A Foot on the Brake and a Foot on the Accelerator with Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi – Part 1

Transformation is easy to praise when it’s successful but hard to live through, especially when the business appears to be doing well and the market isn’t demanding you to change it. In a special in-person two-part episode, Clarke Murphy sits down with Indra Nooyi, former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and now a board director at Honeywell, Amazon, and Philips, for a masterclass conversation for any leader pursuing change the market may not reward right away.

Indra traces how growing up in Madras, India, with "a foot on the brake and a foot on the accelerator," shaped her leadership. She unpacks the thinking behind PepsiCo’s Performance with Purpose: why she launched it from a position of strength, how she won her board over one director at a time, and how she held her ground against skeptics. She makes the case that AI transformation starts with leaders going back to school and running pilots before writing big consulting checks. And she explains the difference between "micro understanding" versus micromanagement.

We'll also hear from Jens-Thomas Pietralla on how boards can bring the right technology expertise into the boardroom.

In today’s rapidly changing world, the ability for an organization to adapt and transform is critical. But while nearly 75% of leaders believe that their organization risks going out of business without fundamental transformation in the next decade, only 29% say that their organization has been very or extremely successful in its transformation efforts.

Four things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. Run the company for its lifetime, not your tenure, to better recognize and act on transformation opportunities
2. Train the top, then go deep into the details to develop micro-understanding
3. Start AI with leadership education and pilots before deploying it
4. Freedom within an established frame builds better leaders

A closer look at the research from this episode:

• 2025 Transformational Leadership Study
• Global CEO Turnover Index
• Global Corporate Governance Trends for 2026
• The Catalyst CEO: Why CEOs Can’t Lead Transformation Alone—And What the Best Do Instead
• Why Tech-Q Alone Isn’t Enough: Bringing the Right Technology Expertise into the Boardroom

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like these Redefiners episodes:

• Lessons from a Catalyst CEO: How Jean-Pascal Tricoire Sparked a 20-Year Transformation at Schneider Electric
•Leadership Lounge: Why Decision-Making Is Becoming Harder for C-Suite Leaders—and How You Can Overcome It
• The Eight Moves to Rewrite Your Leadership Playbook with Former IG Group CEO June Yee Felix
• Leadership Lounge: How New CEOs Build Productive Relationships With Their Board
• Talking Transformational Leadership with RRA’s CEO Constantine Alexandrakis
• Leadership Lounge: How to Build a Top-Performing C-suite: The Leadership Blueprint for Sustained High Performance

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Indra Nooyi
Former CEO & Chairman, PepsiCo

Indra Nooyi served as CEO and chairman of PepsiCo from 2006 to 2019 and was a member of its Board of Directors from 2001 to February 2019.  Today, Mrs. Nooyi is a member of the board of Amazon, where she chairs the audit committee, the supervisory board of Philips, where she is a member of the nominating and corporate governance committee, as well as on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Honeywell.  She also serves on the Advisory Board of Apollo Investment, Deutsche Bank, and the Dean’s Advisory council at MIT’s School of Engineering. She is a Trustee of the National Gallery of Art and advises several early-stage companies.

Between 2019-2022, Ms. Nooyi served as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point where she worked with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership to fulfill the mission of character at the U.S. Military Academy. She was also co-chair of The Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group, developing recommendations and guidelines for reactivating the state's economy post-pandemic.

Ms. Nooyi is the author of the book My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future, a memoir that offers insight and a call-to-action on how our society can blend work and family — and advance women — in the 21st century. My Life in Full is a New York Times bestseller and available in multiple languages.

Ms. Nooyi is the recipient of 21 honorary degrees. In 2007, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, the country’s 3rd highest civilian honor. In that same year, she was named an “Outstanding American by choice” by the Department of Homeland Security/US Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2019, her portrait was inducted into the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and in 2022 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Sciences, the New York Academy of Science and the American Philosophical Society. 

She is also revered as a role model for women and immigrants and celebrated for her empowering messages on inclusivity.

She holds a B.S. from Madras Christian College, an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, and a Master of Public and Private Management from Yale University. Ms. Nooyi is married and has two daughters and one granddaughter.