want to teach them. You want to teach them skills to soar. Um, mentors are confident people, uh, and mentors don't think you're going to take your, their job. Mentors just know you're going to change the world.

And in return, mentees have a job too. They have to respect their mentors. They have to seek their advice. And if you don't take that advice, go back and tell them why you didn't take their advice, because you've got to make mentors be part of your life.

And so I think I was blessed with incredible mentors who each met these criteria. They were fearless in telling me what I did wrong. I don't think they complimented me when I did right. But they pushed me along.

AG:
Well, this, I think surfaces a couple of things that I've always found interesting about management and mentorship. I've long believed that good managers try to create opportunities for people to grow and advance instead of keeping them stuck in a single job. But great managers will even create those opportunities to grow and advance if it means leaving the organization and going somewhere else that they put their people's interests above the organization's interest. And it, it sounds like that's been a hallmark of mentoring in your career.

IN:
You know, the classic example would be when we were doing the Quaker Oats merger, and Steve Reinemund, the CEO that time or the incoming CEO, walked into my office and said, "I need you to oversee the FTC process, the approval process for the Quaker Oats merger." I just looked at him and said, "you've got to be joking. I know nothing about it. I'm not a lawyer. I've never done an FTC process, ain't doing it now."

He just kept looking at me and saying, "I need you to do it." Now. I look at it from my perspective. At that time I was already overloaded, oh my God, not another job. From his perspective. You know, if Indra understands the FTC process, any future deal, I know she'll approach it very responsibly and I'll have, uh, you know, ability to rest a bit because I know somebody very competent is overseeing it.

He forced me to learn it and he said, look, "let me help you with your kids. I'll go pick them up. If your husband is traveling, I help you in your family life. But learn this skill." You know, it was a sink or swim, but the fact that the matter is, in a way, it was also giving me a lifeboat for other parts of my life.

To me, that's what great mentorship is about. Give them stretch assignments, help them jump up to those stretch assignments. And when you think they're not jumping high enough, find a way to give them a little stool to jump up.

AG:
That's great advice. I think the sacrifices that you made to lead are in some cases pretty arresting. I think the moment that pulled at my heartstrings the most was when your younger daughter wrote you a note that said, "I will love you again if you would please come home."

IN:
I still have it in my drawer. I look at it regularly. Um, and then the way she wrote, please, please, please, please, seven times in her, uh, writing with little. Uh, cloud and butterflies, uh, tugs at the heartstrings today, even today.

My kids were never latchkey kids, my kids, never, without a family member with them all the time. My kids never wanted for anything. If they wanted mom because they were ill or they needed mom, I was there. I would drop everything for my kids, but I wasn't there more regularly. Because the time that I was working, we didn't have FaceTime.

We didn't have Zoom. We didn't have these communication technologies of texting and it was all landline phones, and you had to figure out how to reach people. Um, and so that's the time that I came into leadership positions.

And I was one of the few women. I was not going to let down women by not performing. So I felt like there was a weight of a lot of things. I had the weight of being an immigrant, the weight of coming from India. And I had this feeling in me. I couldn't let my family down. Couldn't let India as a country down because I represented the hopes and dreams of those people.

And I never wanted to be viewed as anything but a very positive force in the United States, which welcomed me. So I had the weight of all three, and that's why I said I'm wired differently, Adam. All of these things weighed heavily on me. And so, yes, I had a lot of guilt. I had a lot of tug of heartstrings and, uh, in retrospect, um, I wish I'd had more time with my kids, especially some ability to work remotely and job flexibility.

If we have, if we had, then the tools we have today, I would have gone home a few times earlier to meet my kids off the bus. So, you know, I hope today's young people can balance all this better with some combination of flexible working or remote working and the ability to have families.

AG:
I hope so too, in part, because the evidence is clear even before COVID that as long as people are in the office, half the week together, if they have flexibility the rest of the week, they're more productive, more satisfied, more likely to stay. And there isn't a cost to collaboration. And yet I am seeing so many CEOs make statements like, "well, if you're not in the office, you are not engaged and you're not committed."

Why are leaders having such a hard time coming around to rethinking this idea of the ideal worker?

IN:
The biggest gap, I think, is all discussions on the future of work—talk about robotics, technology, disruption—it does not talk about family. It doesn't talk about women, young family builders who are all central to this idea of the future of work. Okay? If you don't have enough women in the workforce, you're not going to have jobs filled.

Because a lot of the care jobs are going to be remain unfilled when, especially when we have 10,000 people reaching the age of 65 every day in our country, so we better worry about women coming into paid work. Women are getting college degrees at 10 points higher than men. They've got a whole point of GPA more than the men in STEM disciplines.

70% of high school valedictorians are women. Today, in a knowledge economy, the country is going to succeed by having the best and the brightest come to work. So we have to give women the choice to come into paid work. We've got a grease the skids for them. Instead of what do we do? We put barriers up to them and say, "you know, if you have a kid, that's your problem."

That's why they're delaying having kids. So I come back and I say, "the day we include families and women and young family builders in our discussions on future of work, I think everybody's sensibilities will improve."

AG:
I think so too. I think one of the, I guess one of the roadblocks that I'm seeing organizations run into is take a, an experiment that Nick Bloom did at the CTrip Call Center in China, where people who were randomly assigned to work from home are 13 and a half percent more productive, but they were half as likely to get promoted because they didn't have face time with senior leaders. And I know that a lot of leaders are starting to worry about this disparity where, you know, if people do have flexibility, if you're hybrid or you're fully remote are still going to be people, probably men, probably people without families at home, uh, who ended up with more of that face time and they're going to be advantaged unfairly. How do we solve that?

IN:
I think we are in the most tricky part of that discussion right now. How is hybrid work going to work? Should you give people the choice to decide how to deploy the hybrid days? Or do you mandate for groups of people to come and certain days and others not to come in other days? The only way it's going to happen is if office footprints themselves change. So that you basically say, "we are going to say, 'come in only for two days; three days, you're not going to come in.'" It's going to help the climate, it's going to reduce our office footprint, whatever the commercial real estate guys are not gonna like what I'm saying, but the reason I'm saying this is because that's the only way you're going to avoid the men going into the office and the women staying home and working flexibly and having trouble balancing all of the priorities.

AG:
So this idea of rethinking is something that I've been spending a lot of time on lately. And I'm not, not surprisingly frustrated that a lot of leaders are afraid of being accused of flip-flopping or they're, you know, they're, they're showing these knee jerk reactions, like, "but that's not the way we've always done it. Or, you know, that's, that's not my experience." How have you, how have you gotten leaders to open their minds a little bit? I loved when you wrote in the book that you had the courage to change your mind when the environment changed, and that was leadership.

IN:
Look, any change program, I've seen that you're in one place, people think you're going to the completely opposite place. They think you're swinging the pendulum too far and their job is to get you somewhere in the middle. So I think it's sitting down and explaining to people that you're not swinging the pendulum all the other way to saying, "no more working in person." All that you're saying is, "let's enable family creation, good children to be nurtured and developed people to be cared for." Again, bringing families and women and young family builders and care into the center of the future-of-work discussion, Um, will actually enable the younger people to have a voice in saying, "we're not going from pandemic-induced staying at home to back to work fully. We're trying to come to this resting point in the middle where it says, 'if we have another pandemic and an outbreak, we can handle it, but let's have this middle ground where in this moment of stillness from the pandemic, we rethought what our society could be. We rethought what our society could be.' If we lose this incredible moment and don't rethink how we need to interact with us and what kind of societies and communities we want to build, shame on us, Adam."

AG:
So Indra, what's what's something you've rethought as you reflect on your career as a leader, something you wish you could undo or redo?

IN:
Two things. One is, what have I re-thought in terms of undoing? And then what have I re-thought about my life going forward? You know, if I think back to my life, there's one program that we put in which I, my heart sort of yearns for it. And that was a Pepsi Refresh project, um, way back right after the financial crisis.

The guys came to me with an idea to say, "what if we took the advertising they spend on Superbowl and take more than half of it and put it against small grants we give to communities which are crowdsourced, crowd voted on, and, let's just give the money we had spent on Superbowl advertising on these projects. Call it Pepsi Refresh, refresh your life. And people are hurting so much in the financial crisis, let's rebuild communities." I thought it was a brilliant idea. Brilliant. And the first grant that was given, I still remember was to a community where a bunch of kids with Down Syndrome wanted to learn cheerleading. And they couldn't because they had Down Syndrome, people excluded them. And in the crowdsourcing, they came number one and qualified for a grant. We gave them a check. The joy on the faces of these people, I mean, I went home and cried, but I say this because people criticize me saying, "you lost two tenths of a market share through this Pepsi Refresh because your competitor increase the advertising their brand. While you shifted it to Pepsi Refresh." There was even a Harvard business school case. My point is that case should have been written saying, "this is the model that the industry should have followed." Not questioned me for what I did at that time. You know, when society was going through so much pain, why couldn't companies have leaned in more for more responsibly driven campaigns?

I never understood that Adam and I never had the courage to stick with it because it was early in my days as CEO. Sometimes I think back and I think of all the projects and I think of all the ideas that came and they were fantastic.

AG:
That's great. And then moving forward, how have you rethought your life?

IN:
So right now I'm not a prisoner of the earning cycle. And you know, when you're a CEO, your calendar for the next year is 80 to 90% full. Two years out, it's about 60% full. Three years out, it's about 40% full. I'm not a prisoner of that calendar. I can do what I want. Uh, I mean, it's simple things like if I'm tired, I can take a nap here.

I could never do that then, you know, I've just been, go, go, go, go, go. So now I can focus on things that I love doing. Just everything I take on, I think carefully and say, why am I doing it? How can I contribute? How can I read, um, you know, how can I improve things in the community? So at every point I'm looking at, uh, you know, the question that my mother asked me a long time ago, um, you know, what are you going to do to make a difference as opposed to just doing something?

AG:
And yet, and yet I just heard you make a comment about taking a nap, which surprised me because you're famous for not sleeping very much. Has that changed?

IN:
No, that's, that's a genetic malfunction Adam, and I'm I'm really struggling

AG:
Malfunction? Are you kidding? It's a gift. I want it. I wish I could eliminate sleep from my life. I think that I don't have that choice. I have to sleep otherwise I can't function, which drives me insane.

IN:
Yeah. I always thought that is wonderful because you could read more. You could do more, you could write more lists. You could just get so much done when you had four extra hours in the day.

AG:
I think very few people realize how much freedom you give up when you take on so much responsibility, especially as CEO. Um, and it's, I guess in some ways it's ironic because you're now in control of the company. You, you, you don't have anybody who could put meetings on your calendar, right? You have total total say, and how you spend your time. And yet you, it sounds like you felt very constrained.

IN:
Um, when you're a CEO, I mean, you have a fiduciary role that goes beyond just narrowly focusing on some things to do with the company. You have to talk to shareholders, you've got to talk to government, you've got to talk to outside constituencies. You have to reach out to people. There's a much broader stakeholder community that you have to engage with.

And then based on the kind of person you are, you can decide whether to go into detail on the businesses or not. So when you put all of that together, Um, it's a punishing, uh, workload. I mean, the best example is during the planning discussions, the pre-reads would come. The pre-reads would be four to 500 pages because you have a big business, you have businesses, 10, 11 billion, you'd get a significant pre-read deck. I thought out of respect for the people who put that pre-read deck together, it was called pre-read because they expected me to pre-read it. So I would read every page and write notes for myself and every page, because when the meeting came about, I wanted to do two things. Always told me the distance between the number one and number two is a constant.

So if I want to raise the, my organization, I had to raise myself. So I would read everything and I would ask them questions in a way that said, "Hey, maybe you didn't connect the dots. Maybe you just presented me with a lot of data, but didn't connect the dots. Because when I connect the dots, it gives me a different picture than what you're presenting."

AG:
The idea that preparing is a signal of respect, I think is so powerful. This, this also reminds me of some research that Aaron Dhir did looking at how board dynamics change when women suddenly started finally joining in Norway. And he found that when you added women to the board, suddenly the men started reading the prep materials, which I thought was hysterical. I hope by the way, this doesn't mean men normally don't read. To me, this looks much more like what psychologists would call a stranger effect, where if you're a newcomer, you feel extra pressure to be prepared and to read the room. Uh, but I love the way that dynamic changed. And it sounds like you instituted a version of that.

IN:
Absolutely, but I think it is right. I I've noticed that in many boards that I've been involved in, the women read everything, everything. I've noticed that, too.

AG:
What changes are you hoping for coming out of the pandemic?

IN:
We are at a moment in time where we can take this whole issue of family and care and family builders and make it more central to our discussions. The time has come. We've been putting it off. We've known that it's a burning platform and a big issue, and we've sort of punted it all this time.

I think we're going to run into serious issues with the whole caregiving equation if we don't address it as companies, communities, governments, uh, really think about creative solutions to address this crisis, this opportunity, this issue. And I hope in this discussions about future of work, we don't talk about hybrid work and technology and disruption, and forget to put families in the center of it.

I just hope the pandemic has taught us a lot of lessons about our workforce, who we need to bring back. How do we protect families? Our frontline, our caregivers. I just told humanity comes back into our discussion.

AG:
Stay tuned next week for more wisdom from Indra and plenty of humor in a live event we just did together ...

[PREVIEW]
IN:
In my case my in-laws are bigger supported than even I expected, they're even today my biggest supporters. I hit the lottery of life on this one.

AG:
Okay so you're saying, marry for good in-laws

IN:
Check them out too is what I'm saying

AG:
There is nothing that you don't do due-diligence on
[END PREVIEW]

AG:
Taken for Granted is part of the TED Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant.

Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Aja Simpson, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Cosmic Standard and mixed by Jacob Winik. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

IN:
So you want to sit down with your partner and say watching football does not count as labor

AG:
[Laughter] and recreation last time I checked.

IN:
[Laughter] So let's talk about all of the work that has to be done in a family