MARIL MACDONALD:
Hi, welcome to Let Go and Lead. Today, we’re here with Al Carey, who’s the CEO of Pepsi Co. America’s Beverages. Al, thank you so much for joining us —

AL CAREY:
— my pleasure.

MARIL MACDONALD:
So, you’ve been with Pepsi Co for quite a while, since 1981 as I recall.

AL CAREY:
That’s right. I’ve been here for 31 years after I left Proctor & Gamble right out of college.

MARIL MACDONALD:
Wow, so, you must like it here, huh?

AL CAREY:
I do.

MARIL MACDONALD:
And I know the company has quite a purpose. Can you tell me a little bit about that, about the core purpose behind Pepsi Co?

AL CAREY:
Yeah, I think our chairman, Indra Nooyi , did a great job, several years ago, probably five or six years ago of coming up with an approach to our business called performance with purpose. So, this company’s always been a high performance organization, I mean for many years, if you went back over time and said how did Pepsi Co perform, always good, you know a strong performer in the stock market and performance of it’s beverage brands and it’s snack brands. But how about purpose? You know what was the purpose part of this?

So, what we’ve come up with is um, sustainability in three areas where our aim is to provide sustainability in three areas, human sustainability, and environmental sustainability and talent sustainability. So, the way we treat our environment, the way we provide products that are healthy, healthier and healthy for consumers and the way we treat our people.

And by doing those three things we believe our performance is going to be better.

MARIL MACDONALD:
And have you found that as you really redefined or enhanced your purpose that it’s effected the company’s culture as well?

AL CAREY:
Yeah, it has and it definitely has changed the culture. But you know you can really see it if you go on a college campus and I spent a fair amount of time doing recruiting on college campuses and going back to my old school, and presenting materials and speaking to the business class and you know what I’ve noticed, is young people are very much interested in this performance with purpose and environmental sustainability, the way we treat people, making healthier products, it changes the dynamic.

And I’ve found that young people who would normally not be interested in working our company maybe, had other ideas, it’s more attractive. And I’ve noticed it’s, it helps our ability to recruit the best and it also changes the way you feel about things.

I’ll give you one example, when I was at Frito Lay for the last five and a half years on — as the CEO of Frito Lay, we really made progress on environmental sustainability. And I thought that would be something that just the young people would be interested in.

And we made significant strides on solar, water conservation , co-gen operations to provide our own electricity and get off the grid. These are the kinds of things I’d get emails from 25 year, 30 year veterans saying Al, I’m so proud of the company, I really am proud to work at this plant in you know Connecticut. And, and it’s surprising that it wasn’t just the young out of college people, but it’s everybody in the organization feels more proud of the company.

MARIL MACDONALD:
Yeah, we’ve been seeing that, a lot of that in our work as well, but meaning has taken on so much more importance to people than it may have at one point.

AL CAREY:
Yes.

MARIL MACDONALD:
And many of the people I’ve interviewed have talked about that, like Simon Mainwearing [phonetic] talked about purpose as the new profit. Howard Schultz talked a lot about purpose, Dan Pink who you know of course, talks a lot about how people are now driven by purpose, mastery, autonomy, so, we’re seeing a lot of it, it’s really interesting. Do, do you have a sense of what’s shifted?

AL CAREY:
I think the young generation brings a lot of that. some of us baby boomers who have been in these business environments for a long time I don’t know if it’s enough for people to just be successful in a business and make money and have a title. I know when maybe 15 years ago I got to a point where I got in to a position where I thought it was a dream job, like how did I get to this position? But it really wasn’t enough, I thought there’s got to be more to this than just being successful on your own and it, it starts making you feel like you, you want to give to others and, and provide for others and it’s, it’s a bigger picture than just success for yourself.