Costco Connection - June 2008

If I were to die today and people were to

write my epitaph, it would actually be a

pretty damn good one,” says PepsiCo

Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi. “It would

say she lived wisely, agreeably and well.

And to me that is really how you’ve got to

live life. You’ve got to say, at every point in

your life, if you were to drop dead, would

your epitaph be something that you

could be proud of? Is your

legacy something that would

linger long after you?

Living wisely, agreeably and well, a state championed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, among others, could double as a mission statement for the 52-year-old Nooyi, who 19 months ago took over the world’s fourth-largest food and beverage company. There, she has promoted the concept of “Performance with a Purpose” to rally the company’s 180,000 employees.

“We have always been commercially a very good company,” she says. “And we have also been a very good company in the moral sense. We are good to our employees. We give back to our communities. We have been very responsible in the way we have transformed our portfolio. We try to leave as minimal an impact on the environment as we can.

“The only reason I explicitly articulated performance with purpose is I felt in today’s environment, where the expectations of people for companies is increasing ... our people want to work not just for a commercially good company but also a morally good company.”

Can a company have a soul and still produce for shareholders? Pepsi’s stock is up more than 10 percent since Nooyi took over. (It was around $68 at press time.) With slower growth domestically, she reorganized the company to increase its global reach—its international business now contributes 40 percent of its $39 billion total annual revenue.

“I think Indra is going to be a fantastic CEO,” says CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “She is going international, which is where the growth is, and making it so PepsiCo will have some permanence because of the changes in terms of making snacks that are good for you.”