My Life in Full: Indra Nooyi’s Journey From Chennai to PepsiCo
My Life in Full – Work, Family and Our Future is notably different from many traditional CEO biographies because it intertwines her professional journey with her personal experiences, creating a more holistic and relatable narrative. A review by Manjulaa Shirodkar
Indra Nooyi’s autobiography My Life in Full – Work, Family and Our Future* came out in 2021, two years after she had retired from PepsiCo after serving as the Chairman on the company’s Board of Directors for an year and after 12 years as CEO of the Fortune 50 Company. Today, she is on the Amazon Board of Directors and chairs its audit committee; is on the supervisory board of Philips, as also other director and trustee positions at seminal organisations such as the International Cricket Council among others.
You would think that a book featuring the former CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo would bring to the table a piece of work which details corporate strategy and pursuit of professional excellence alone, but it actually lays emphasis on personal experience intertwined with her brilliant career graph. Page after page, Nooyi candidly shares the background she hails from – Chennai, Tamil Nadu; the sacrifices her family had to make to support her; her own guilt at not having enough time to spend with her young, growing up daughters and a husband who had his own challenges at work, and lauds his unstinting support.
My Life in Full stands out from many traditional CEO biographies and autobiographies in several key ways. While most CEO memoirs lean heavily on corporate strategy and professional success, Nooyi’s book creates a more holistic and relatable narrative. In an interview with Lilah Jones, Talks at Google in 2024, Nooyi mentions that “My story could have only been possible in America. I firmly believe that,” while crediting her grandfather, father, mother and her extended family for having sculpted her into who she became eventually.
At no point does the graduate from the Yale School of Management let the reader forget the roles that she juggled as a professional, a mother, a wife and a daughter, and also how each of her decisions in the corporate world was dictated by a desire to impact not just the company she worked at but society at large. An excerpt from the book illustrates a harmonious blend of two cultures that she straddled throughout her work life.
On page 206, Nooyi speaks of how she wanted PepsiCo to become an environmentally responsible company and how that decision was shaped by her childhood back home in India: “I had grown up in a household where one small bucket of waste a week was too much. Now I was captaining the “convenience culture” – where one time use and throwaway habit were the dominant leitmotifs. … It’s not like this was out of the blue. Al Gore’s documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth had just been released and the whole world was talking about the planet. But I think that, for some key PepsiCo executives, the packaging waste problem just felt too colossal, something that would require a technological breakthrough to address. In addition – and they were right – the convenience culture was embedded in our society and would take a lot to change.
“A second troubling environmental issue for me was water. The value of water is in my bones. Our lives in Madras were regulated by the flow of clear, clean water and the hours in the day when the taps were on or off. In my mind I saw my dad at the kitchen sink, waiting for the trickle to fill our pans and bowls. I saw myself bathing with my little steel cup; I saw the women of Madras lined up waiting their turn at a public well.
“At PepsiCo we were using 2.5 gallons of water for every gallon we made of Pepsi-Cola and our other beverages. Just fifteen miles outside Chennai, I saw our plants drawing water out of the aquifers using powerful pumps while the people in the city were parched. On my watch, I had to figure out how to make our factories extremely water efficient and, more important, to use our water management methods to help whole communities improve their water efficiency.
“The more I thought about PepsiCo’s future the more I felt it was incumbent on me to connect what was good for our business with what was good for the world. I needed a relatable universal plan…. I finally decided the way forward was to rethink the company under the umbrella Performance with Purpose. This was my opus.”
Another issue that clearly stands out in Nooyi’s book is the focus on identity and belonging. Many memoirs by male, often American CEOs operate from a position of cultural and social privilege. Their story is one of individual achievement and rarely delve into the specific hurdles of being a person of colour, a woman, or an immigrant. Nooyi’s book is especially relevant today in 2025 when the world is facing mass scale immigration and racism.
Nooyi’s identity as a woman of colour and an immigrant from India is central to her narrative. She discusses the subtle biases she faced, the cultural differences she navigated, and the feeling of being an outsider. This perspective is a crucial differentiator, as it provides a voice for millions of people who see themselves reflected in her journey. Her story is a testament to the ‘American dream’ but that it was a dream achieved with unique challenges and the help of a supportive community.
Her book also stands out as a candid discussion of work-life juggling as opposed to work-life balance. The most significant contribution in the book is her honest portrayal of the immense sacrifices and emotional toll of a demanding career while raising a family. She debunks the myth of “work-life balance,” and instead advocates “work-life integration” and a societal “care ecosystem” to support working parents. This focus on systemic change, rather than just individual resilience, sets her apart.
She delineates this argument further in her conversation with Jones championing the cause of working women who, she reminds us, are an economic force to reckon with worldwide. “It’s an economic necessity to have women engaged in paid work. It is an economic necessity for young families to be creating. So that we can support the ageing – we can provide people for all the jobs in the future…. It is a double economic necessity so let’s view this as economists and not just say that this whole argument is a feminist argument.”
With gems like these and more, My Life in Full is a significant and important commentary that powerfully highlights the unique challenges and triumphs of a trailblazer. It is a must read for anyone and everyone aspiring to find bare truths in an inconvenient world.
Book Details:
- Title: My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future
- Author: Indra Nooyi
- Publisher: Hachette India
- Release Date: 20 July 2020
- Format: Paperback/Hardcover
- Pages: 321 pages
- ASIN: B08ZNVVWZT
- Price: Rs 490 (Hardcover), Rs 324 (Paperback)
- Where to buy: https://www.amazon.in/My-Life-Full-special-Epilogue-ebook/
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