My Life in Full

Indra Nooyi was chief executive of PepsiCo from 2006 to 2018 and wrote this memoir after leaving. It covers her upbringing in Madras, her education there and at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and then Yale, her consulting career at Boston Consulting Group, her work at Motorola and ABB, and her twenty-four years at PepsiCo.

The business content centres on Performance with Purpose, the strategy she introduced that committed the company to shifting its portfolio toward healthier products, reducing environmental impact and improving employment practices, while continuing to deliver financial results. She describes the acquisitions of Tropicana and Quaker Oats, the divestiture of the restaurant business that became Yum Brands, the reformulation programme, and the resistance from investors who considered the health orientation a distraction from returns. Nelson Peltz's activist campaign and the pressure to split the company appear, though Nooyi treats them briefly.

The second theme is the conflict between the demands of the role and family life, which she treats directly and without resolution. She argues that the American arrangements for childcare, paid leave and elder care make it impossible for most women to do what she did, and that individual determination is not the answer. The book is a memoir rather than a business analysis, and readers wanting an assessment of PepsiCo's performance under her tenure will need to look at the numbers separately, since the share price underperformed Coca-Cola and the broader market for much of the period.