Some CEOs still behave like imperial kings: Former PepsiCo boss Indra Nooyi

Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, said that there are still many corporate leaders globally who behave like 'imperial kings' and the onus for the same lies with the company boards.

"Some CEO’s behave like kings even today and they aren’t even approachable and there is so much arrogance. I would say the company boards have a role to play there. We have to move away from hierarchical company to networking firms where barriers are diminished,” Nooyi told Wipro Chairman, Rishad Premji, in a fireside chat during Nasscom’s tech leadership forum on Friday.
 
She added that the CEOs of today should commit to life-long learning and understand how changing technology could be adapted.
 
Nooyi, whose book, 'My Life in Full-Work Family and our Future', has received rave reviews, talked about the larger concern of women dropping out of workforce and underlined the significance of putting in infrastructure which supports the women employees, especially in the essential services.

“We have gone through time where women have found their way up but had to drop out of workforce because of family, childcare and it is a fact that especially in essential care services, women have no support. High time we adopt the idea that family is not just women, family is men and women both and they need to take the responsibility ,” Nooyi said.
 
Various factors which have led to the exclusion of women from the workforce include unconscious bias, lack of pay parity and different radars of evaluation, Nooyi admitted.

Talking about the importance of failures in one’s life, Nooyi shared that she has had many shares of failures in life without which she wouldn’t have been a better CEO.