An autobiography of a female, immigrant CEO that is full of heart.
The Indian former CEO of PepsiCo narrates her rise to the top.
Growing up in a Hindu Brahmin household in Madras (renamed Chennai in 1996), India, Nooyi learned the importance of family, and as a self-described “tomboy,” she loved to buck tradition. Whether she was co-founding Madras’ most popular all-female rock band, living alone in Bombay while interning at the Department of Atomic Energy, or moving, unmarried, to the U.S. to pursue a degree at Yale, Nooyi’s parents always supported her. This invaluable support continued when she married her husband, Raj. After she was offered a job she couldn’t turn down, Raj agreed to move their young family from Illinois to Connecticut, a concession that most Indian men of his generation would not have made. “Raj’s selflessness,” she writes, was “all the more remarkable because he was taking on the conventions of the time in so many ways.” Although she always valued family, rising through the ranks meant making difficult choices about being a mother and a wife. Throughout the book, she reflects on these choices, sometimes with regret. Nonetheless, she is justifiably proud that her personal sacrifices led to unprecedented strides at PepsiCo, where, as CEO, she reduced water consumption and plastic usage in the manufacturing processes, spearheaded the development of healthier products, and changed many of the trucks in the company’s fleet to hybrid vehicles. As a global corporation, profit was paramount, but Nooyi was also dedicated to progressive change, particularly regarding environmental practices. “The more I thought about PepsiCo’s future,” she writes, “the more I felt it was incumbent on me to connect what was good for our business with what was good for the world.” Nooyi’s autobiography is a quick, fascinating read, laced with unusual frankness and generosity. The author is honest about her privilege and her regrets, never sugarcoating her failures or giving herself undue credit for her successes.
An autobiography of a female, immigrant CEO that is full of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19179-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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