Top 50 Indra Nooyi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.”

— Indra Nooyi

Featured in: Positivity Quotes, Intention Quotes, Optimism Quotes, Smart Quotes, Quotes About People

2. “Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent.”

— Indra Nooyi

Featured in: Be Kind Quotes, Intention Quotes

3. “Women helping each other – coaching, mentoring, and providing tips – is a great way for us to be our own force.”

— Indra Nooyi

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Positive Quotes for Women, Motivational Quotes for Women, Career Development Quotes, Diversity Quotes

4. “The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other.”

— Indra Nooyi

Featured in: Inspirational Career Quotes

5. “The glass ceiling will go away when women help other women break through that ceiling.”

— Indra Nooyi

6. “An important attribute of success is to be yourself. Never hide what makes you, you.”

— Indra Nooyi

7. “If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself.”

— Indra Nooyi

8. “Take a stand. Be known for your courage and confidence.”

— Indra Nooyi

9. “Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.”

— Indra Nooyi

10. “I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

— Indra Nooyi

11. “Every year in consulting is like three years in the corporate world because you have multiple clients, multiple issues – you grow so much.”

— Indra Nooyi

12. “When you assume negative intent, youre angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.”

— Indra Nooyi

13. “My parents made us dream that we could be anyone that we wanted to.”

— Indra Nooyi

14. “Most importantly, we want to create a company where every employee can bring their whole selves to work.”

— Indra Nooyi

15. “There is nothing like a concrete life plan to weigh you down. Because if you always have one eye on some future goal, you stop paying attention the the job at hand, miss opportunities that might arise, and stay fixedly on one path, even when a better, newer course might have opened up.”

— Indra Nooyi

16. “The first thing I’d say to women is put aside the guilt. I think we’re all genetically programmed to feel guilty for not giving total effort at the job.”

— Indra Nooyi

17. “Market growth alone doesn’t give you enough tailwind. You have to create your own. The way to do that is by designing products for consumers that wow them.”

— Indra Nooyi

18. “In today’s world of blogging and tweeting, conversation has become a bit more staccato. In many ways we’re more efficient, but I think the amount of longer conversations that radiated more warmth may have gone down.”

— Indra Nooyi

19. “My guilty pleasures are the websites where you can look at the fashions and see how different outfits will look. You can even take a picture of yourself and download it and play with the fashions! I love playing with these websites to see what I can learn.”

— Indra Nooyi

20. “I’m very honest – brutally honest. I always look at things from their point of view as well as mine. And I know when to walk away.”

— Indra Nooyi

21. “Most companies target women as end users, but few are effectively utilizing female employees when it comes to innovating for female consumers. When women are empowered in the design and innovation process, the likelihood of success in the marketplace improves by 144%!”

— Indra Nooyi

22. “As a leader, I am tough on myself and I raise the standard for everybody; however, I am very caring because I want people to excel at what they are doing so that they can aspire to be me in the future.”

— Indra Nooyi

23. “Just because you are CEO, don’t think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I’ve never forgotten that.”

— Indra Nooyi

24. “The challenge of the leader is looking around the corner and making the change before it’s too late to make the change.”

— Indra Nooyi

25. “I pick up the details that drive the organization insane. But sweating the details is more important than anything else.”

— Indra Nooyi

26. “My father was an absolutely wonderful human being. From him I learned to always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent.”

— Indra Nooyi

27. “If you give up the guilt, that’s a huge load off your shoulders.”

— Indra Nooyi

28. “When I was president of the company, I said, ‘Okay, I can do this – piece of cake.’ Then when you are the CEO, the responsibilities multiply enormously because you worry about everything.”

— Indra Nooyi

29. “I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, ‘I’ll arrange a marriage for you at 18,’ but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to an encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president.”

— Indra Nooyi

30. “Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.”

— Indra Nooyi

31. “Topics were explored in depth; pros and cons debated. I’d never been part of anything like it.”

— Indra Nooyi

32. “But the good news was that my elder sister refused to get married straight away and I couldn’t get married until she did so I had the licence to go off and dream.”

— Indra Nooyi

33. “At the end of the day, don’t forget that you’re a person.”

— Indra Nooyi

34. “Women play a couple of roles. They are in professional schools and increasingly producing the talent to keep the engines of the economy growing, but they’re also the nurturers and the caregivers.”

— Indra Nooyi

35. “I think innovation as a discipline needs to go back and get rethought and revived. There are so many models to talk about innovation, there are so many typologies of innovation, and you have to find a good innovation metric that truly captures the innovation performance of a company.”

— Indra Nooyi

36. “I asked my parents for permission to study in America and they were so sure that I wouldn’t get in and get a scholarship that they encouraged me to try. So I applied to Yale and got an excellent scholarship. I then worked for the Boston Consulting Group for six and half years.”

— Indra Nooyi

37. “We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all.”

— Indra Nooyi

38. “PepsiCo did not have a woman in the senior ranks, nor a foreign-born person who was willing to think differently.”

— Indra Nooyi

39. “When I grew up there was no web, blogging or tweeting. In fact, where I grew up there was not even television! I met a lot of my friends in school and in college, and they are still my friends today.”

— Indra Nooyi

40. “There will never be a replacement for that ongoing physical contact. But I don’t think blogging is meant to replace the face-to-face of friendships and meetings. Blogging is a way to keep in touch with a larger group of people on an ongoing basis, in a more efficient way.”

— Indra Nooyi

41. “Blogging is a great way to provide tips and advice to each other.”

— Indra Nooyi

42. “Blogging and the Internet allow us to engage in a lot more real time conversations as opposed to a one-way dump of information or a message.”

— Indra Nooyi

43. “Anything that’s done to address unemployment in terms of massive stimulus spending is going to exacerbate deficits. And anything that’s done to address deficits in the short-term is going to exacerbate unemployment.”

— Indra Nooyi

44. “I’ve just become president of PepsiCo, and you couldn’t just stop and listen to my news,” I said, loudly. “You just wanted me to go get the milk!” “Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.”

— Indra Nooyi

45. “Mothers and fathers have an extra set of hands when they need them, and children and grandparents connect, building the kind of deep and lasting relationships that I had with Thatha and that Preetha has with my mother and Raj’s parents.”

— Indra Nooyi

46. “Roger wrote a book called The Other Guy Blinked, declaring victory in the cola wars.”

— Indra Nooyi

47. “Most significantly, this event made real my father’s urging for me, as a woman, to always have the means to provide for myself.”

— Indra Nooyi

48. “When I had the honor of being included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019, I sat for a painting with four objects on a shelf behind me in the composition: a photo of my parents; a photo of Raj, Preetha, and Tara; a Yale SOM baseball cap; and a PepsiCo annual report with the words “Performance with Purpose” on the cover.”

— Indra Nooyi

49. “My childhood was not a world of “Great job!” It was more like “That was so-so” or “Is this the best you can do?” We were accustomed to honesty, not false encouragement.”

— Indra Nooyi

50. “Good business demands tough decisions based on rigorous analysis and unwavering follow-through. Emotion can’t really play a part. The challenge we all face as leaders is to let the feelings churn inside you but then to present a calm exterior, and I learned to do that.”

— Indra Nooyi