Ask PepsiCo Inc.’s India head, Sanjeev Chadha, almost any question, and more likely than not he will pause and start with a count, listing at least “two or three” thoughtful reasons in ascending order, unusually methodical for a consumer products executive with an advertising background.
Ask consultant Radha Chadha a question, and it is more than likely that, after an equal pause, you will get a non-linear answer that is about emotions and inner reasoning or a higher purpose. Again, not perhaps something you would naturally expect from a math whiz from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
Global citizens: Home is no longer one country (Illustration by: Jayachandran / Mint)
Unusual, until you realize that after 25+ years of being married to each other, the Chadhas are clearly a couple in sync, in spoken and unspoken ways, even if they may have spent significant time away from each other amid demanding careers and multiple residences.
Now back in India, after being away for a little more than a decade, they represent a new, emerging breed of Indian power couples—those who are global in their approach to life, making separate and distinct marks in their chosen fields but, in many ways, doing it together.
It isn’t surprising then that Radha has helped Sanjeev screen potential ad models from tapes that he brought home for Pepsi commercials (taking credit for picking Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for one commercial when “she was a nobody”), while he was the one who pushed someone more comfortable with numbers than words to eventually write what would become a well regarded book on the luxury business in Asia (“because she used to write lovely letters!”).
A 17-year veteran of Pepsi, Sanjeev is back in India heading a newly resurgent entity whose global CEO, Indra Nooyi, also happens to have India high on the agenda for personal and business reasons. His goal—“well, two big ones”, as he lists—is to triple business in five years by leveraging Pepsi (the cola giant) into PepsiCo (the cola, water and juices giant); and to push aggressively for what PepsiCo dubs “Performance with Purpose”, by which the company also does social good while trying to beat the life out of the likes of Coca-Cola Co.
For Sanjeev, coming back to India was about answering the question whether “I wanted to be a spectator or do I want to get involved in these exciting years.”
For Radha, who runs her own consulting firm and thus has a portable gig, the move is not so much about the India opportunity as “it is about my ability to see India afresh…understand that this is what defines Indians.”