Trendsetters: PepsiCo's CEO Indra Nooyi Tells AdAsia that Optimism can Rise from Uncertainty.
Indra Nooyi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo, oversees some of the world's largest food and beverage brands that span over 200 countries and include such companies as Quaker Oats, Tropicana, Gatorade, Frito-Lay, and Pepsi-Cola.
She is also the champion of PepsiCo's Performance with Purpose strategy, designed to deliver sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and the planet through reducing the use of energy, water and packaging, while providing a better workplace.
Ms. Nooyi told an eager audience at AdAsia in Delhi, India last week that "the world is now experiencing a severe crisis of expectations" in an address titled, "Uncertainty is the New Certainty." Held every-other-year as a regional advertising Congress, AdAsia is organized by the Asian Federation of Advertising Associations (AFAA), comprised of representatives of the advertising associations of ten Asian countries.
Indra Nooyi was an ideal choice as AdAsia's closing speaker. Her extraordinary global career is anchored in both India and the United States. She holds a BS from Madras Christian College, an MBA from Calcutta’s Indian Institute of Management, and a Masters of Public and Private Management from Yale University. Her career began in India, where she held product manager positions at Johnson & Johnson and at Mettur Beardsell, Ltd., a textile firm. Ms. Nooyi joined PepsiCo in the U.S. in 1994.
Her belief is that "we are now living in the midst of three inter-locking crises." The first is a crisis of leadership, compounded by the second -- a simultaneous crisis of governance. These two have resulted in a severe crisis of expectations.
She continues, "Businesses, regulators and governments are now unsure what success looks like. Consumer demand changes in a heartbeat. Trust in established brands and institutions has diminished. Businesses are left struggling to keep up."
Ms. Nooyi states: "This is the era of negative uncertainty. But we should be careful not to fall into pessimism. This is also a world abundant in opportunity, if we know how to navigate it. There is plenty to give us cause for optimism. But we need to know how to unlock the potential. We now live in a world in which the only certainty we have is that the world is uncertain."
Her answer to how we thrive in this new world is adaptation. Citing Charles Darwin, Ms. Nooyi reminds us that it is not the strongest that survives, but the fittest, or those who can adapt to the changing environment.
She offered the audience five new rules for navigating these uncertain times.
- Recognize that we are in a new reality.
Indra Nooyi urges us to accept that we are in a new era of uncertainty. “Volatility,” she says, “is not just the way that our normal lives are disrupted. It is our normal lives.”
Her advice is that we must learn to responding to change through a wholly new skill-- the skill of adaptability.
- Lead for today and tomorrow at the same time.
“Uncertain times require us to have a long term horizon. It is the companies with a clear long term mission that will thrive,” says Ms. Nooyi. “But at the same time, investors are understandably more nervous than ever before. They need great performance, here and now. So we have to work on two time scales at once.
She adds, “The companies that thrive in the new era will be those which define a compelling vision of the role they play in society. A good company is more than just an engine for the generation of profit. People want corporations and brands to stand for something.”
- Be ambitious. We must make big changes to big things.
According to Indra Nooyi ,”Great ideas have no borders. We need to be open to new thinking, from new places.”
“Innovation is not just about refreshing what you have. It’s about rethinking and reframing your whole product offering, your complete service. It’s about encouraging borderless innovation, where the clever practices of low cost countries are brought to places where costs are higher. Disruption is now our friend, not our enemy.”
- Attracting and developing the right talent is now perhaps the most important leadership task.
She believes that the entire process of leadership development needs to be rethought.
“Leaders in the new era will need courage, confidence, perseverance, accountability, openness to new ideas and the ability to manage rapid change. We need a team that is diverse-- a team that spans the whole range of ages, of nationalities, of ethnicities. We need to tap into their talent and recognize that because ideas recognize no boundaries, neither should we. We are also looking for ways to give our young leaders experience across business geographies.
A lot of our leadership talent grew up in the West, with Western models. We now need to expose them to the East and bring back its unique ideas. And we are looking for ways to export our Eastern talent to the West.”
- We need to communicate all the time.
“Every organization has to understand the vision. Every organization needs to know what the realities are. And everyone needs to know how they are moving forward.
Talk to people and listen to them. It’s always been good advice for leaders but now it’s imperative. Leadership is not just a rational thing. It needs an emotional connection.
But I do believe that we can generate opportunity from uncertainty. I retain great faith in the power of human ingenuity to overcome the problems that human beings have set themselves.
The future has never been made by predictors or skeptics. It has always been made by dreamers and doers and innovators who embrace uncertainty, those who seize the day to shape the future and show us the way forward.
Those businesses are the ones who are able to say they knew what they were for and they followed that mission, everywhere and at all times.
I leave you with the words of the psychologist Erich Fromm: "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
Indra K. Nooyi will also be honored at the 58th Annual Advertising Council’s Public Service Award Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on the evening of November 16.
