My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

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I chose Indra Nooyi's recent book, My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future, to read this January. She is one of a few immigrant women of color who ran a Fortune 50 company. I enjoyed her book very much as she wrote about her struggles with Kids, parents, married life, and her demanding career. Her memoir is quite honest and down to earth as she spoke frankly about her privileges and limitations.

I’d never had a close woman colleague with a job like mine and had never seen a woman in a workplace who was senior to me. I never set out to write a memoir. I started off wanting to write a bunch of policy papers on how to grease the skids for women to reach the top of a company. And then, coming out of the pandemic, I wanted to make it easier for our frontline workers to be able to do whatever they do and still have a support structure for them to take care of their families.

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we’ve got 41 CEOs. That’s a big number. But it’s less than 9 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs. There’s lots of room for women to grow and ascend as CEOs. The other part is that being a CEO is not the only hope, dream, and aspiration of many women. Women want to be entrepreneurs. Women want to start companies. Women want to run NGOs. Women want to be in other positions in society. That’s OK. All that we’re saying is whatever you want to do, we want to make sure that there are more tailwinds than headwinds when it comes to work and family and the integration of the two. the committee requirements. We have to think about whether boards have to meet for a longer period of time. Do boards need to have more committees? Do they need to increase in size? What can they drop? I am writing this as a cultural anthropologist and Indologist, as well as alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and retired member of the Indian Administrative Service. So, while I devoted every drop of my talent and time to it all, my success was actually a bit like winning the lottery.

rounded up to 4. It's a book for a certain type of audience, I think. The writing is very dry and to-the-point. I only kept going because I wanted to hear more of her story, not just in her own words but also in her own voice. The Indian woman so many Indian parents want their daughters to learn about, look up to, and emulate - what did she do different? Getting into the nitty-gritty of EVERYTHING - the fantastic story of the 1.5 Billion IT project she took apart herself.I spent several weeks in China after I became CEO, and I wanted to understand the country because it represented such a big opportunity. The way we had to operate was in China, for China, with China, and I In the single most valuable corporate benefit I received in my early career, the head of BCG's Chicago office, Carl Stern, called to tell me to take up to six months off—with pay—to help care for my father. (Alok - Amazing examples of EMPATHY from employers) To be extra, extra, extra, extra careful, I would hide my bags under a cupboard or something like that because I wanted to make sure that there was never any paper left around the house that somebody might look at and say, “Mom, are you working on this?” You don’t want to discuss everything with your husband, because there’s only so much you can discuss that are problems. You also want to have a normal conversation with your husband. But more importantly, I think families are so vested in you. If I shared my problems with my husband and he had a negative perception of the person that I said I wonder why I am wired this way where my inner compass always tells me to keep pushing on with my job responsibilities, whatever the circumstances. … I love my family dearly, but this inner drive to help whenever I can certainly has taken a lot of time away from them—much to their dismay. I sometimes wish I were wired differently.”

For the first time and in raw detail, Nooyi also lays bare the difficulties that came with managing her demanding job with a growing family, and what she learned along the way. She makes a clear, actionable, urgent call for business and government to prioritize the care ecosystem, paid leave and work flexibility, and a convincing argument for how improving company and community support for young family builders will unleash the economy’s full potential. I developed my own research routines. For a company that made citrus processing machines, I crawled through juice plants in Brazil and Florida and learned the intricacies of squeezing oranges with different commercial machines. I hung out in a bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, nursing a lemonade, to listen to competitors' factory workers talk about their troubles on their tissue lines, and then drew lessons for my clients. (Alok - Meaningful insights take tons of hard work to gather!) Mine is not an immigrant story of hardship—of fighting my way to America to escape poverty, persecution, or war. … Still, I do feel connected to everyone who streams into America, whatever their circumstances, determined to work hard and to set in motion a more prosperous life for themselves and their families. … I still have that fear—an immigrant’s fear—that presses me to try to do well and to belong.” I’ve always heard how important it is to innovate and think ahead of one’s time and have thought it to be something only extraordinary people are capable of. Through this book, I feel it was empowering to realise that foresight is not something out of my reach - it can be achieved by unfaltering dedication to a cause, experience and good education. Innovation and bringing about new changes only requires courage and strong belief in your ideas. We never shared fears or hopes and dreams with our elders. They just were not the kind to have those conversations. Any effort might be cut off with the words Pray harder. God will help you find a way.

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We are investing in your education to help you stand on your own two feet," he said. "The rest is up to you. Be your own person." (Alok: JUST the advice we've given to our daughters :) I think women today are held to a different standard. They’re too loud or too soft. They’re too emotional or not emotional enough. They’re too strident, or they’re too weak or passive. Every possible badge is given to women. It’s disconcerting because you can feel it. You get these badges. You can see the looks among men when women dress a certain way. It’s the environment we live in, whether we like it or not. And that ranges from every business event you go to, every social event you go to, and sometimes even in boardrooms. The writing is a bit dry, very factual- a lot of space dedicated to PepsiCo's efforts to be a 'sustainably capitalist' company. I felt I could have read these else where as well if I was interested enough. What was probably missing were more insights into any struggles and her feelings navigating through difficult situations. Wherever included, even these are matter of fact! But maybe, that's the person she is and that's what helped her have such an immensely successful career! I would probably give this book a 3.5 if Goodreads allowed it. When I was a little girl, my mother asked me to make speeches pretending I was India's prime minister. She also worried about finding me a husband