My Life in Full

Indra Nooyi was born in 1955 in Chennai, then called Madras, into a middle-class Indian family that valued education and discipline above almost everything. The house was lively: parents, siblings and a retired grandfather who lived with them and had strong opinions about how his two granddaughters should grow up.

This grandfather, a former judge, created a habit that marked her childhood: every week, Indra and her sister had to prepare a short speech as if they had just been elected to public office, mayor, governor, prime minister, and present what they would do in power. He listened with a straight face, asked hard questions and corrected without mercy.

In a time and place where girls from traditional families were raised mostly to marry well, this exercise sounds out of the ordinary. It taught her two things that stuck: that defending an idea in public is a skill you can train, and that thinking big was not off limits just because she was a woman.

As a teenager, Indra played guitar in an all-girl rock band, something unusual for the time and for the conservative environment she lived in. The band played at school parties and neighborhood events, and rehearsing as a group was already, though nobody called it that, training in teamwork under the pressure of an audience.

She also played cricket, a sport that carries the same cultural weight in India that football does in the U.S., on a team made up mostly of boys. Learning to fight for space, argue game strategy and endure public defeat as a kid is the kind of training that never shows up on a résumé but shows up later, in the meeting room.

The book tells these two phases without inflating their importance: they were not prophecies of business success. But they help explain why, years later, being in a room full of men discussing strategy was not an entirely new experience for her.

Nooyi graduated from Madras Christian College, one of the most respected colleges in southern India, and then got into IIM Calcutta, one of the most competitive management institutes in the country, the Indian equivalent of an elite graduate business program.

Before thinking about studying abroad, she spent a few years working at companies in India, in product and marketing roles, a period in which she learned how real business works in practice, not just in classroom theory. It was in this work that she began to take an interest in corporate strategy as a field of its own.

This path, a strong college, a competitive graduate program, a few years of hands-on experience before any international leap, is part of the reason the book insists so much on quality public education: without it, much of her trajectory would never have taken off.