How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

JACK NICKLAUS

So I came back and I started to write my direct reports to other senior executives’ parents narrating the story, my cultural background, what happened when I went to India. Then I wrote a personal paragraph of what their child was doing at PepsiCo and said, “Thank you for the gift of your child to our company,” and it opened the floodgate of emotio

DR: Suppose somebody says, “Look, I don’t care about being healthy, I just want to eat a great snack.” What snack is going to make me the happiest? IN: Fritos. Oh my God, you would feel like you died and went to heaven.

Let me just give you a good piece of news. A single bag of Lay’s has less salt than a slice of bread. DR: Really? IN: Yes, because it’s surface salt. For bread you need it as a leavening agent. In soup you need it as a preservative. With potato chips, it’s a surface salt, so it’s actually three ingredients in a bag of Lay’s: a little bit of salt, p

One area that Indra did not sacrifice while at Pepsi was empathy for her employees. She regularly wrote to the parents of her senior employees, giving them a type of report card (invariably a positive one) about how their children were performing. How can your mother get a favorable report card from your boss and you not feel undying loyalty to tha

INDRA NOOYI

We have a really open company. Most of us could finish the other person’s sentences even when we might disagree with them. It wasn’t a matter of Steve having this secret file or something. He was always sharing his ideas. My view at that time was, he was going to be chairman and he would do that forever, and that we would figure out the relationshi

Steve met me on Saturday. Just minutes into talking with him, it was like, “I want to do it.” I was shocked myself. But there was a sparkle in his eye that I’d never seen in a CEO before. And there he was, sort of turning left when everyone was turning right. In everything that he talked about, he was doing something extraordinarily different than

We view the stock price and revenues and profits as a result of doing things right on the innovation side, on the creativity side, focusing on the right products. Treating customers like they’re jewels and focusing on the user experience. I didn’t even know the numbers that you just quoted. This is not something that’s even in my orbit, to be hones