“I’m eternally grateful to the United States because I am a product of America,” Indira Nooyi told nearly 2,500 ITServe members during her keynote address at Synergy 2024 on October 29th, 2024 at the Caesar Palace in Las Vegas, NV. “When I look at all of you, and you’re making a great living here in the US, creating wonderful companies and employment. And I hope, like me, you too, are very, very grateful to this country. You give back not just to this country, but also to India. But that’s what I say, both countries. Wonderful!” Nooyi said.
Echoing the sentiments shared by Nooyi, Jagadeesh Mosali, President of ITServe, while referring to the many contributions and accomplishments of ITServe pointed to how through its Corporate Social Responsibility, ITServe has shown that it is dedicated to making a difference in the lives of the underprivileged, ensuring that no one is left behind. “Our initiatives are focused on education, healthcare, and basic needs. We strive to uplift those facing adversity and create a more equitable society. I am proud that each of you have been unwavering in your commitment to give back to local communities across the country.”
This commitment has led us to serve the larger society through STEM advocacy, STEM Education, STEM Scholarship, STEM Training, Internship Programs, educating the underprivileged, feeding the hungry, supporting our veterans and first responders, and recognizing our community heroes.
Mosali said, “I am truly honored to have been chosen and entrusted with the role of leading ITServe as the President for the year 2024. With all of your active support, collaboration, and guidance, ITServe Alliance, the largest association of IT Services organizations, serving as the voice of all prestigious IT companies functioning with similar interests across the United States, has made remarkable progress and achieved many a milestone, especially in the current year.”
Summarizing the mission of ITServe Alliance and Synergy 2024, Anju Vallbhaneni, President-Elect of ITServe said, “We believe in developing strategic relationships with our partner organizations to work for a better technology environment by building greater understanding. Come and join us on our journey. Let us be your voice when it comes to Information Technology.”
Suresh Potluri, Executive Director for Synergy 2024, said, “We are proud to present a lineup of visionary speakers who are not just industry experts, but trailblazers and disruptors shaping the future, who will share their insights and best practices on a diverse range of topics relevant to ITServe members, during our flagship Synergy 2024. These leaders represent a diverse range of fields and bring fresh perspectives and groundbreaking ideas that drive the next wave of innovation.”
Referring to her upbringing Nooyi recalled how while growing up in Madras, “My parents just told me that when you’re 18, we’re going to get you married. But then I grew up with a very powerful grandfather. I won the lottery of life in that I had a wonderful grandfather who said, my granddaughters are going to dream and be whatever they want to be. He helped us to a very high standard. I’d like to tell him how grateful I am to him for doing what he did for us, how he made us do our homework, how he taught us, how he taught us to argue both sides of an issue because he was a judge and he wanted to hear both sides of every issue.” Nooyi shared passionately about the influence her mother had on her and how she shaped her to be a woman, who is confident, competent, and doing one’s best always, especially when “you grew up in an era where opportunities for women were very limited.”
Growing up in a traditional family, Nooyi said, her dream as a child was that “I’ve got to study. I’ve got to do well in school and college because if you didn’t do that, I got married off to some guy I don’t want to get married off to. And the whole idea was to do well in school and college to avoid marriage. That was my only goal. I did not want an arranged marriage.”
Nooyi had her first job in Chicago with the Boston Consulting Group. She shared with the audience vividly about how she chose to work for PepsiCo over General Electronics. She said, “Wayne Callaway, who was the CEO of PepsiCo, called me and said, ‘I can understand why you want to join GE but let me tell you why you should come to PepsiCo.’ He laid out the case for me to come to PepsiCo, including saying, if you came to PepsiCo, I would make sure I develop you, and I support you, and make sure that your entry into this company is easy and you can perform very well. This made me think. I got the CEO in a big company could take that much time and with all humility called me and made a pitch for me to join PepsiCo. It spoke volumes about the culture and the zeitgeist of a company. So, I picked PepsiCo, not for the business, but for the personality.”
On working her way up in PepsiCo, Nooyi told ITServe leaders about what made her stick around and grow in PepsiCo, which is a very valuable and insightful lesson for CEOs. “In many ways, PepsiCo had a culture and a reputation, and Wayne Callaway had a passion and a culture that he would always keep his word. So, you all must look at yourselves and say, do you have a calling card? Do you have a reputation? Have you built one? Have you built a personal brand that people can say, look, I really want to work for this person, because I trust what this person is saying by developing me. If you’re going to use me as a tool of the trade, as opposed to looking at me as an asset, then I should shake myself all the time. But if you look at me as an asset, as a talent that you want to develop and support and mentor, I think people will stick around. So, it’s a two-way street,” Nooyi observed.
When asked about business leaders wanting their children to succeed them, Nooyi said, “Ask yourself a question: are you developing a business or you developing a dynasty? That’s a question you have to ask yourself. If you’re developing a dynasty. Sit there and worry about whether your children will take the job from you, even if they’re capable or not. Very often, you take your kids, force them into the job even if they’re not capable. On the other hand, if you’re saying, I want to build a company, I want the best leaders to try and I want to grow this company and make it iconic. And this is actually my children can be owners of the company and can get a dividend or get a stock price. That’s good, get a salary. I don’t care what it is. Let them do what they want to do. That’s a whole different mindset. So don’t sit here forcing your company down the throat of your kids. If they want to do it, they’ll come into it. Don’t force them to come into the company, because it’s not good for the company is not good for the kids.”
Referring to the many advantages entrepreneurs have today, Nooyi said, “I actually think you’re all very, very lucky, because when I was studying, there was no online course at that time, not at all. In fact, YouTube didn’t exist. The smartphone didn’t exist. Think about it. These are all the things that happened after 2006, I mean, well, before I became CEO. And so for every one of these things, you have to go find the book to study yourself or hire professors to teach you the stuff. In today’s world, you’ve got every course available to you for free online, which you can watch, study, and understand any time of the day or night at your own pace. I think you are incredibly lucky to have all these resources in front of you. Just utilize them. So, I’m actually envious of what you have. The problem you have is that you have too much of it, right?”
When asked about “performance with purpose,” Nooyi said, “The first thing I had to convince people is to say purpose doesn’t come at the expense of performance. Performance and purpose are a virtuous circle. If you deliver performance, you can find purpose. If you focus on purpose, it delivers more performance. So, I have to make that case and demonstrate to people that performance and purpose are part of a virtuous circle. Secondly, when you’re looking at transformation, and that’s your transformation that’s outside in, not inside out. I would always tell people, put themselves in that situation. Think of every child as your child. Think of every farmer as a member of your family. So, telling stories, making it very personal, you have to grab them by heart. And you’ve got to repeat that message again and again and again and every time.”
Nooyi said, she is of the opinion that writing code, simple code, is not going to exist as a driving business. “And if you were recommending to a client how they should run the business, what would you tell them that they should get rid of and give to technology? How to migrate up that whole chain to say, how am I going to add more and more value to the offering, as opposed to strictly labor arbitration? And I think that’s going to be a tough challenge, because for so long, so many companies have worked on this labor arbitrage, and I think that era might be coming to an end. It doesn’t bode well for many IT companies in India who also have to rethink the model. But I think especially for many of you who work in that area, you have to think hard.”
When asked about ways to double the revenues in the next three to five years. Nooyi suggested that
One must find the right companies and partners to work with. Because today, with the disruption happening in the world, you’ve got to figure out which partners you want to pick yourselves to, and who you’re going to learn from because you can’t do it all yourself. The small and medium-sized companies, you can’t do it all yourself. Try to get closer to AI.
Nooyi said, “Learn everything they’re teaching you so that you can use those learnings to grow. So, I think this is not about linear growth where you just go there and try to get as much business as you can. That’s really not the game. It’s a question of, how are you are going to learn from big guys. You’ve got to become a valuable partner to the big guys. That’s something you have to think through. And companies don’t have the wherewithal now to handle a whole bunch of small guys either. So find the right partners, work with them, learn from them, and see how you can have them give you business, I think that’s the way to grow going forward.”
Nooyi said she did not have access to many technological advances that today people have. “Before AI and GPT became a big factor, nobody knew it was going to become a big factor, let’s be honest, right? So, in 1999 and 2000 for sure, I wasn’t thinking about what they had. I wasn’t even thinking about the cloud. I was thinking about how to spend billions of dollars on SAP and Oracle, which almost feels ancient these days, right? So that’s what we were focused on. I wish I had cloud services there. I mean, I don’t know about AI, because it’s still being proven, but, you know, I wish I’d had an AI by my side, that I could have included them in my entire IT transformation.”
Nooyi is aware of the uncertainties of AI and its effectiveness. She said, “People are afraid that if they don’t have a big investment in AI, they’ll be left behind, but they’re still unclear as to what the benefits are of AI. So, I think the best thing for companies, if I were you today, I would first train all my leaders, the top two or three levels in the company on AI, and what it could do for the company today, and tomorrow. But then I take one or two areas and go very deep and say, let’s use these as test cases to prove out how we can get benefits from AI, whether it’s innovation or some sort of a customer call center. The baseline is that you properly understand the benefits. While I do that, the other thing I’d be doing is to say, what employees am I going to be displacing, and what am I going to do for them? How am I going to retrain them? Because if we don’t do that, believe me, they will hurt your efforts. So, I think about the human side of people are going to be displaced and the productivity side of what the company could be if AI became a much bigger.”
“When I became CEO, the attention from the press and the media was about everything you said, from my perspective. I was just another CEO to keep this company successful. So, the fact that I was a woman was an incident. I was singularly focused on, how do I make sure this company stays successful well into the future. Let’s all focus on the job that’s to be done. I don’t care if you’re a guy or a girl or whatever you are, we have a job to do it. So, at every point in time, I focused on doing things better than everybody else, so that I was respected for the job, and I put the company before me. So when I did those two things, people said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to give her respect, because the company comes first for her, and she always puts the job in front of everything else, and she happens to be a woman that was incidental. The positive is great. But had I failed, they would have said, here’s a woman of color from an emerging market running a Fortune 500 company. That would have been a disaster. I didn’t want that, but I didn’t want them to say she succeeded because of that.”
Nooyi said, her entire life, she had focused on “putting the company before me in my entire life. And, I was very clear that I was going to be judged by my job.” She recalled when she came to the United States in 1990s, there were hardly any women and there were hardly any Indian women in senior positions. She was the only one there. “So, people gave me respect for who I was. Today’s world is very different,” she said.
When asked to give “one piece of advice you can give us, so that we become the best mentors in developing great talents,” Nooyi said, “The first thing I tell you is that talent development, people development, is a very difficult job, and it’s an unselfish job because if you do a good job with talent development, they could take your job, right? So, you’ve got to develop talent and say to yourself, it’s okay if they take my job because I’m going to create a bigger job for myself. So, if you’re willing to be that unselfish, you can develop people, and the more you demonstrate it to develop people, people want to stick around and work for you. So you have to ask yourself, are you a talent developer or a talent blocker? Because many CEOs were insecure, blocked talent, and stifled them so that they don’t rise. And then they go. So, each of us has to look at ourselves in the middle, and say, ‘What kind of an environment are we creating? A growing, thriving environment, or an environment.’ Ask yourself a question: ‘Why did people leave my company? What could I have done to keep them? Do they keep that database?’ Because that will tell you a lot about the culture of your company and yourself. So, a lot lies in the leadership here.”
Stating that India continues to emerge as a global player and that young leaders are on the rise in India, Nooyi referred to Nara Lokesh, the young Minister from the state of Andhra Pradesh. Shri Nara Lokesh, the visionary Honorable Minister for Information and Technology, Electronics, and Communications, Government of Andhra Pradesh, was a Special Guest Speaker at Synergy 2024. Nooyi said, “He’s so articulate, and I have great confidence in Andhra Pradesh. Now, what struck me when I met him was there’s a next generation of incredible leaders looking to burst forward into the Indian scene and make a difference. And I don’t think the system allows them to burst forth. I think there’s got to be a system where you say, look, one generation, you’ve got to move ahead and let this new generation rise. I think we have very good people, don’t get me wrong, very good people. But perhaps the time has come, and I think we have to retire a lot of them, and let the youngsters take over and then sit back and enjoy the country that results as a consequence.”
Synergy is ITServe Alliance’s flagship Annual Conference, which began in 2015 with the objective of providing business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives with strategies and solutions that address the unique needs of the IT Solution & Services Industry.
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