The Man Who Led PepsiCo’s Home Run Into India

This is my modest contribution to the memory of Priya Mohan “Suman” Sinha to whom I owe much.

 Before I write about Suman and Pepsi I got to mention that PepsiCo opened its innings in India with Ramesh Vangal and his band of outstanding managers who launched brand Pepsi in India in the late 1980s. For the record Pepsi was the first FDI ever on a road that was rough and twisted. Suman took over the leadership of PepsiCo in the mid-1990s.

 Launching a mix of a brown and greenfield venture is in itself very challenging, and to set up complex bottling systems, navigating regulatory norms, setting up distribution, building brands and supply chains makes it an exhilarating ride. All this has to be done by rapidly recruiting a pool of talented and committed people, this is not easy.

 And in PepsiCo’s case, the company was up against an 800 pound gorilla called Coca-Cola. For those who have been in the game, you realise how difficult it is to battle for a sustainable business in these circumstances. PepsiCo did this and more with great style and flourish. That’s a lot of heavy lifting.

 Many would remember that the Pepsi launch in India was, in a word, grand. The advertising sizzled as it created a new paradigm, using celebrities like never before, who in turn believed that being a part of Pepsi added to their brand value. Film stars and cricketers lined up and were woven into the story by Ravi Dhariwal, Sanjeev Chaddha and Vibha Rishi. The likes of Shishir Lal and Gautham laid the business pipelines and Brand Pepsi soared. It was a large cast.

 By the time I joined PepsiCo it was regarded as a high energy organisation with a very large number of talented people with a “can do” attitude. In my first meeting with Suman, he laid out the way he saw the company and wondered if I would be interested in leading the non-Pepsi-Cola business which needed to be nurtured and built. 

At the time it was truly a very small and insignificant piece. But what excited me was the truly sexy line-up of brands PepsiCo had in 7 Up, the range of brands from Dukes Mangola, Ginger Ale, Ice Cream Sodas, Slice, Aquafina and in time Gatorade, Lipton and Tropicana. A line up that is a consumer product professional’s dream. I was also coming out of two great startups and was enthused.

 Suman, in my first meeting with him, deployed his famous strategy, inspired by Clausewitz, shock and awe. I was crossing over from ITC, which was, to put it mildly, a bit different. Suman sold the job and listed out the challenges, the heavy lifting, the long hours and the perseverance required.

 He said, Pepsi was high on energy, everyone sized you up to see whether you were talented, committed and shared their passion and also whether you had uncompromising integrity, both intellectual and fiduciary. These were necessary conditions and those who came within this envelope thrived, the rest were ejected.

 If I may add, like General James Mattis, Suman had an inexhaustible reservoir of energy, ability to multitask and move swiftly, he could have easily owned Mattis's aptly called call sign – “Chaos.”

 I responded, in what I thought was firmly, to his assault at my first meeting. During the conversation that followed and the journey there after we linked up and he became a mentor and if I may add, a true well-wisher. That triggered an exhilarating experience largely because of Suman, the task on hand and the band of talented folks he brought together.

 A former colleague who is much younger, has posted a picture of the first batch of management trainees in 1996 with Suman. On reflection, pulling in talent in large numbers who went to lead successful businesses over time, is one of his legacies.

Suman was not an easy boss to work with. He could be impatient, had high expectations, was brutal on any slippage in execution, unforgiving if you were not on top of your game, had horror of humbug, and had a rather aggressive style. On the other hand, if he was convinced that you were honest to the cause and thought it through, even if you disagreed with him, you couldn’t find a better leader. I felt his style masked a caring, affectionate and considerate man.

 Pepsi was genuinely a matrix in design. It required getting used to and quickly. You walked across from production, to packaging development, to regulatory, legal, finance over an afternoon, called New York in the evening and got the most complex problems sorted. The culture encouraged this, bureaucracy was frowned upon. Our business actually did rather well over the years and Suman was proud that having placed a few bets, the results were due to the outstanding team that supported the effort.

 I recall that we were trying to get Aquafina going in Bombay, and weren’t getting it right, but finally we did. We were opposite Sterling movie hall in a store with a full on pack display, some great merchandising and stock flying off the shelves. Chandsekhar Mundlay, his colleague Homi Battiwala and our striker Harshad Jain had cracked it. It was late January and we had a feeling in the bones that the business would fly in summer – way ahead of the Reds.

 Suman grilled everyone one at a time following which we had apaanand lit up our cigarettes at the corner of the street. Suman was chatting with the sales folks. He asked me when I was back in Delhi. I saw him the next morning in his office and he shook my hand without saying a word. He asked me to sit, and wanted to know what I felt. I remember saying “Good to roll Sir”. That led to signing off capex for water plants across the country and he asked me to activate the national roll out. The rest as they say, was history created by Harshad Jain and his teams across.

Another story is about juices. Parul Sikka, amongst our first lady management trainees and now a business leader in West Asia, was a very young manager working on juices – a tiny business at the time. While running some numbers with the finance folks she realised that juices were very profitable because they did not attract duties. Also they had a significant growth opportunity. We did due diligence on the numbers and I took it up with Suman. He went through it patiently, called in a few senior colleagues, corroborated the hypothesis and pulled out the resources to make juices big. The advertising was nicely controversial, the business teams smelt blood and the business boomed.

 The sideshow to this juice story almost got the three of us fired. Pradeep Sardana, Ashish Sen and I went on to launch guava, lichi and other fruit juices. The following year New York was apoplectic that we were rolling out products without following protocols and without approvals and this dereliction meant being cashiered.

 We were in front of the firing squad and everyone looked at me. I went to my office and took printouts of all the mails between New York and me, copied to all. All the mails ended with ‘OK’, written big and bold, which meant the proposal had been approved.

 Suman at his belligerent best, defended the three of us and asked this very senior Italian American to apologise, waving hard copies of the mail with ‘OK’ highlighted big and bold. Three somewhat middle-aged managers were reluctantly left off the hook and we hammered back a few that evening.

 However now that Suman is not around may I say that, in a hurry to launch the variants we had missed what the emails were actually suggesting. The head of product development was an outstanding manager and a dear colleague from West Africa. She, like me, had a long multibarrel name, her initials were ‘OK’ with which she signed off her emails, it wasn’t an approval.

 This goof up rang hard from Valhalla to Shanghai. A very nifty software for product development was installed by New York to bring some sanity to product launches. We took her out to a very expensive dinner during the next trip to Manhattan and laughed our heads off, since we still had one. She since then has signed off with her full name and remains a friend.

Suman transited recently, I have a deep sense of gratitude, a feeling of quiet joy for what he did for all of us. I would never exchange the productive years, the wonderful colleagues who are now friends, the finest brands in the world and those intense crisp meetings, the long gruelling AOPs and Strat Plan sessions and finally the evenings we celebrated victories with Suman.

 The good that men do should live after them. Thank you Sir.

 (For the record, I was his only team member who called him ‘Sir’, despite his aggressive insistence that I call him Suman. I have acceded to his request only on this occasion, while writing this piece. I have mentioned a few names but then there is a very large cast who I could not include as much as I would wish to.)

(Mr Subroto Chattopadhyay was a member of the leadership team at PepsiCo)