How to unlock your team’s creative potential

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1:31In this conversation with Reid Hoffman, she shares incredibly valuable insights about how to unlock your team's creative potential. I hope you enjoy it. So just imagine this big room.

1:49With shiny red floors.

1:55and not much furniture. There's probably one chair in that entire room. But right in the middle hangs this rosewood swing. And it's hanging on chains that were built into the wall.

2:12That's Indra Nui, former CEO of PepsiCo. And that rosewood swing she's describing was the centerpiece of her childhood home in Madras, now Chennai, in India.

2:25And it's in use all the time because the various women in the house in particular would come and sit on the swing. And they'll be chatting away on politics and family and gossip and children's grades. And then when the elders got together, it was all about, let's match all the horoscopes. for the various girls and boys that need to be matched.

2:59And when they were not there, the kids jumped on the swing and boy, did we have a rocking time. It just went as high as it could. All the cousins would sort of pile onto the swing and we'd sing. We all had the same repertoire songs, The Beatles and Beach Boys and Cliff Richard. So for about two hours, we could sing all these songs. It was one hell of a musical fest.

3:30And you could time the swing so that the creaking gave you a beat

3:38for the music, and you just went on, went on and on.

3:44There was a centerpiece of the living room, and it hangs there even today. My kids just love it.

3:55Every founder, entrepreneur, and leader must make your version of that rosewood swing by creating an environment that's stimulating and sustaining for each and every person in your company. Just like for all of Indra's family members, that seat is the focal point of family life and the basis for interacting, growing, and thriving. So build your swing and keep it swinging. Get it right, and you'll be releasing the full creative potential of every member of your team. Get it wrong, and you'll stifle their talent and your company's chances of success. That's why I believe you need to create an environment that lets talent thrive.

4:36Let people push their own creative boundaries, and they'll do the same for your business and for you.

5:06nutballs. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

5:20I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe you need to create an environment that lets talent thrive. Let people push their own creative boundaries, and they'll do the same for your business and for you. As a kid, did you ever poke around the pools of a rocky shoreline in search of fish, crabs, or other aquatic wonders? Perhaps you collected some in a bucket for closer inspection. You may even have been tempted to take some home with you. But unless you have a proper aquarium, it's unlikely that all of your fishy friends would have done well in their new environment.

5:57For your marine menagerie to thrive, you'll need to know what each creature needs how they can best support each other and how you can create an environment that will stimulate all of them. Gathering and sustaining talent for your company poses a similar challenge. You need to be proactive about finding talent, but you can't then just transplant that talent to your own environment and expect it to thrive. Before we go on, it's worth defining what it means to thrive in your work. A big part of that is letting people bring their full selves to what they do. A founder, by default, brings their entire self to work.

6:34There's no other way to do it. As the leader of a startup, you need that 100 % commitment to your mission and your product. But when it comes to the people you want to bring along with you, you need to look at far more than their skills and how they can help your company. I wanted to talk to Indra Newey about this because she spent a huge part of her time as CEO of PepsiCo thinking about how to encourage talent at the company to thrive at all levels. During her 12 years as CEO, she grew multi-billion dollar revenues by more than 80%. And since stepping down from that role in 2018, she has continued to think about this problem on a societal scale.

7:09It's a problem she's experienced firsthand. I want you to put yourself in India in the 70s, a couple of decades before they'd gotten independence from the colonial rule. And India was still a poor country, slowly finding its footing. But I had won in many ways a lottery of life, because I had a stable family. We had a roof over our head that was permanent. We had a home. So that's another lottery of life. I went to the right schools and colleges. I was born with a brain. So I had lots of things that worked in my favor. You know, now with all of these benefits, I actually went and got a master's degree in India at a time when very few women went to professional schools.

7:48I was in one of the business schools. And the biggest lottery in my life was that the men in my family and my mother thought that men and women should both be educated and should do whatever they want. So I had the luck of the draw. After graduating business school, Indra joined the India office of Johnson & Johnson as a product manager. For her first assignment, she was charged with bringing a new line of sanitary pads to the Indian market. The task involved working around deep cultural taboos and sensitive customer research. It was just the kind of situation that could end up stifling innovation.

8:22But Indra took the challenge head on. In families like ours and most families, nobody spent money on packaged personal protection. It was always homemade personal protection, very uncomfortable, very restrictive. The U.S. sent us a product, but we had to now retool the product for the humidity conditions in India because adhesive behaves differently under different humidity conditions. We have to decide the optimal one offering. And how does it fit the Indian human ergonomics? So I had to request women to leave their used pads so I could inspect what the shape of the pad was after use. India did not allow advertising for sanitary napkins those days.

9:06So we had door-to-door conversations with mothers. We'd go to schools and colleges and educate women on the freedom with using this sort of a sanitary protection. It was a whole different approach to marketing. Indra's ingenuity and perseverance were central to making the new product a success. And fortunately, she was given the space to come up with novel solutions to overcoming the cultural taboos. Now, what was amazing about J &J is most of the bosses were men. But you go to them and talk about how the form function had to change or whatever, they listened carefully and they acted. So there wasn't a question of making you feel embarrassed talking about this.

9:47So once we had the product and everything designed, now the challenge is distribution and advertising. Indra's bosses at Johnson & Johnson trusted Indra with a new product launch. Yes, they saw her talent, but more importantly, they saw her creativity. And that creativity provided solutions to the obstacles they faced. They saw that helping her thrive gave their product the best chance for success. Indra was set for a strong career at Johnson & Johnson. But within a year of joining, she felt the need for a new challenge.

10:24In those days, there was only one country. That was the seat of innovation, the seat of creativity, the seat of excitement. The best music, the best fashion, the best culture. We devoured everything American.

10:47And for young people graduating from college, there was only one place to grow and thrive and bring out your full potential. And that was the United States. All of the best brains in India were leaving India for the United States because they said, look, if I can learn from the U.S., if I can contribute to the U.S., I'm going to be a better person. It was an aspirational move.

11:25Indra graduated from the Yale School of Management and then landed a job as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group. The role involved parachuting into different businesses, quickly getting up to speed, and helping them overcome specific problems. I loved consulting. I loved the way we approach problems. I loved the way you think about frameworks to address issues and how you bring the experience of multiple industries to solve the problem of one industry. Consulting gave Indra the challenge he needed to thrive. After six and a half years at BCG, Indra was recruited by Motorola, then moved to manufacturing equipment maker ABB.

12:06Some years into her career in the U.S., Indra found herself fielding offers from GE and PepsiCo. I was more of a technology person than I was a consumer goods person. So naturally, I was leaning towards GE because the potential was huge. PepsiCo was a fantastic company, but my technology bent was taking me more towards GE. However, an impassioned pitch by PepsiCo's CEO at the 11th hour swayed her. I promised both companies I was going to make a decision on X date. And about three days before that decision date, I get a call from Wayne Calloway. Wayne Calloway was the CEO of PepsiCo at the time, and his pitch to Indra is worth taking some time to examine.

12:50He proceeds to talk for about 10 minutes, explaining to me why GE is a fantastic company. Jack Welch is a legendary CEO. I was on the GE board meeting today and Jack said, I'm going to join GE. I understand why you'd want to join GE. It's a great company. But you said you were going to make up your mind in three days. I'm going to take you on your word. Let me tell you why PepsiCo needs you. And he made the case for why PepsiCo needs me. Somebody like me had never been in the executive floor. They wanted somebody to give them a different frame of thinking, how they were going to support me, mentor me, develop me.

13:31and he made a plea for me to join PepsiCo. What might surprise you about this story is that Wayne also happened to be a board member of GE, the very company that was also vying for Indra. And so something struck Indra about the pitch. So at no point in time did he say I'm better than GE. In fact, at every point he played up GE. That's the kind of human being that he is. Wayne Calloway's attitude was the hook. But it was something else that he said that reeled Indra in. What Wayne was basically saying is your 360-degree view of industry and what you'd bring to PepsiCo and what we're willing to hear from you and act on is something that will make you feel very, very good about your time in our company.

14:19Count on me to use that wisely and to put it to good use at PepsiCo. Count on me. This is what you want to be saying to your team explicitly and implicitly when it comes to helping them thrive. Count on me to understand your passions. Count on me to make sure that you have the freedom to innovate. And count on me to ensure that you grow as part of the team I'm leading. Wayne wasn't just relying on Pepsi's existing reputation. Rather, he was laying out how Pepsi needed to change. And how was it going to change? Indra. Wayne's pitch was aspirational for both Indra and Pepsi. Here's how Indra responded.

15:01Holy cow, I'm going to join this company if this guy is the leader. So that day, I walked out of the ABB office into PepsiCo and said, I accept. Indra joined PepsiCo as Senior VP of Strategic Planning. She was immediately tasked with a daunting prospect. evaluate what was wrong with PepsiCo's underperforming restaurant business, which covered Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, and then propose how to solve it. Indra and her team worked around the clock, visiting restaurants and diving into the figures. One of the problems they found was that there were simply too many restaurants cannibalizing each other's business.

15:40But there was another, deeper issue. PepsiCo was a packaged goods company. Restaurant is a service industry. And for a service industry, you need experienced people who love the restaurant business, running restaurants. We would take hotshot packaged goods people, push them into restaurants, and all of a sudden they're looking for a packaged goods solution to a service business. PepsiCo was taking talent that thrived in a packaged goods company and transplanting it into the alien landscape of restaurants. At the same time, it was stifling the talent that would normally thrive in the restaurant business.

16:17We were putting a lot of bureaucracy on restaurants. That was okay when you were stamping out billions of bags of snacks or beverages. But I still remember the scene when I went in the morning to a restaurant at opening. Over the night, they'd print out 100 reports automatically. In the morning, the restaurant guy would come into the store, take the reports, and put them all in the garbage. And he had his own book where he kept his records. This scene was being repeated every day in thousands of restaurants. In most cases, the managers and staff knew what needed to be done to make their restaurant thrive.

16:55But they weren't being given the space or trust they needed. And this meant their motivation and drive to innovate was being crushed a little more each day. This had been happening for years, and no one in the head office had noticed until now. Indra knew something needed to be done quickly. We had to reinvent how PepsiCo should play in the restaurant business and come to terms as to whether we should be in that business at all. Ultimately, after two years, we decided to unfetter it because it was a completely different culture, different business model, and the best way for it to be successful was to be separate from PepsiCo.

17:35It was a radical and controversial plan, but Indra convinced her CEO and the board it needed to be done. By then, she knew the company had given her room to think big and take calculated risks. So in 1997, PepsiCo spun up their entire restaurant business under a new brand, Yum. It has gone on to be one of the world's most successful restaurant businesses. With this victory behind her, Indra set her sights on making the rest of PepsiCo a company where innovation could thrive. Her next task was fixing the company's international beverage business. Indra headed up the$3.3 billion acquisition of Tropicana and then a merger with Quaker Oats.

18:15In 2000, she became the CFO. A year later, she became president. Then, in 2006, she took over as CEO. When I took over as CEO of PepsiCo, I realized that I was being given an incredible opportunity to shape an iconic company to be even more successful into the future. And I also knew as a CEO, my job was to manage the company for the duration of the company, not the duration of the CEO. In business terms, this meant focusing on healthier products and reducing the company's environmental impact. But it also meant making PepsiCo a place where talent could thrive. And it's this strive to support talent that underpin all of Indra's initiatives to transform the company.

19:03This is Mike Nicholas, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Ansett Uncles, a plant-based restaurant and community space in Brooklyn, New York. And he's telling us how they started a product line. We already had a space in the community. The food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values. So we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce. That's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us what do we do, we provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One business card.

19:42Working with Capital One business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we need it to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Most single-function AI tools just gum up your workflow. Project management becomes a tedious relay race of copying, pasting, and switching tabs until you forget what you were even doing. Say hello to Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, Mail, and Coda built right in, you get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly.

20:22Superhuman lets you handle multiple tasks wherever you're working. No more copy-pasting, no more jumping between AI tools, and there's no learning curve. Superhuman gets what you really need from day one. It understands your writing style, helps you focus on what matters, and proactively offers the next best step. Unleash your superhuman potential with AI that meets you where you work. Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. That's superhuman.com slash podcast. As you set your sights on a strong start to the new year, consider this. Every leader knows this moment. You've got the vision, the strategy, the plan, but somehow the team isn't clicking.

21:05Deadlines slip, momentum fades, and here's the kicker. Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies nearly$1.9 trillion every year. At Project Management Institute, teams gain the skills they need to collaborate, deliver, and turn strategy into results because the real cost isn't the training. It's what happens when you don't. Project Management Institute. Empower your people. Turn potential into performance. Find the answers at PMI.org. We're back with Indra Nui, former CEO of PepsiCo. For big, iconic companies to remain successful, we needed the best and the brightest. So we needed the best and brightest talent, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, orientation.

21:59Don't care. Building an environment in which talent can thrive goes hand-in-hand with long-term thinking. Indra knew this, and she also knew she had to be proactive in reinvigorating PepsiCo. I'd look at our own products and say, God, we have evolved over time to become a cacophony of colors, but we really haven't made our products invite consumers into the product. We haven't created this strong, passionate bond between us and the consumer. And I'm not sure we've even thought about the user experience in terms of the product size, the bag, how it sits in the pantry. The classic example was Sun Chips.