Years before she was revolutionising the path of PepsiCo, one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world, as its CEO, a young Indra Nooyi, along with her siblings, would spend days playing, snoozing and singing on a huge rosewood swing set that graced the women’s living room in their middle-class Madras home. This was pre-liberalisation India, before Madras was Chennai. Life was frugal, but a sense of clockwork discipline bound Nooyi, her sister Chandrika, and brother, Nandu — one that was silently instilled by their pragmatic parents, under the watchful eyes of thatha (grandfather). And so, while Nooyi delves into her conquests across the world in her hot-off-the-press memoir My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future (Hachette India), it’s her foundational years — spent frolicking on the swing, solving maths problems by her thatha’s bedside, churning butter to help amma, and forming the first women’s cricket team of her college — that lend us a peek into the person behind the leader.

The awe-inspiring book traces her journey across the globe. From her school and college days in Madras/Chennai to her B-school years in IIM Calcutta, a sales trainee in Mumbai, and an immigrant student at Yale, it charts her ascent as a diligent, hard-working strategist who rose through the ranks at Motorola, The Boston Consulting Group, ASEA Brown Boveri and PepsiCo. Through all of this, she reminds us, her family — two daughters, husband, parents and siblings — continues to occupy centrestage. Of course, there are curveballs, but Nooyi offers us an honest insight into how she hits them out of the park. Here are a few lessons from her life that stayed with us, and which victory coach Farzana Suri decodes for corporate leaders: