Inspiring women one relatable story at a time

Takeaways from Indra Nooyi’s recent Sydney appearance

Onward And Upwards

How do women navigate their personal and professional lives to ensure overall effectiveness?

Indra Nooyi, one of the world’s most successful women in business, told us exactly that, in Sydney recently.

At work, she said, know your stuff. Be current with products and megatrends. Hit the textbooks if you have to. As a team leader, model the behaviour you want for your team. Treat team members like family. Try and write hand-written notes to your team, maybe even to their parents. Don’t be bothered by the labels people assign you. Define yourself by the quality of your output instead (this was definitely my top take-home from the night).

At home, organise your schedule, with your spouse if you have one. Six months in advance if needed. Enlist the help of extended family. Always focus on the job at hand, whatever your role may be –professional, daughter, wife, mother. Prioritise.

Oh, and marry the right guy.

At the end of the day, it was all good sense and practical advice that our mums give us. Yet, Indra Nooyi articulated it with so much authenticity – making it all perfectly relatable with anecdotes from her own experiences – that everyone present, including the men, went home with useful life nuggets.

Was there more we would have liked to hear from Indra? As a person of colour myself, I would have liked to know more about how that played out in her (success) story. Seated beside me, Matthew Browne,

CEO of Melanoma Institute Australia would have liked her take on those “5050, 51-49” decisions that CEOs have to routinely take, as well as how she dealt with the loneliness that so frequently accompanies the C-suite roles.

My second takeaway from the night, was the idea that we’re going to see women stepping up in coming decades. 57% of college graduates in the US are women, Indra noted. It’ll be interesting to see whether women in leadership positions can make a difference to the political, economic and social chaos around us currently. As I look around me, in my own age-group of 50-somethings, I’m emboldened by some outstanding examples of talent and ambition I have begun to see. Only a generation ago, women their age might have started to slow down, but these women are pushing onward and upwards, having found new confidence after successfully wrapping up parenting responsibilities (to a considerable degree), and having built relationships strong enough to tell the men in their lives – like Indra – to ‘be thankful they’re on the list’ when they complain they’re low down on the list of our priorities.

Clearly, women like her are being strong role models.

What will help us, undoubtedly, is a rethink on that core issue of the care equation – child care as well as elder care, as Indra noted, and changing the very nature of work to make it more flexible, perhaps with better use of technology.

Rajni Anand Luthra