Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, offered up some great career tips during an interview released July 1 as part of the Hoover Institution’s “Only In America” documentary series.
Here are the six best pieces of advice she gave:
1. Seek opportunity
Nooyi emigrated from India to the US in 1978 to attend the Yale School of Management. Studying and living in the US was the springboard she needed to secure jobs at Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ultimately PepsiCo.
“An immigrant could come in with nothing in her pocket and become the CEO of an iconic American red, white, and blue company,” Nooyi said, reflecting on her unlikely career path.
“I would never have been CEO in any other country in the world including in India,” she added, championing the US as a meritocracy where the best and the brightest can get ahead.
2. Find mentors
Recruiting guides to accelerate her learning and help her chart a career path were vital to Nooyi’s success.
Nooyi said she’s a “product of great mentoring” and “forever grateful to every one of those people who gave me so much of their time and energy.”
“My mentors believed in me even more than I believed in myself,” she said. “They would give me impossible assignments to do, just to prove to the world that I was worth mentoring. They would lift me up at points when I thought I could never be lifted up.”
3. Work hard
Nooyi said she’s had to hustle and grind her entire life, including as a foreign student at Yale.
She and her peers “worked our tail off” with the mindset that they weren’t at college to go to parties or take weekend trips, but instead “to study and to work hard and to move ahead.”
“So we’d go to school in the morning, work through the night, and I was a receptionist in my dorm from midnight to 5 a.m. So people realized that this was a grueling experience for us and they respected us for that.”
4. Focus on the job you have, not the job you want
Nooyi said she didn’t join PepsiCo intending to become CEO. Her approach was “I’m going to nail this job,” to the extent that when her bosses wanted to promote her, she would ask if they were sure and tell them she was happy in her current role.
Having an explicit goal like becoming CEO in 10 years can mean “you get obsessed with that,” she said. Her advice is to “do the job you’re doing very, very well and everything else will take care of itself.”
5. Budget for taking risks
Nooyi said she “took calculated risks knowing that I might lose my job sometimes.”
That was possible because she and her husband “lived simply” so that “even if I had lost my job we could have lived on one salary,” she said.
“So we both were very comfortable that the risks I was taking were calculated, and it was worth fighting for, and that’s what we did through our career.”
6. Stay humble
Nooyi said her family played a “major role” in keeping her grounded.
She recalled her mother always telling her, “I don’t care if you’re a big shot, leave your crown in the garage because you don’t need to bring your crown into the house. You’re the mother, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, the daughter-in-law. Don’t forget those roles.”
Nooyi said that the message from her mother, that she wasn’t above helping around the house and taking care of her family, “anchored” her and kept her humble.
