How Pepsi Popped Its Top

With U.S. soda sales flagging, Coca-Cola resurgent, and the world in recession, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi has found ways to cope with each challenge. She has also moved PepsiCo toward a greater commitment to health and the environment, a strategy that has inspired employees, attracted customers, and aided overseas operations. Meet a rabid New York Yankees fan named Indra Nooyi. Apart from adoring the 2009 World Series champions, Nooyi is stunningly different from the men who head up most of America’s biggest corporations. She was born 54 years ago in Madras, India. She often wears saris to work at her New York office. She is smart, ebullient, determined, and successful. As Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo, Inc., she runs the biggest U.S. corporation headed by a woman. Pepsi is booming, largely because Indra Nooyi has transformed its mission, refocusing the company on the world’s rising demand for healthier foods and the soaring need for environmental action. Here is a major global company simultaneously doing good and doing well--thanks to a charming, indomitable Indian woman. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version. With U.S. soda sales flagging, Coca-Cola resurgent, and the world in recession, PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi has found ways to cope with each challenge. She has also moved PepsiCo toward a greater commitment to health and the environment, a strategy that has inspired employees, attracted customers, and aided overseas operations. Meet a rabid New York Yankees fan named Indra Nooyi. Apart from adoring the 2009 World Series champions, Nooyi is stunningly different.

Walt Disney presents a puzzling paradox. He was a salt-of-the-earth, hard-working artist who promoted family values. He was a tyrannical, wary, micro-manager whose associates decried the lack of charity in his soul. How, then, did he create such lovable characters and establish his empire? By utilizing all of his attributes. In fact, without his contradictions, he wouldn’t have been Walt Disney, and his fabled enterprise would almost surely have vanished long ago. We can learn a lot from his story. Four decades after his death, Walt Disney is still hailed as a creative genius who not only gave the world Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and a host of fantasy characters, but set the all-time standard for family theme parks and forever changed the world of entertainment. Every bit the brilliant innovator he has been portrayed, Disney was also a patriot who served his country, a corn-fed populist who shrugged off critics of his G-rated view of America, and an exemplar of bootstrap enterprise, hard work, and rugged individualism. But Disney had a most unpleasant side, too. He could be, and often was, an unforgiving taskmaster—not at all like the lovable creatures his studio created. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

With children growing up faster than ever and pop culture running rampant, Lego's little plastic bricks were inexorably losing appeal. The Danish toymaker lost its way when it tried to recast itself as a lifestyle brand, but a new leader brought a different vision of the future--and forced his idealistic managers to focus on the bottom line. Here’s what you can learn from their experience. Today it seems almost unthinkable that as recently as 2004, the Danish toy colossus Lego was mired in debt, hemorrhaging losses, and fearful of a hostile takeover. After three-quarters of a century, how could such an icon of nurturing and creative play be in danger of failing? Its knobby little interlocking bricks were a fixture of nearly everyone’s childhood; churned out at a pace of 16 billion a year, they were so ubiquitous that there are some 62 of them for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Sadly, it was true. “It was a company that had lost its way,” says Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. And the story of how Knudstorp turned Lego around, to the point where it bucked the 2008 and 2009 global recession with stacked up sales and profits, has become a classic case study of a business recovery, with lessons for managers and leaders everywhere. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

For two decades, while building Marriott Hotels' international operations, Edwin D. Fuller has demonstrated his leadership ability in dozens of countries around the world. Now he has distilled the lessons of that experience into a series of brief, practical guides to effective leadership. In this one, he warns that leaders should never ask anyone to do what they wouldn't do themselves. “We’re entering a kill zone,” the pilot of the U.S. Army plane, a C-12 Sherpa transport, informed us as we began our descent to the Baghdad Airbase. “It’s going to be a steep drop.” It was. I’d been in war zones before and was prepared, but I could see the anxiety on some of the faces of my team from Marriott, and I made sure to maintain a calm, confident demeanor. The pilot brought us in safely, but nerves were still taut as we donned flack jackets, exited the aircraft, and crossed the tarmac to the heavily armored SUVs that would take us into the city. As I surveyed the body-armored soldiers and contract security guards sporting Glock pistols, I began to relax. I’d been an Army captain serving in the Vietnam War, and I had confidence in the U.S. military’s ability to ensure the safety of my four-member team. Still, it had been many years since Vietnam and being in a combat zone is never a relaxing experience.

When rock 'n' roll arrived, all Britain had were two black and white TV channels, the BBC and the slightly racier ITV. In just over a decade after the first dedicated music programme, Cool For Cats, aired in 1956, cheap black and white studio-bound miming would give way to epic prog-rock live performances as programme controllers' were forced to accept the rise of the counter culture. Eventually, mammoth rock festivals would be enjoyed on multi-channel high-definition TV, delivering more coverage than any one person attending the actual event could ever experience. In Rock & Pop on British TV, Jeff Evans tells the whole story of how this entertainment medium morphed and grew as technology advanced and cultures changed. In a world where music is available on demand, 24/7, the story of Rock & Pop On British TV takes you back to your youth - whenever that was - and the days when pop on TV was an eagerly anticipated, greedily consumed and thrilling part of growing up in Britain. This Omnibus Enhanced digital edition includes a Digital Timeline of the notable programmes discussed within the book and the #1 hits of the day, illustrated with videos and images.

At Intuit Inc., the path to innovation and domination in financial software has been paved with customer feedback. To ferret out problems and test progress on products in development, the company sends its engineers out for face-to-face encounters with consumers and entrepreneurs. But the company has struggled to adapt its business from software sold on disks to online financial services. Perhaps the most valuable feedback: Intuit relies on volunteers for improvements and new product ideas. For almost an hour, the 14 Canadian entrepreneurs–owners of businesses ranging from a bakery to a hip-hop clothing manufacturer–sat around a table venting about their problems. “Finding distribution channels,” they said, and “partnership and collaboration,” and “cutting costs,” and “the time suck of social media.” Running the session in Toronto in October 2009 was a slight, professorial, 57-year-old Silicon Valley legend named Scott Cook. He had assembled the group because he wanted to hear their problems first-hand so that Intuit, the business he founded, could come up with profitable solutions. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

In a secluded Rocky Mountain watershed, gathering rivulets of melting ice form from snow-capped peaks. They launch slowly down headwater creeks, meander through plush beaver meadows, and catapult between deep canyon walls, slowed only momentarily by a large reservoir. They then race through the white-water rapids of Devil's Gulp and eventually intersect Towne, a remote mountain community. Within this community lives a host of people with a variety of successes, failures, loves, ambitions, obsessions, hopes, and fears. There's Laura Menard, who left Wisconsin looking for a job but finds only fishing. When her car breaks down near Maggie's Corner, Laura discovers that people do care. There's former Wall Street broker Richard Whendelstat, who gave up the fast pace of life to open the Flies and Lies fishing resort. And then there's Bradley Hawkins, who came to the area on a fishing trip and never left; his wife now wants a divorce. With wry humor, joy for life, and an immense appreciation of the mountains and small-town living, Rocky Mountain Watershed narrates the stories of these characters, who face personal decisions that will change their lives and those around them-as well as affecting the common thread that binds them all, the river.