Indra Nooyi

Now you're really a value-added board member.

As opposed to, yeah, so-and-so is a good board member, read the board material, made sure that governance was ticked off.

I think that's the table stakes to be on the board.

But a great board member does a lot of work themselves to read way beyond what the company gave you to read.

You know, the entire company is focused on the customer.

The obsession of the customer is something else.

And it's always like, how do we make customers' life better?

How do we lower costs for customers?

How do we improve delivery times?

How do we latency?

All of these things are what they focus on all the time.

So I've never been part of such a customer-obsessed company.

PepsiCo is consumer-focused, but these are customer-obsessed companies, first.

Second, Amazon has paranoia about devolving into hierarchy and what they call losing the day one fear.

culture, day one culture being when they were young, entrepreneurial, how hungry they were and how they hustled.

They want to have that hustle culture all the time.

The fact that they're paranoid about it, even today, given their size, is what blows me away.

They're always scared that they will lose that day one culture.

And so you've got everybody hustling to make sure that hierarchy is not built too much.

Bureaucracy doesn't kill ideas.