Christine Michel Carter
00:00:05
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Work-Life Equation, a Bright Horizons podcast. The only podcast featuring candid conversations, stories and strategies from corporate leaders, from public figures, and from everyday people who are putting the pieces together to make life work. I am one of your hosts, Christine Michel Carter.


Priya Krishnan
00:00:24
And I'm Priya Krishnan, the chief client and experience officer for Bright Horizons.

Christine Michel Carter
00:00:29
Priya, how have you been?

Priya Krishnan
00:00:30
I've been good, Christine. How have you been?

Christine Michel Carter
00:00:32
I have been fabulous. I am so excited today. I know that I have to do our intro. I have to keep it very calm, but this is the season premiere.

Priya Krishnan
00:00:44
That is right. And we both have our respective fan girl moments with our guest today.

Christine Michel Carter
00:00:49
Oh, my gosh. What a season premiere-worthy guest we have, no pressure!

Priya Krishnan
00:00:50
Yes.

Christine Michel Carter
00:00:53
Just the woman consistently ranked one of the world's 100 most powerful women with her own masterclass New York Times bestselling author, the first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50, not 500 company, that means $65 billion were in her control. I'm done. I'm nervous, to say the least.

Priya Krishnan
00:01:18
As am I. But I'm sure we'll learn a lot, both personally and professionally, from our guests. So looking forward to it.

Christine Michel Carter
00:01:25
Let's get into our here we go conversation. So for those of us joining us, other people call them dinner table conversations. Priya and I call them here we go conversations. So there's no real time for us these days to have dinner table conversations with our kids. Most meals are eaten in the car, so you have to have those uncomfortable conversations at any time. So who has time to wait until dinner? And they're just the conversations that make you think, how in the world am I going to talk about this with the kids? And my dinner table or my here we go conversation this week was really about discussing a time with my kids. To them, it looked like success. To them, I looked like the supermom-preneur mom boss. But I knew deep down inside that I was struggling on the inside and I even felt like I failed. So my daughter went to school and she loves talking about my book. Of course, she doesn't say the title because it's Mom AF, but she loves talking about the fact that her mother has a book. It's so cool. And her friends think that it's cool that her mother had a book, but for me, it's definitely a “here we go moment” whenever she asked me about the book because it's based on my separation and my divorce. And even though years have passed, for me, there's always elements of the book because it's so multilayered, that still make me think, how in the world am I going to talk about that part of the book with them? And with the book, I was living the pain in real time, right? So to them, it looks like a success. For me, I felt like a failure. I was deliberately choosing to go it's alone. I was separating and divorcing, and it was a moment where I felt like I had failed and failed them at that.

Priya Krishnan
00:03:01
Mine's work related as well. And before Bright Horizons, I founded the childcare company in India, and I'd won this big award where I was named the woman entrepreneur. And it was all over the news. I had people calling me, but I was going through this really big struggle internally with the direction of the company and exiting the organization and sort of taking a step down. So, it was a very conflicted time for me. On the one hand, you were getting all these public accolades, and you become this person that people are reaching out to, saying you're a woman leader and a woman entrepreneur. But I think I took that moment to just have that discussion with Sanjay, my husband and the kids, just to say, I'm struggling with this, and you should know. And it was really helpful just to have that safe space to have that discussion in. Sometimes this outer layer of you and this inner layer of you is constantly at conflict. But how do you manage through that is really critical. It's in the past, but I think it brought back memories as you were talking about it.

Christine Michel Carter
00:04:17
Yeah, it's always resurfacing those here we go moments, especially, like, when you feel like a success. Excuse me? When the world thinks you're a success but you feel like a failure inside, it always comes back, doesn't it? It never leaves you.

Priya Krishnan
00:04:30
Yes.

Christine Michel Carter
00:04:31
Well, today's guest is I mean, wow. You know how some people can say, Google me, and you're like, okay, yeah. All you see is, like, a random. People find their site and it's their address, and that's it. That's all that the Internet has about them. And you're like, yeah, you're a big deal. No. The guest that we have today for this season premiere episode oh, my goodness. She has so many accomplishments, I will not even list them. I can literally hold one of her accomplishments in my hand. Okay, I'll Google her. I promise you that you will be amazed. But I also promise you that what you will find out today on the season premiere episode of the Work Life Equation podcast. You will not find out from Googling her because we're going to discuss work yeah. But family, women in the workplace, her parenting style, how she was raised in a no nonsense, no softball questions kind of family, what external success but internal failure looks like for her, and being the one to make tough calls that impact millions of families in America. Welcome Indra Nooyi to The Work-Life Equation.



Indra Nooyi
00:05:38
Thank you for having me on the show, Indra.


Priya Krishnan
00:05:40
We both had fan girl moments, and it's something that we've been looking forward to. You heard both of us talk about our respective moments of external success, but internal struggle. It would be great if you could share if you had one of those or a few of those that normalize, that conversation of struggle.

Indra Nooyi
00:06:01
It's a fact of life. In fact, I'd say that for many women I've talked with. But certainly for me, there's a track in my head, maybe 20% of my brain, that's constantly thinking about, what do I have to do with the kids, the home? What have I not done? Where did I mess up? It's running all the time. I can't shut it down. So all the time I was working, and even now when I travel any place, there I am, giving a speech in front of a group of people in some country, and the other side of me is going, oh, my God, did I give up permission to go on this field trip? Did I make sure that I bought the right dress for the mother daughter litigie? That's all I'm thinking about. And I'm waiting to get off the speech so that I can get all those checklists done. And I'd come back home and I'd say to my husband, did you worry about these things? He said, no, I went on a business trip, and that's all I had to worry about. And so I think what happens is we must have something in our gene pool that says we have to have a part of our brain focusing just on the family and kids. And what that does is if you don't get those checklists done, you feel like a failure. Oh, my God, I failed the family. I didn't do it. So that feeling of inadequacy was there all the time. And I think it's that perfection gene in us that wants to make sure the family is handled okay. The work is handled okay. Everything is done right. Some of it is our own doing, but I think it's also required to keep the family going.

Christine Michel Carter
00:07:28
I love that. I appreciate that. And we are very candid on the podcast. So I must say, when I came back home after speeches and whatnot and heard you weren't thinking about it or heard I didn't know. I was like, well, your workplace, you're gone. So I am a single mom, and what advice do you have for working women who might be struggling like me, who are caring for their family, and not only as the female role in the family, but the responsibility of both parents? And if you want to speak to how you navigated that role while you're currently married, obviously, unlike me, while at Pepsi, please do. But I would just love any type of advice that you could offer.

Indra Nooyi
00:08:08
Christine, first of all, I have to tell you that and I say this often in many ways, I won the lottery of life. I won the lottery of life because of the family I was born into, who told me that women can dream as much as men. And then subsequently the fact that I married somebody who was very supportive of me and my career and his family is also supportive of me and my career, and they all came together to help me. I often wonder what my life would have been had I not had a supportive spouse, had I not had the family support I did, who all came in and took over the family running while I was busy on business matters or if I had a sick child at home. There are a lot of people who have special needs children or a sick child, and it's very hard to balance all of it. I'll come back and say, if you don't have an ecosystem that's set up to support you, I don't care what technology we have, what kind of remote working you do, it's very, very stressful to manage work and home and children and make sure your paycheck is coming in. It creates stress, very high levels of stress. So one of the things that I would love to explore at some point is how do we create community structures where people actually help each other? We have lost trust in communities. We've lost trust with neighbors. We have to come together and help each other out because that's how communities were built in the past. That's how neighborhoods came together. If we don't recreate that, I just don't know how. Parents who have to hold their job, have to care for aging parents or children who might not be well or deal with all these multiple priorities can do that and remain sane. So we have to rethink how we function in society.

Priya Krishnan
00:09:58
I think what you're saying is so true, but you're also minimizing and maybe being self-deprecating. When you say you won the lottery, it's not straightforward. And you also have a successful spouse. Raj had a career of his own and ran his own organization, and you've raised two kids together. It's not straightforward to balance that out. We'd love to hear – it is different circumstances, but how did you pull that off? And how did you decide where to divide and conquer and also where to sort of delegate?

Indra Nooyi
00:10:36
The lucky thing is the parents on both sides both said, we're going to help you out. Now, I have to tell you, multigenerational living is a challenge because their ideas of parenting is very different than our ideas of parenting, and it's going to be inevitable clashes. But if you're willing to suck it up and say, I'm not going to focus on the clashes, I'm going to focus on the fact that they're here to help me and somehow make it work. I think the combination of Raj and I working in cooperation with each other, planning our calendars carefully, because we decided the kids would never be without one of us any night. So it required very careful planning. It also required us to schedule the family members and relatives to come and help us. So there's all this big scheduling chart all the time. And we were just talking to our kids recently and saying, we got married at 25. We had our first kid when I was 28 or 29. Since that time, our life has been revolving around the children, the job and children. I don't think the two of us took a vacation, just the two of us, and decided to chill out. It was always about Disney World, some cruise with the kids, you know, something to do with the kids all the time, weekends, every vacation. And we only had money to go on the economy overseas, so kids sitting all over you. So we went through all of that stuff. We don't regret it one bit. But I could not have done it without Raj there. I could not have done it without the family support. Was it a challenge? Yes, but a different sort of a challenge than if I had none of them. And I had to still manage all the family because I love children. I love the concept of being a mother. And Bright Horizons didn't exist then, Priya. Bright Horizons was a fantastic innovation from Linda Mason and Roger Brown. And I went to school with Linda. And I will tell you that had Bright Horizons existed when my children were young, there would have been an added support only in work hours, not after work hours.

Priya Krishnan
00:12:39
No. I think I'm a big believer if you need to be personally anchored to be professionally successful, and we've struck this balance. Sanjay and I have a long distance relationship because we focus on our respective ventures. But I would love to hear from you on how do you preserve that relationship now that the girls are out of the door? How do you find yourself again? How do you transition from being parents of children to actually being husband and wife and sort of going into that next phase of your life?

Indra Nooyi
00:13:12
I think that you'll always be parents of your children, especially when you have girls. And we have responsibilities. Both of us have aging parents, aging mothers. And so not only do we talk about the two of us, but we also talk about how we're going to spend time with the aging parents, taking care of them because they require care rajasthan, India, 50% of the time taking care of his mother. And so I cannot complain about it because that's his responsibility as one of the two sons. And so the question is, if you have respect for each other and a deep commitment to each other, everything else becomes irrelevant. So the way we work, it is respect, deep commitment, total commitment to our kids and our families and everything else we can handle somehow or the other.

Christine Michel Carter
00:14:04
It's so interesting you talk about your mother after you were appointed the CEO of Pepsi as well, when she asked you to go buy milk. And how she told you, leave the crown in the garage, I thought that was funny. How did that change your perception of what success looked and felt like having your mother say that to you?




Indra Nooyi
00:14:23
No. At that moment, I was pretty upset, Christine, because I'm like, hey, wait a minute. It's a big promotion, and it's something I never thought I'd ever get or I'd never be in the boardroom of PepsiCo. I'm sort of floating on cloud nine, and all that you want to do is to dunk me in the water and bring me back to earth. What's wrong with you? But after I reflected on it for some time, I realized that when I do come home, I have a role to play that nobody else can play. Nobody else can be the mother, the daughter, or the wife or the daughter in law of that family. It's me. And when I come home, that power has to be packed and parked in the garage, and I've got to take on the humility mantle. Very different, because people at home don't work for me. I can't order them around. It was a big revelation for me to say, how do you handle power and humility? The only thing I told my mother is the following. I said, mom, it's okay for you to tell me to leave the crown in the garage, but for heaven's sake, don't insist that the men bring their crown into the house. Or you take a crown that exists and put it on the men and then take it away from the woman. Don't do that. I think both men and women, husbands and wives, should leave the crown in the garage, and we should both say that family is not female. Family is family. We both have a commitment to that. And so, I think having kids is a humbling experience. Very humbling, especially having girls is a doubly humbling experience because they use moms as punching bags, so you get feedback on a real time basis regularly. And so I got a lot of that.

Priya Krishnan
00:15:58
You talk about the fact that having girls was difficult. I grew up in a family of girls. My dad was a pilot, and we were two sisters, that I have a family full of men. I have two boys. I have a dog who's male and a husband who's an overgrown child. I think the notion of trying to figure out how to instill feminism in them and have met that same degree of respect to women who come into their life, I'm very encouraged by the fact that you, as a mum of daughters, are thinking about this, and I, as a mum of boys, are thinking about this. And, Christine, you have a boy and a girl, and I'm sure you have that mixed conundrum of how to make sure they get both messages. But I think the fact that all of us are being thoughtful about it just makes for a better world overall.


Indra Nooyi
00:16:46
Poor Raj is always surrounded by women. The daughter is me. Any help we have at home, his mother, my mother, aunts, he's just surrounded by women. So he's learned to cope with all of us and still maintain his identity and personality. So kudos to him. But daughters don't give him an inch. Not an inch.

Priya Krishnan
00:17:08
So in terms of how you talk about balancing this and you make it sound easy, and everyone who watches you knows you've done all of it with elan. But at what point did these conflict with each other? What are some of the formulas that you use, saying, I'm mom in this moment, and I'm the CEO in this moment, and what can we learn from that experience?

Indra Nooyi
00:17:33
I was mum in this moment, or I was parent at this moment. Okay? The moment needed a parent. There were moments which needed a mom, but there were moments that needed a parent. So Raj and I would sit down and say, whose commitment is more important? Who's going to give up their slot to be parent at this point? So we would segment out what's a mom moment and a parent moment. The parent moment is negotiable. The mom moment was not. For example, my little one had Lyme disease. You know, she was bit by the lime tick, and she got pretty sick. When she was about four years old, she was in the hospital, and I had to go to South Africa on a very important trip. I just said, I don't care about South Africa and a very important trip. You can wait. I am not leaving the hospital. I'm not leaving my child alone. So I just stayed there for the whole week. I didn't even leave her side except to take a shower and come back. So you know that those moments are critical moments, and nothing can take the place of mom being there. I don't care if dad said – he kept saying, I'll do it. You just go, that's not the point. I decided that it was a mom moment, and it was. So at every point in time, I sit down and say, if it's a mom moment, I'm not going to give it up. I'm going to figure out a way to make it happen. If it's a parent moment, negotiation, can you do it? Can I do it? How important is yours? It's all negotiation, give and take. Debate, discussion, pleading, cajoling each other. Somehow you make it happen. It's not easy. It's not a software program where you just put your available slots and say, Slot me in for one of these. It's like, what can you move? What can you get done? We always used to do this six months out planning, the two of us. It's bizarre here husband and wife doing six months out planning of their life. But that's what we had to do. The kids have a way to. If something is not okay. They always call the mom. And so it didn't matter what I was doing. I had to be on call for the kids and so that's what I did.

Christine Michel Carter
00:19:41
It doesn't matter if it's a stumped toe or broken leg. They absolutely will just call the mom.

Indra Nooyi
00:19:47
Totally. And the mom reacts the way they would like a reaction as opposed to just push the eyes on it, you'll be fine. I'm like, stop toe. This is like open heart surgery. I'm coming to school right now. I zip there.

Christine Michel Carter
00:20:03
Your perspective. I am in an awe, I truly am. I mean, first woman of color, first immigrant to head a fortune 50 company. Obviously first mom, then in that case as well, to do those things as well for those communities. And I have to ask, what do you think people who aren't in one of those categories would be surprised to hear about your experience as a leader at such a big company?

Indra Nooyi
00:20:29
Well, those days there weren't enough women in the C suite at all in senior positions and definitely no people of color at all or immigrant women. So it was a trifecta in so many ways and I still don't know how I worked my way up. And I think it was really a function of two things. One, I knew I was so different, so different on so many measures that I realized that the only way to have people overcome the fact that I was so different is to have them focus on the content of what I was going to say or do. So I over spent time on preparing for a meeting, reading more than I needed to, reading stuff around what the meeting required me to know so that I would walk in a real expert. And I had read everything more than anybody else in the room. And so I had to build up credibility on that axis as opposed to how I looked, how I spoke, or where I came from. Don't focus on that because Indra knows more about the material than anybody else. Second is I had bosses who basically said, if Indra speaks, we're going to listen because she's done her work. They believed in me. And the combination of these two is what allowed me to succeed. Had I not spent as much time as I did Christine on preparing for meetings, I think I'd have been just one of the others as opposed to, oh, my god, this person is special. And nobody focused on my differences. And to be honest, I didn't want to be part of all these social networks. I never went on fishing trips on the weekend, golf trips, because I don't fish, I don't eat meat, I don't golf, I don't do anything. So what's the I don't drink. What am I going to do these weekends? I just went home to the kids and so people said, don't count an Indra for all these social events. She's just not going to come and she's just going to do the work and do a damn good job. So that's the way I was perceived, and I think that stood me in good stead. I'm not saying that's the formula for today, because I hear from people that a lot of the decisions are made on Thursday bar events when they get together, people talk about what open slots are available in various jobs. I didn't have those issues. I was just trying to hold on to my job and do a good job. So it's a different time.

Priya Krishnan
00:22:58
And how did you make that contextual for your girls? I grew up in India as well, and we were taught that education was a route to emancipation. I think that work ethic is instilled very early on in you. But how do you then translate that to your children? And like you said, the world around them and the decision making around them has changed. So how did you translate your own experiences but make it relevant for them?

Indra Nooyi
00:23:30
I told them they had to get a college degree and a Master's degree. After that, they can do whatever they want. So they both got an undergraduate degree and a Master's degree. So I felt like the education part, my duty is done. Now. If they want to put that Master's degree to use, if they want to earn a key, that's up to them. But then as first generation immigrants, prayer. We worked so hard, and our focus was on making sure our kids had enough for themselves, for ourselves and for them, so we would never be a burden of the kids. And we wanted to make sure the kids didn't have to work as hard and so intensely as we did, because we came with nothing. And so we tell the kids, do whatever your heart tells you to do. You want to be a playwright, you want to be a musician, you want to be an artist, you want to work in a company. It's completely up to you. We are there to support you as long as you're alive. We're there to take care of your kids. If you choose to have kids and if you choose to stay home, we've got resources set aside for you. So we are asking them to be whatever they want. It's a luxury they have. But again, they have to decide their own path. We don't want to put our hopes and aspirations for them on them because they're not relevant. It's different time, different place, different expectations, different everything. Economics for them is completely different.

Christine Michel Carter
00:24:57
I appreciate that I'm sandwiched right between your daughters with age, and I love how you said, the next 20 years are going to be the decades of women. We know that last year woman was the word of the year, I think, in the dictionary. Where do you see women like your daughters and myself playing in the workforce in the coming years?

Indra Nooyi
00:25:19
Well, just let's look at the numbers. They say that 70% of high school valedictorians are women. Women are getting more college degrees than men. Women are graduating from professional schools and masters programs at higher level than men. So you've got this wickedly smart group of people who are just working hard, wanting to get economic freedom, wanting to have the power of the purse, graduating from all educational institutions. Now, if you don't find a way to deploy them in the economy, provide a way to give them the support systems to have families and engage in paid work as a country, we lose out. So I look at this and say, this is the decades that as countries and companies, we should stop and say, this is no longer a man versus woman issue. It's the best talent issue. If you want to recruit the best and the brightest, you look at the whole pool not say, let me just get the best and brightest from the men and the top grades are all women. What are you saying? You don't want the top grades? I don't think that's the right answer. So if as a CEO or a governor or anybody who's running a large organization looks around, they should say, let me look at the whole talent pool. Let me extract the best of the brightest. And incidentally, there happens to be people who want to be family builders. Let's figure out how to put the support systems in place because we want young people too. So that our whole system, our pension system works. So this is where Bright Horizons becomes an important part of pretty much every community's support structure for young family builders. So I think we've got to move the debate and discussion away from how do we make sure that we do welcome women? Because it's the right thing to do for society to saying it's an economic and a business argument to bring in the best and the brightest. And incidentally, they happen to be women. No.

Priya Krishnan
00:27:17
And it's fascinating that you say that because one of the conversations that I continually have with clients is if you want equity in the workforce, whether it's gender, racial, you have to have inequity and benefits and think about how you're going to support and create support structures. You are also quoted talking about the fact that as you think of the future of work, start with the family and work outwards. Can you give us some insights on how you think about that and as a leader, how you thought about it at Pepsi and how you encourage your own leaders to think through this?

Indra Nooyi
00:27:52
At the end of the day, we want children. We want the replacement rate of the population. Okay? That's 2.1 kids per woman we need for the economy. And there's no point lamenting that our birth rates have fallen like it has in China and Japan and Korea. There. Was an article about Japan, the aging country, that it is not enough young people to take care of them. Pension plans have gone into disarray, and there's a loneliness factor. A lot of developed Europe birth rates have fallen. So I think the US has done a brilliant job with local births and immigration to get the country the dumbbell, if you want to call it, of the young and the old imbalance, okay, we can't allow that to go south. And so it's very important we encourage family building. And the only way to encourage family building is to take the stress out of family building. So we also have to get a message out that we need young people. And today only women can have kids. So we need women in the workforce. We need them to have kids. So I'd come back and say, treat child care as a gym, just as you provide gyms in offices for exercise. Think of child care as a facility for employees. Doesn't matter with men or women. When we put in childcare at PepsiCo headquarters, men brought their kids in as much as the women did. So it doesn't matter who it's for. It's for young family builders. And if it's not in the office, put it in the community, which may be even better. But let's think about childcare as an essential utility that actually creates a healthier, happier society.

Christine Michel Carter
00:29:35
I couldn't agree more. I appreciate the idea that you're thinking about childcare, you're thinking about the family, you're thinking about just trying to summarize everything that I've heard today is just the quality of the man or the quality of the partners, basically in the relationship as it pertains to child care. I think that that's absolutely amazing. Sidebar one of my questions is, will you adopt me? Because I'm right in between the ages of your daughters and I cook really well. I would have given you the just cutest grandchildren ever. I'm so amazed. And so in all this whole conversation related though. Related, I do want to ask you about family. Like, when you were at Pepsi, you were known for taking it to being a more health conscious company. And I have a background in CPG, so I understand all of the lift and the time involved in doing that. Can you describe what it was like being there during that monumental shift within the company and some of the changes and the challenges that came with that? Like you said, you always tried to be the one that was prepared in the room. But that to change a huge multibillion dollar company and to change the perspective, that is such a difficult thing to do.

Indra Nooyi
00:30:56
Transformations are difficult, but before you undertake the transformation, you always have to be very clear as to why you're undertaking it and whether you're willing to stick it out in the face of all criticism. So in the case of PepsiCo, it wasn't about transforming the portfolio just because I felt I had to transform it. I was just looking at the trends over the next decade or two and I was looking at consumer habits and evolution of technology and what was going to happen to the world. And it was clear that consumers were beginning to shift their eating and drinking habits to a healthier palate. And so you sit there and go look before your core fun for you categories decline too much. Why don't we build up the better for you, good for your products, so that consumers have a choice? This is about choice, okay? All that we're saying is we want the better for you, good for your products to taste as good as the fun for your products. We want them to be priced as affordably as the fun for your products and we want them to be ubiquitously, available like the fun for your products. So when a consumer walks into the store, getting a good for your product is not a treasure hunt. They don't have to say, yuck that tastes terrible or I can't find it. So everything put it on eye level. Direct the consumer to the better for you, good for your products. So at the end of the day, you're creating a healthier, more viable society going forward. Now, people kept saying, but that takes some investment in the short term, yes, but any company you run for the long term requires a judicious balance of earnings and investment and you have to think about that constantly because if you don't, companies will die a natural death because you're not renewing it all the time. So anybody who criticized me, Christine, I said, don't criticize what I'm doing. Let me tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing. Question the why. These are the megatrends, these are the changes in society. Do you agree with them? Yes, I do. If you do, then why are you disagreeing with what I'm doing? Okay? And so it was always go back to the why. Don't question the what, because the what is the result of the why I'm doing it. So it was always this linear argument that I kept coming back to. And over time, the first six years or so, they kept saying, why do we have to change this company? Why is Indra changing the company? That was the first six years when I was CEO, the next four or five years, they said, oh my gosh, she was so prescient and how did she think about all this? And then the last two years to now it's like, what more awards can we give her for what she did? I'll be honest with you. But the first six years, really the tough six years of being a new CEO, I had to have a tremendous amount of grit to stay the course. And the board, I had a wonderful board that supported me through everything and said, this is the direction we support the CEO. Back off.

Priya Krishnan
00:33:56
It's incredible how you talk about the theme that comes out is you're very self-assured and the fact that you came from a different environment and said, I'm comfortable in my skin, I'm not succumbing to the norms, and also just staying the course, that takes a lot. You must have had moments of doubt. You talk about a village to support the kids, Raj, your parents, his parents. But who is your village? And who did you go to outside of work to say, I'm not 100% sure because everyone seems to be questioning this decision.




Indra Nooyi
00:34:36
Priya one thing is, when you're a CEO, there's not too many people you can talk to, right? Because for confidentiality reasons, you have to keep a lot to yourself. You can't talk much with your spouse either, because what happens is what came home and I told Raj so and so was being nasty to me. The next time he sees them, he doesn't talk to them because he then goes to the wife. One has to be very careful what you share with your husband. And you don't want to just bring all your tales of woe home because you want to have a happy time at home, too. And so I was very careful to internalize a lot. And that's why they say CEOs have been very resilient, because you have to learn to internalize a lot and somehow manage through all of it, because there's not too many people you can talk with. And I learned how to talk to myself. I'd look at myself in the mirror and just talk to myself and have this conversation. Sometimes fits of rage, I'd cry. But you know what? That's life. I learned how to be just strong myself. It was not easy. And the other thing I tell you is the reason I could be strong and resolute on the strategy, and I wouldn't recommend it for everybody. The reason I could do that is because Raj and I decided that we would learn to live on the lower of the two salaries. So it didn't matter if one of us lost a job, because we knew how to live on the lower of the two salaries. We never overspent. And so, self-respect and being true north was more important to us than just the almighty buck from the paycheck. It was a very different approach.

Priya Krishnan
00:36:15
I'm smiling because in spite of the fact that we've not known about each other's life, it was a formula that Sanjay and I adopted as well, because it gave us both the economic freedom to do what we wanted to do. And it wasn't a forced process, because that puts a strain in general. You spoke about I would be remiss not asking about the childcare at PepsiCo. I had the fortune of running the childcare at PepsiCo in India, and with Bright Horizons, we run it for you in the US. It's been a big part of both your narrative but also something that you truly believe in and talk about. It's a space that you've gotten from an advocacy standpoint. How do you see this benefiting employers? We think employers and the government have to play a bigger role. But it would be great to get your perspective, as you were the CEO of Pepsi, how you thought about it and how it helped employees at PepsiCo.

Indra Nooyi
00:37:15
Bright Horizons ran it at PepsiCo headquarters, and I'd go visit that quite often because it filled up within, I think, six months after it opened. It was full and there was a waitlist. So people had so much peace of mind with that childcare facility. Now with working from home options, et cetera. I would almost argue that we ought to think about childcare centers and communities because rather than parents having to bring their kids in subways and all that to childcare center at work. If it's closer to home, it's much easier for them to get home, pick up the kid and go back home. Provided you can get home at a predictable hour. Which now gets me to the second question. And Christine, this goes back to the question that you asked me. How do you put families at the center of the future of work? What does it mean? What if we said schools finish at 3:30? We want young family builders to leave the office at three to be able to pick up their kids. There's no magic, which says the office day has to end at five. So leave at three, pick up your kids, spend time with them, maybe you pick up your work later on in the night after they've been sort of put down to bed. But I think we have to think about why do we engineer a work day that's in conflict to the school day? How do we rethink all of these institutions and systems we've had from the past so that we reduce the stress on families that causes them to delay having children or not having children at all. And then let's not talk about mental stress on people. Let's create a society which has community help, reduces mental stress, and somehow encourages family building the right way so that we actually have thriving, healthy families.

Christine Michel Carter
00:39:04
I love it. I spend just so you know, I spend about 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon with kids because my kids have different school schedules and then I have a work schedule on top of that. So I'm with you. Let's reduce the challenges of mental health for mothers and create a community of a childcare in my basement so then I can just leave and then we can have a Bright Horizons in my basement. Priya, you should make it happen. I want a Bright Horizons in my basement so I don't have to do this.




Indra Nooyi
00:39:34
Imagine a community, every community had a, even in Connecticut we have home based child care centers run by all our kin. Jessica Sager. Amazing woman. But things like that, where in your community you can have a child care facility, not just regular hours. I think of all of front line workers who work night shifts, how are they supposed to have kids and raise families and earn a paycheck going to a nine to six shift? And so I think we have to think through all of this and say, how do we engineer flexibility? How do we allow child care to exist? Off hours, aging care, you know, the whole care equation is a big one, as societies age. But if we don't take care of all of this, Christine, we will have a more stressed out, a more troubled population where the burden of care is disproportionately on them. It ends up being women.

Priya Krishnan
00:40:32
It's like all good doctors say, solved for the root cause and not the symptoms. So if the mental health is coming from the stress of child care but I love the fact that you're talking about designing work around how the family unit functions. And I think it's something that we're reflecting on as an organization. And I hope your voice, your advocacy role now has that impact both on employers as well as the government.

Indra Nooyi
00:40:59
I mean, I'm not suggesting you give up productivity. I'm not suggesting you slack off, get the work done, but just engineer the work day slightly differently.

Christine Michel Carter
00:41:07
Thank you so much, Indra, for joining us. I have taken away so many different nuggets. I'm going to claim it. I feel like I am a better woman and mother and executive for having had this conversation with you. I love the idea of the crown not going in the house. I love the idea that CEOs in any position that you hold in the workplace can be replaced, but your position as a mother can't. I love the idea of making sure that you have the data and you have the argument to support any type of transformational decision you make. The only thing that I disagree with you with is being petty after you get the awards. I think that you have earned it. I think that you should have been Tom Petty and taken it and said, see, I told you for the past ten years how awesome I am. Now look at this and give me more awards for waking up in the morning.

Indra Nooyi
00:42:04
I want to tell you I'm in awe of you as a single mother bringing up two kids, keeping a job, and, you know, being as charming and lovely as you are. So I'm in awe of you. So I just want you to know that it's people like you who show us the way that women hold it together in incredible ways. And it's people like you who need all the support structures we can build. So I'm taking my hat off to you.

Christine Michel Carter
00:42:28
Thank you so much. I'm so beyond honored to have had this conversation with you. I want everybody to run out and pick up a copy of your book. Obviously, this is mine for sure, highlighted and just sleeping with me every night. But what can listeners expect from you next? Are we going to get a second or no?

Indra Nooyi
00:42:47
No more books. Just one. No more books. 100%. No more books. 

Christine Michel Carter
It was an exhausting experience?

No, it's not that. I mean, look, unless you have something profound to say, there's no point writing a book. Books come out all the time. But it's got to be a truly cutting through the clutter kind of message. I don't have that. I still have legs on this book to get the message out, and that's all I'm going to do, get the message out on this book. And I don't need to write another book. We can keep restating all the messages from this book and seeing if we can make change happen in society that makes sense.

Priya Krishnan
00:43:24
But your balancing of power with humility is incredible. And the fact that you do this in every conversation is amazing. Like Christine said, I think we learned so much from you, Indra. The awards are something that you should continue getting because you continue to be an inspiration for women, for women of color. So thank you. 

Christine Michel Carter
00:43:43
Bright Horizons is a leading education and care company dedicated to helping people thrive both at work and at home. Their solutions and resources are designed to support the full family and help people thrive at work and at home. Priya, with that in mind, what resources do you have for our listeners to help them thrive at work and at home?

Priya Krishnan
00:44:04
This week, there are so many resources that are available on our website, www. Bright Horizonss.com, you can search for work life equation, but there are three that I would point out to, which is how do you solve the childcare crisis and how employers can support that the real reason why working women are opting out of the workforce. So it forces both as a reflection for employers and the work design that India sort of alluded to, and the five strategies to ease working mum guilt, which, you know, you and I have oodles of. I only think of it as the guilt never goes away. You can only alleviate a part of it through what you do. So I think these would be useful resources for our listeners.

Christine Michel Carter
00:44:50
Jeez Louise. I mean, I've never listened to a season premiere of a podcast that was as good as this. My takeaway, 100% is that Indra Nooyi thinks I'm amazing and that is all that I will need to tell my children. When they tell me that they don't want me to cook dinner and want to go to Chick-fil-A tonight, I'm going to say, but Indra Nooyi told me I'm amazing, which means I can cook amazing. And you will eat in the house.

Indra Nooyi
00:45:17
Absolutely.







Christine Michel Carter
00:45:20
Priya, what did you learn this week.

Priya Krishnan
00:45:25
I love the fact that you said family is family, and family is not female. And I think the more equity we can bring in roles and responsibilities in the household. So I am going to go back and thank Sanjay for being a wonderful spouse and remind my kids that that's the role that they have to play as they have their partners in their lives. That was my take. Okay.

Christine Michel Carter
00:45:48
I love it. Since we still have your injury, is there any final thoughts that you wanted to give the audience?

Indra Nooyi
00:45:54
No, just go back to the point you made, Christine. I really believe women have a profound role to play in society, in so many roles, so many critical roles. But through it all, the only key that I have for women is make sure you have economic freedom. Make sure you have the power of the purse. Make sure that you're never dependent on other people. Because you never want a situation where you feel like you gave up everything and now you're by yourself and you don't know how to get back in the job market. And you don't know how it's all going to work because your marriage broke up and you never had a job. So make sure that you have the means to work and earn a living, because if you're not economically independent, it means that you're setting yourself up for issues downstream prior. Thank you, Christine. It was a pleasure talking to the two of you.

Christine Michel Carter
00:46:46
You have just listened to the season premiere of the Work-Life Equation, a Bright Horizons podcast, the only podcast featuring candid conversations, stories and strategies from corporate leaders, public figures and everyday people who are putting the pieces together to make life work. Join us for our next episode. I am one of your hosts, Christine Michelle Carter.


Priya Krishnan
00:47:08
And I'm Priya Krishnan from Bright Horizons. And we're signing off. Thank you so much.