12 Fortune 500 CEOs worked for Pepsi. Delta’s Ed Bastian explains why it’s a leadership factory |
12 Fortune 500 CEOs worked for Pepsi. Delta’s Ed Bastian explains why it’s a leadership factory
In Atlanta, loyalty often runs deep—particularly to the city’s two hometown giants: Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines.
So it might come as a surprise that Ed Bastian, who has spent nearly a decade leading Delta, credits an Atlanta rival—PepsiCo—for making him the executive he is today. On the latest episode of Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, Bastian opened up about how the food and beverage conglomerate didn’t just shape his own rise to the C-suite, but it has quietly done the same for a generation of business leaders.
“[At PepsiCo], you’re surrounded by great talent. They understood that talent is going to win in the marketplace,” Bastian told Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. “They were constantly recruiting, bringing talent. It’s one of the only places I’ve ever been to where they tell you when you start, you’re probably not going to retire here because it’s a talent factory.”
And he isn’t exaggerating: PepsiCo has long been known as a breeding ground for top executives. A December 2022 analysis found at least a dozen Fortune 500 CEOs had passed through its ranks, including McDonald’s Chris Kempczinski and Land O’Lakes Beth Ford.
PepsiCo’s approach to grooming leaders was shaped in large part by Bob Eichinger, an industrial organizational psychologist who spent nearly a decade at the company starting in the late 1970s. Eichinger........