Books Written by Indra Nooyi

Where to Start with Indra Nooyi

If you want her life story
→ My Life in Full (2021) — from Madras in the 1960s to the top of PepsiCo.

If you want an inside view of a global company
→ My Life in Full (2021) — healthier products, less water and plastic, and the resistance she met.

If you want the argument on work and family
→ My Life in Full (2021) — the closing case for paid leave, care and flexibility.

The Book by Indra Nooyi

How to Read Indra Nooyi

There is only one book, so there is no order to work out. My Life in Full is told chronologically: childhood and education first, then the career, then the policy argument. The early chapters on Madras and her family set up much of what comes later, including her mother’s milk-and-crown remark, so it is worth reading from the start rather than skipping to PepsiCo.

If you want the background to the book, her remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2014, that women cannot “have it all”, are the public version of the dilemma the memoir works through at length.

A reading path
1. My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future (2021)

How Indra Nooyi Writes: A Career Told Through Family

My Life in Full is a chronological memoir, and much of its detail is domestic: the food her mother served, the convent school, the girl band she played in, and her grandfather, whose rule was that if you take something on you must give it your all. The family is not background to the career; it is the measure she keeps returning to.

She is specific about how she was treated at work. At a summer job with Booz Allen she wore a sari every day and was never taken to see the client; at ABB a boss called her “babe” and “sweetie” until she felt secure enough to leave. She also records her own methods as a chief executive, such as the hundreds of letters she wrote over ten years to the parents and spouses of her senior managers. Kirkus Reviews noted that she is candid about privilege and regret and does not overstate her successes.

The book ends by turning her experience into an argument. She writes that she would have quit BCG to be with her father when he was diagnosed with cancer if the firm had not offered her paid leave, and uses that to make the case for paid leave, care systems and flexible work as economic policy rather than private problems.

Watch

Indra Nooyi on My Life in Full

CNBC Africa · Interview20212021

▸ 01▸ My Life in Full

In a special Talking Books episode posted in November 2021, the former PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi talks about her book My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future. From the official CNBC Africa channel.