Anantha Chandrakasan, the Dean of Engineering at MIT hosted a reception to honor Indra Nooyi, former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo at the Samberg Conference Center in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Following the reception, Linda Pizzuti Henry moderated a book tour talk for Indra's Nooyi’s recently published book. Several local Indian American Entrepreneurs, professors and Indian American women leaders   attended the event. 

The talk moderated by Linda Pizzuti gave several insights into the motivation for writing her Memoir - My Life in Full and several topics she has addressed in her book. Nooyi has been studying issues around child care which she sees a very book problem. 

“The cost of child care is out of control (and has been long before the pandemic), and is pushing many women out of the workforce as they try to balance the dual challenges of home schooling and working from home. My original intent was to write a paper on this issue. However I was advised that writing about this issue through the arc of life experiences would make this more credible. This is what prompted me to write this book," said Nooyi

Linda quizzed her about her time as CEO at Pepsi and her bold moves to shift the focus of PepsiCO deeper into healthier snacks. She emphasized the importance of companies to understand the changing needs of the customer. “I should ask the Sloan students and faculty to do a study on the top 12 companies that were giants and yet are no longer here. Many of them like DEC,Polaroid and others are Boston based companies” said Nooyi, emphasizing that their inability to change with the changing needs of the customer could potentially have been a cause. 

On the topic of Child Care, Indra was very emphatic that it was the need of the hour. “We need children to support the future. Companies need to make the workplace supportive of young families” said Nooyi. "Organized child care is going to bring more of the people who left the workforce back to the workforce, and they all tend to be predominantly women. And the biggest crisis we have today is the cost of care is too high when it's available, most of the time it's not available. And even when it is, the quality of the care is not good enough."

She has indeed taken on the tough challenge of addressing the child care issue. Given her track record of success, we hope she comes out with a viable solution that will be a games changer for families.