In her new memoir, My Life in Full, former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi credits her family, mentors, and former bosses for supporting her ambition.
One boss taught Nooyi a skill she calls “foundational” to her career. Gerhard Schulmeyer ran the automotive electronics division of Motorola. Nooyi worked for him for eight years, considering him a teacher, coach, critic, and supporter.
“He taught me to simplify complex problems and to communicate them effectively,” write Nooyi. In return, Nooyi’s loyalty was “unwavering.”
Nooyi continued to sharpen this ability to simplify complexity and communicate those simple explanations to higher-ups. As Nooyi built a reputation as a simplifier, she became irreplaceable to those who relied on her to clarify complex topics.
In 1998 while Nooyi served as Pepsi’s vice president of strategy, she was handed an important project. Investors were placing a higher value on their competitor’s stock price. So her boss, CEO Roger Enrico, asked Nooyi to prepare an in-depth analysis of Coke’s business.
Together with her team of about a dozen people, Nooyi immersed herself in the global beverage business. She poured over thousands of pages of documents and analysis for the next four months. They hired a consulting firm to make a competitive analysis. The final report was more than 300 pages.
Nooyi assimilated the report, summarized it, and presented it. “After much debate, we synthesized the message into six graphic, easy-to-understand posters and propped them up on easels around the conference room.”
Nooyi concluded that Coke’s stock price at the time was unsustainable. She’d be proven right when the stock fell 35% in the third quarter.
Companies and the people who run them are drowning in a barrage of data. The staggering amount of information day is truly mind-boggling. More than 1 trillion MB of data is created every day—1.7 MB of data per person per second.
The world is growing more complex. And, as a result, individuals who can help others make sense of that information—and turn it into actionable insights—will be rewarded.
“When somebody gives me a complex problem, I become a student,” Nooyi said during an interview with LinkedIn. Nooyi said that throughout her entire career, people recognized that her ability to simplify complex problems could help them navigate the issue and identify a solution. “That was my skill then; it is my skill today,” she said.
According to Nooyi, the key to developing this valuable skill is to become a student. A student enthusiastically strives to understand a subject—really know it. A good student investigates, analyzes, questions, and attempts to explain the issue to others who don’t know the subject as well as the student does.
One way to become a simplifier is to read books that do just that—simplify complex topics.
In one interview, Nooyi was asked for book recommendations. She suggested a book about international trade by Fred Hochberg, a former chairman of the Export-Import Bank. Nooyi praised “Fred’s uncanny ability to simplify the very complex results in a clear-eyed, informative defense of free trade.”
Communication skills—especially the ability to distill mountains of data into simple and clear information—will set you apart. According to Nooyi, “When you have a competence that nobody else has, you become more valuable.”
Don’t be dispensable. Be valuable.
