While the likes of Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are famous, not many people know about Vivek Sankaran who leads one of the biggest retail chains to emerge out of the US. The Indian-origin global CEO is among the top former PepsiCo executives groomed for leadership under legendary CEO Indra Nooyi.
From his humble origins in India, Sankaran carved his way through the corporate world to become the CEO of Albertsons, the grocery store giant with a market cap of $11.5 billion (over Rs 95,000 crore). One of the former Pepsi execs leading a Fortune 500 company, Sankaran was PepsiCo North America’s CEO when he left for Albertsons in 2019.
Born and brought up in India, Sankaran is an alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. He started his career as a Xerox photocopier repairman, a skill that he still holds as he jokingly asserts he can still fix the machines. Sankaran then left for the US to pursue masters at the Georgia Institute of Technology followed by an MBA at the University of Michigan.
He then joined leading consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in 1993 and rose through the ranks and made all the right noises in the industry. After over a decade, he became one of the business leaders who rose from Indra Nooyi’s strategy at PepsiCo to become a “destination” for talent. He was offered the role of Chief Strategy Officer at PepsiCo by Nooyi in 2009. Sankaran went on to have a decade long career at Pepsi in various leadership roles before joining his several peers like Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan and Target CEO Brian Cornell as the chief of a top MNC.
