The video shows Nooyi saying that work-life balance doesn’t exist, and that at best one can juggle all the priorities.
Industrialist and RPG Group Chairman Harsh Goenka, recently shared an old video of PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on X where she is seen giving an honest take on work-life balance. Goenka captioned the video – ‘Work-life balance- a lovely story from Indra Nooyi’.
The video shows Nooyi saying that work-life balance doesn’t exist, and that at best one can juggle all the priorities. Sharing a personal story, Nooyi said that once she got a call from her younger daughter who said, “Mom, your turn to bring chocolate chip cookies for the class coffee this morning. I said you didn’t tell me, I didn’t do it. She said its on the refrigerator, you didn’t see it? I didn’t see it, I was busy. So now it’s like 9 o clock. I’m supposed to walk in with chocolate chip cookies at 10 o clock.”
She further added that her daughter asked her not to bake the Nestle Toll House cookies because everybody I her class knew that the cookies should be home made.
“Now where am I going to make them? I don’t know how to make them and I can’t do it in an hour,” Nooyi said. “So I called out to my cafeteria and said I need home-made cookies in an hour. I’ll pay whatever it takes, just give it to me,” Nooyi said as the audience broke out a chuckle.
“So in 40 minutes I get the most delectable, homemade cookies in aluminium foil. So it’s not professional. I walk into the school with it. Evidently, those cookies tasted fabulous. And my daughter was hero. But you see I juggled priorities. Did I balance them? No I didn’t,” Nooyi said.
She concluded by saying, “women already are super people, because they somehow make it all work. But anybody who uses the word balance is crazy.”
There has been a lot of buzz in the recent past over maintaining a work-life balance. With Narayan Murthy pitching for 70-hour work week, netizens have been quick to react on this whole debate. Harsh Goenka had also shared a post on LinkedIn in January where he talked about why employees leave their jobs, a problem many companies face. In his post, he included an infographic called “Reasons People Quit and What To Do About It,” which listed common reasons employees quit and gave useful tips for employers on how to fix these problems.