Transformation is easy to praise when it’s successful but hard to live through, especially when the business appears to be doing well and the market isn’t demanding you to change it. In a special in-person two-part episode, Clarke Murphy sits down with Indra Nooyi, former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and now a board director at Honeywell, Amazon, and Philips, for a masterclass conversation for any leader pursuing change that the market may not reward right away.

Indra traces how growing up in Madras, India, with "a foot on the brake and a foot on the accelerator," shaped her leadership. She unpacks the thinking behind PepsiCo’s Performance with Purpose: why she launched it from a position of strength, how she won her board over one director at a time, and how she held her ground against skeptics. She makes the case that AI transformation starts with leaders going back to school and running pilots before writing big consulting checks. And she explains the difference between "micro understanding" versus micromanagement.

We’ll also hear from Jens-Thomas Pietralla, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates and co-leader of our Global Board and CEO Advisory Partners practice, who shares how boards can bring the right technology expertise into the boardroom.

Four things you’ll learn from this episode:

Run the company for its lifetime, not your tenure, to better recognize and act on transformation opportunities
Train the top, then go deep into the details to develop micro-understanding
Start AI with leadership education and pilots before deploying it
Freedom within an established frame builds better leaders

A closer look at the research from this episode:

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like these Redefiners episodes:

A Foot on the Brake and a Foot on the Accelerator with Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi – Part 1

Redefiners

A Foot on the Brake and a Foot on the Accelerator with Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi – Part 1