the gift of your child: Indra Nooyi's letters to her executives' parents
When Indra Nooyi became chief executive of PepsiCo, relatives who came to see her family in India congratulated her mother, not her. That small scene, as she tells it, led her to write to the parents of her senior executives. It is a story about a very old form of communication: the specific, handwritten kind of thanks.
By Brightside English editorial team
Reviewed by a Brightside senior coach · · 5 min read
Indra Nooyi led PepsiCo from 2006 to 2019. She has said that after becoming CEO, she watched visitors in India praise her mother for raising her, and realised she had never thanked her own executives' parents. She began writing to them. The lesson: thank people specifically, in writing, and sometimes thank the people behind the person.
A visit home
Nooyi was chair and chief executive of PepsiCo from 2006 to 2019. NBC News noted that she was the company's first woman president and first Indian-born chief executive. She grew up in India in the 1960s and went to Yale for business school before her corporate career in the United States.
She has told the story of the letters several times, in slightly different words. In a 2014 conversation with Fortune's Andy Serwer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she described going home to Madras after becoming CEO. Her mother had relatives and friends over. One after another, she said, they congratulated her mother for raising a daughter who had done so well.
In 2022 she told the story again on Art of Power, a podcast from Chicago's WBEZ, hosted by Aarti Shahani. There she put it more sharply: visitors said hello to her, then went to her mother to offer congratulations. Watching this, she said, she realised she had never thanked the parents of her own senior executives.
The letters
Back at PepsiCo, she began to write. In the Fortune account, each letter described her visit to her mother and thanked the parents for raising their child, with a few lines about that child's work at the company. She told Fortune she wrote words to the effect of: "therefore I'm writing to thank you for the gift of your son."
In a 2023 talk at the University of Texas at Arlington, reported by the university, she described the structure. At first she wrote to the parents of the 16 executives on her staff. Two paragraphs were personal, about what that executive did for her and for the company, and she ended by thanking the parents for their gift to her and to PepsiCo. She copied each executive on the letter.
The practice grew. She told Fortune in 2014 that after her direct reports, she extended it to a larger group of high potential employees, about 200 people, whose parents she also wrote to.
What came back
The parents wrote back. She told Fortune the letters opened up emotions she had never seen before. She described one executive grumbling to his mother that his boss was hard on him, and his mother taking the boss's side, because by then she considered Nooyi a friend. She also described calling the mother of a candidate PepsiCo wanted to hire, who was weighing another offer. His mother, by Nooyi's account, settled the matter.
At the Arlington talk she recalled a visit to Dubai, where, she said, one executive's whole community seemed to feel it had played a part in the company's success. In the WBEZ conversation she spoke of seeing parents beaming with pride.
She has also credited her own parents for the idea, telling the Arlington audience she had won the lottery with them. Her 2021 memoir, My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future, published by Portfolio, covers her childhood in 1960s India, her years at Yale and her time at PepsiCo, with much of its reflection given to family.
What is self-reported
Almost everything about the letters comes from Nooyi herself, in public conversations and talks. We have not seen the letters, and PepsiCo has not, as far as we could find, published them or any count of them. Her own accounts agree on the core: the visit home, the realisation, letters to her direct reports' parents, thanks for the gift of their child, parents writing back.
The numbers vary in the retelling. She has spoken of 16 direct reports, and in 2014 of about 200 high potential employees. Some later articles and social media posts give much larger totals, such as 400; we could not trace those figures to her own words, so we have left them out. She told the Arlington audience the letters made a big difference to culture and morale. That is her judgement as the person who wrote them, and there is no independent study of their effect.
None of this makes the story less useful. It simply means it is best read as a leader's account of a habit, not as a measured result.
The lesson for the rest of us
Most thanks at work are generic. "Great job, team." "Thanks, everyone." They are kind and quickly forgotten. Nooyi's letters worked, by her account, for three reasons that anyone can borrow.
They were specific. Two paragraphs about what this person actually did. Not a template.
They were written. A letter can be kept, reread and shown to others. Her executives' parents, she said, showed theirs around.
They thanked the people behind the person. Parents, yes, but the idea stretches. A spouse who covered at home during a product launch. A team in another city that made a client call go well. A night nurse whose handover made a ward round easier.
You do not need to run a global company to do this. A manager in Pune can write to a new hire's family after the first big release. A founder in Kochi can thank a supplier's whole team, by name, not just the owner. A daughter in Doha can write to her mother's neighbour who checked on her every evening during a hard month.
"I wanted to tell you what Meera did this quarter. She led our first export order from start to finish, and the client asked for her by name. Thank you for the gift of a daughter like her."
"Thank you for the evenings Arjun spent away from home during the launch. I know the cost fell on you too."
"Your team's preparation made our client call easy. Please pass my thanks to every one of them, especially Ravi, whose summary I read twice."
Sources
- Fortune, Say wha? The CEO who writes her employees' parents (Andy Serwer with Indra Nooyi at Davos), 28 January 2014. fortune.com/2014/01/28/say-wha-the-ceo-who-writes-her-employees-parents/
- Aarti Shahani, Indra Nooyi smiles through the BS, Art of Power, WBEZ Chicago, 17 March 2022. www.wbez.org/art-of-power/2022/03/17/indra-nooyi-smiles-through-the-bs
- University of Texas at Arlington News Center, Business leader Nooyi tells students education is a forever commitment, 22 March 2023. www.uta.edu/news/news-releases/2023/03/22/mss-indra-nooyi
- Penguin Random House, Portfolio to publish memoir by Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, in September 2021. global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/portfolio-to-publish-memoir-by-indra-nooyi-former-ceo-of-pepsico-in-september-2021/
- NBC News, Pepsi CEO on work-life balance and coping with parental guilt (Aspen Ideas Festival), 2 July 2014. www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/pepsi-ceo-work-life-balance-coping-parental-guilt-n146381
Published by The Full Stop, the journal of Brightside English, in the Landmark Moments series. Every factual claim links to a source below; where accounts or findings are disputed, we say so. Sources checked on 26 Oct 2026. Reviewed by a Brightside senior coach. Corrections: see our editorial standard.