To help their executives meet the challenges of today’s evolving business landscape, food and beverage giant PepsiCo created a custom Executive Education curriculum with Chicago Booth—and found that it delivered lasting results.
“I wanted to make sure that we gave our top talent leadership development, because leadership is something that you can learn, and something that you can practice and get better at over time,” said Hugh Johnston, chief financial officer and executive vice chairman of PepsiCo Inc. and himself a graduate of Booth's Full-Time MBA program.
“Our participants were just overwhelmingly positive about the program, and frankly, I’ve seen a difference in their performance as they’ve come back,” said Johnston, '87. Hear more from PepsiCo’s executives about their experiences in the program:
Beth Brickel:
We had a phenomenal PepsiCo University from a leadership perspective, and we had a terrific finance college, which was our functional skills college. But we were missing the ability to take those folks to the next level, to have them look outwardly, look globally, to grow them from a strategic perspective. But how do you really raise them to the next level? What are they missing that that senior level executive is missing?
Hugh Johnston:
I wanted to make sure that we gave our top talent leadership development, because leadership is something that you can learn, and it's something that you can practice and get better at over time. And to use a program to give good leadership development, leveraging PepsiCo's accelerated leadership program, I thought made a lot of sense. I also wanted to partner with a top university, because I thought a top business school could bring perspective that frankly, again, looking outside the company was probably going to give us a better answer.
Rajdeep Datta Gupta:
What really surprised me was the ability of the professors, the SMEs in their subject areas, to start off really simple, bite-sized chunks, then build up on it. This layered approach to learning, which ensured that over a period of a week we covered what would otherwise have been a 10-week semester.
Beth Brickel:
As soon as the professors got up there, Rock and Bunch, they were challenging this class and these students, it's a hard-driving group at PepsiCo and nobody's that shy. And so they were challenged, and they were participating, and everybody was raising their hands, and it was really, it was a great experience to see. We also had a leadership involvement that really helped launch the program so successfully.
Vienna Wong:
The program was very tailored to what a senior finance executives at PepsiCo would need to really get to the next level. What Professor Bunch, actually brought is really beyond finance. When you think about new venture strategy, you're thinking about a startup, it's actually, it was a very unique opportunity for someone at PepsiCo who would typically think of a large corporation.
Hugh Johnston:
Professors Bunch and Rock I thought did a fantastic job really bringing a lot of their outside thinking into the organization. And as a result of that, our participants were just overwhelmingly positive about the program.
Melissa McKerracher:
Take full advantage, be in the moment while you're there, ask all the questions that you have. Don't sit back, and really just be a key participant in it. Really leverage the power of the networking with the other teams within the room. We had a great, talented group. That's a big takeaway for me as well as with the professors.
Rajdeep Datta Gupta:
The time which you get with the professors, the mentoring program, or the opportunity to network and learn from peers, the opportunity to work in a virtual team—these are all very different from what we do in our normal day-to-day jobs and therefore you need to maximize those opportunities.
Hugh Johnston:
The level that we had of executive engagement inside of PepsiCo was terrific. Whether it was our CHRO, our CEO, coming in and being a part of it, and really the broader PepsiCo executive organization really dug in.
“[The program’s] basic notion of forcing people to think more externally in an action-learning environment: 10 out of 10. We absolutely nailed that, and the University of Chicago and Booth nailed that,” Johnston said. “I felt like we got maximum value out of that.”
Hear more from Johnston about the partnership's benefits for PepsiCo’s executives, and learn more about both Custom Programs for corporations, and Open Enrollment programs for executives.
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COVID-19 Thought Leadership Digest: September 14
