My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future

by Indra Nooyi

I thought about how family is such a powerful source of human strength but realized that creating and nurturing families is a source of stress for so many. At the same time, I was among a vaunted group of global CEOs regularly invited into rooms with the most influential leaders on the planet.

Our failure to address work and family pressures in the senior reaches of global decision-making restrains hundreds of millions of women every day, not only from rising and leading, but also from blending a satisfying career with a healthy partnership and motherhood.

Companies lose out because productivity, innovation, and profit suffer when so many employees feel they can’t bring their whole selves to work.

I believe that we must address the work and family conundrum by focusing on our infrastructure around “care” with an energy and ingenuity like never before. We should consider this a moonshot, starting with ensuring that every worker has access to paid leave, flexibility, and predictability to help them handle the ebb and flow of work and family life, and then moving fast to develop the most innovative and comprehensive childcare and eldercare solutions that our greatest minds can

I think the fundamental role of a leader is to look for ways to shape the decades ahead, not just react to the present, and to help others accept the discomfort of disruptions to the status quo. We need the wisdom of business leaders, policy makers, and all women and men passionate about easing the work and family burden to come together here. With a can-do sense of optimism and a must-do sense of responsibility, we can transform our society.

We thrive, individually and collectively, when we have deep connections with our parents and children, and within larger groups, whether we are related or not. I believe that healthy families are the root of healthy societies. I

I think women are held to a different standard from men when it comes to celebrating their professional accomplishments. No matter what we do, we are never quite enough. Getting a promotion or a prize outside the home sometimes seems to mean that either that prize was easy to get or that we are letting our domestic duties slide.

The best run, most successful companies in the coming decades will be those that demonstrate the most foresight on people matters, and I think their stock performance will reflect this. This doesn’t mean ever more generous HR programs. It means companies, as part of their purpose, must pursue the smartest combination of policies to let employees flourish at work and at home.

I believe our workdays should be organized around productivity, not time and place.

we should give workers whose jobs mostly happen at a desk the choice to work from wherever they want—at home, in a coworking space, or in a central office. Evaluations should be adjusted so that people who spend less time physically in the office aren’t judged differently from those who spend more time there. We don’t want to create different classes of workers, again casting people with family obligations in a negative light.

my lack of work flexibility—and the feeling that I could never simply schedule my time in a way that made sense for me—were among the most stressful aspects of my life.