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Education Quote by Indra Nooyi

"Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that"

About this Quote

Power, in Nooyi's telling, is a moving walkway: stop walking and you start drifting backward. The line opens by puncturing the most common executive delusion - that the title is the destination. "Don't think you have landed" frames leadership as transit, not arrival, and it slyly recodes the CEO role from trophy to test. The subtext is both personal discipline and institutional survival: the minute an organization treats the corner office as a finish line, it starts calcifying.

What makes the quote work is its three-part escalation. Not just "learning" (the safe, MBA-friendly word), but "the way you think" (a deeper rewiring of assumptions), and "the way you approach the organization" (behavior, relationships, power dynamics). Nooyi is insisting that leadership is cognitive, psychological, and practical - and that all three have to keep evolving in sync. It's a rebuke to leaders who substitute confidence for curiosity, or who mistake competence in one era for competence in the next.

Context matters: Nooyi rose to the top of PepsiCo as an immigrant woman in an executive culture long dominated by American male archetypes. For someone who had to prove, adapt, and outlearn the room repeatedly, "continually increase" isn't self-help; it's strategy. The closing, "I've never forgotten that", gives the line its quiet edge: it reads less like advice than like a rule she learned the hard way - and kept because forgetting it would be professionally fatal.

Quote Details

TopicLeadership
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Nooyi, Indra. (2026, January 17). Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/just-because-you-are-ceo-dont-think-you-have-49486/

Chicago Style
Nooyi, Indra. "Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/just-because-you-are-ceo-dont-think-you-have-49486/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Just because you are CEO, don't think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I've never forgotten that." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/just-because-you-are-ceo-dont-think-you-have-49486/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Indra Nooyi (born October 28, 1955) is a Businessman from India.

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