Indra Nooyi

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi was born in Madras, now Chennai, India, in 1955, and studied physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Madras Christian College before earning an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. In 1978 she moved to the United States to attend the Yale School of Management, where she earned a master's degree in public and private management in 1980. She later became Yale SOM's largest alumni donor and the first woman to endow a chaired professorship at a leading business school. Nooyi built her early career in strategy, first at The Boston Consulting Group, then in senior roles at Motorola and the engineering group Asea Brown Boveri. She joined PepsiCo in 1994 as head of corporate strategy, and over the next decade became one of the most influential strategists in American business. She was the driving force behind PepsiCo's decision to spin off its restaurant businesses into what is now Yum Brands, its acquisition of Tropicana, and its merger with the Quaker Oats Company, which brought Gatorade into the portfolio. She was named Chief Financial Officer in 2001 and rose to President and CEO in 2006, adding the role of Chairman in 2007. As Chairman and CEO from 2006 to 2018, Nooyi led PepsiCo through a period of significant growth, roughly doubling net profit and lifting annual revenue from about $35 billion to around $63.5 billion. She was the first woman of color and the first immigrant to lead a Fortune 50 company. Her defining contribution was "Performance with Purpose," a strategy that put long-term financial results on equal footing with healthier products, environmental sustainability, and investment in people. Her guiding motto, "do well by doing good," anticipated much of the conversation about purpose-driven business that followed. In 2021 Nooyi published My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future, a New York Times bestselling memoir that traces her journey from Chennai to the top of PepsiCo and makes a direct, actionable call for business and government to build the care economy through paid leave, flexibility, and family support. She has become one of the most prominent voices arguing that supporting the people who build families is an economic imperative, not a social nicety. Since leaving PepsiCo, Nooyi has remained one of the most sought-after directors and advisors in global business. She serves on the boards of Amazon, where she chairs the Audit Committee, and Royal Philips, and she was appointed to the board of Honeywell effective January 1, 2026. She is an independent director of the International Cricket Council, sits on advisory bodies including Temasek's International Advisory Council, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the MIT Corporation. Among her many honors are India's Padma Bhushan, five consecutive years at number one on Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list, repeated appearances on the Forbes and Time 100 lists, and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.