The "Iron Woman" Is Ready to Rock

By Jyoti Thottam

Indra Nooyi's bulldog determination is already the stuff of musical legend--a friend once rewrote Black Sabbath's Iron Man in honor of the electric guitar-loving PepsiCo president and chief financial officer. ("Driving them up the wall/Iron Woman rules them all.") Nooyi, 48, plays a mean power chord herself. In 1997 she prodded Roger Enrico, then CEO, to spin off PepsiCo's fast-food business. She later pushed Enrico to buy Quaker Oats and Tropicana, two bold acquisitions that kept the company squarely in snack foods while adding healthier fare to the mix. Strategic vision has always been her strength. Before joining PepsiCo in 1994, she held top corporate-strategy posts at Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri. A native of Madras, India, Nooyi came to the U.S. to attend business school at Yale. (She now sits on the university's board of trustees.) The one gap in her resume is operations--that's an area in which PepsiCo CEO Steve Reinemund excels. Since the pair took over the company's leadership in May 2001, PepsiCo's profits have jumped 24%. Nooyi's next gig will most probably find her running a PepsiCo unit on her own, a sign that the Iron Woman is getting ready for her solo. --By Jyoti Thottam