Last week we announced that three of our brands crossed the billion-dollars-in-retail-sales line. Those three – Brisk, Diet Mountain Dew and Starbucks ready-to-drink beverages – join 19 other PepsiCo brands in the Billion Dollar Brand club.

The graphic below illustrates the amazing growth of these three brands. I can tell you as a PepsiCo employee that this was achieved through a combination of terrifically smart brand managers, product marketing and innovation initiatives, and strong joint venture partnerships (with Starbucks and Unilever).

In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more news on how we’re working to continuously strengthen our brands and drive growth of the entire global brand portfolio. Stay tuned.

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The public service announcement below features U.S. Army veteran and employee Jerry Pegram, a category manager for the Pepsi Lipton partnership, on-the-job at PepsiCo headquarters. He mentions how, when leaving the military, service men and women are seeking jobs they can be proud of and that will enrich their lives as they move forward.

PepsiCo has a long legacy of military hiring throughout our ranks and across lines of business – from frontline employees up to the highest levels of leadership, including CEO. We believe in providing opportunity for our nation’s heroes, not just in the name of service, but because they help the business win. Veterans are an outstanding talent pool that define diversity, accountability, bias for action and drive for results. Among positive skills and attributes are:

-          Proven leadership abilities, often managing large teams at a young age
-          Highly adaptable and comfortable working in ambiguous environments
-          Taken on high levels of responsibility, experience with ownership over sizeable budgets
-          Performance-oriented, which ties to the PepsiCo culture
-          Globally experienced 

People with military backgrounds fit well at PepsiCo, because we’re a merit and performance based company with upward mobility and a focus on leadership and teams. PepsiCo also has a large infrastructure and supply chain so, like the military, logistics and operations are core to our success. Individuals who understand that environment are a match for our needs. As veterans transition, they may look for the structure that the military provides. There needs to be a culture fit. Our veterans employee resource group VALOR is a platform for supporting transition and success, allowing employees to connect with others who share the military bond, seek advice, build their networks, and together give back to the military community.

In the video below, I elaborate on PepsiCo’s commitment to veteran hiring, the value of veterans within our organization, and advancing our reputation as a leading military partner and destination for top talent.

An example of how PepsiCo UK & Ireland colleagues promoted the work we are doing on healthier products and innovative sustainable farming practices was to bring the farms to life through our display stand at the largest trade show of the year called “Pro Retail.” This was hosted by one of our biggest wholesale customers in the region, P&H (Palmer & Harvey).

The Impulse sales team manning the stand wore wellington boots and rustic-looking shirts representing typical British farmers’ attire. The look and feel of the stand was completely refreshed, going from predominantly branded to making the stand feel less corporate. The goal was to give visitors the impression that they had just arrived at the countryside. This was in addition to talking our customers through our ambitions and progress to date, showing videos and showcasing the raw ingredients that go into our products.

Feedback from customers, the trade press and trade associations in attendance was very positive in making this event effective in bringing PwP to life for not just our colleagues, but also for our customers. Some examples:

• “You’ve been very innovative about using this as an opportunity to talk about your products, of course, like everyone else, but to talk about the Health and Sustainability agenda…. It’s great you’ve used this opportunity to talk to retailers about those issues because retailers can’t ignore those issues. It’s really, really important. They need to start thinking about how carbon emissions, water usage, health will affect their businesses…. and show what companies like PepsiCo are doing in those areas.” — James Lowman, Chief Executive, ACS (Association Convenience Stores)

• “You’ve highlighted key trends, especially around breakfast and new healthier eating, linking that in with Tropicana. Also the equipment solutions for retailers…giving the retailer everything they need to sell the categories.” — Simon Harris, Buying & Marketing Manager, Palmer & Harvey

• “It’s different from every other stand in the show and different from anything PepsiCo have ever done before. It really shows what solutions there are for retailers and really shows the story behind the products retailers sell, as well.” — Stefan Appleby, Editor, Retail Express magazine

When I joined PepsiCo, I was astonished by the depth, breadth and strength of the food and beverage portfolio. Some things you take for granted, but PepsiCo is rooted in creating and delivering iconic, great tasting brands that consumers around the world enjoy on millions and millions of occasions every day.  As part of that, we have worked hard to respond quickly to changes in consumer behavior, the unprecedented choices offered, and the rise of social media that meant only brands that deeply engaged stood a chance of creating enduring value.

PepsiCo has a unique brand formula and global operations that creates enduring value for shareholders, consumers and customers around the world. This new brand formula, designed for a modern marketplace, is proven to deliver material value to shareholders through a billion dollar portfolio of brands – a class that now includes – thanks to our customers – Starbucks Ready to Drink beverages, Brisk and Diet Mountain Dew.

Add that to the fact that the entire organization is stacked with some of the most brilliant minds in marketing and unparalleled distribution, manufacturing and delivery systems, well, then, it shouldn’t be such a surprise.

We sat down with a group of leaders in the organization to hear what they had to say about the accomplishment, successes that made it possible, and what’s in the future for the organization and brands.

To learn further insight into what made each a “billion dollar brand,” take a listen to what our brand managers had to say on what made each a success.

• Starbucks is now the leader when it comes to ready-to-drink coffee sales. Seth Kaufman, Starbucks’ brand manager, attributes the combination of an iconic brand, high-quality ingredients and PepsiCo’s ability to turn a premium coffee into a ready-to-drink package as the brand’s key growth ingredients.

• For Diet Mountain Dew, Brett O’Brien says sales have doubled in the past 10 years mostly due to word of mouth of its fans. Diet Mountain Dew is now the No. 1  20 oz diet soft drink sold and convenience stores and gas stations across the country.

• And Mary Barnard attributes Lipton Brisk’s success due to its ability to connect with urban youth and promote the refreshing taste of tea. Lipton Brisk is now the second ready-to-drink Lipton tea to enter the billion dollar brand family after Lipton Iced Tea.

Watch, share and let us know why you think these three drinks are all “billion dollar brands.”

On December 16, 2011 from 1:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. ET, the Tostitos brand, along with several college and pro football greats, including Jim Kelly, Rodney Peete and Antonio Pierce, and TV personality and Big Brother Nick Lachey, will host a one-of-a-kind event called “Tostitos Fiesta in the Square.” The brand will convert Times Square Military Island into a college football endzone, where fans will help set a new Guinness World Records® title for the most people to kick a successful American football field goal in six hours.

As part of the event, Tostitos will donate $100,000 to Big Brothers Big Sisters. If a new Guinness World Records® title is set, that amount will be doubled for a total contribution of $200,000.

Fans in the Times Square area are invited to join and take their shot a contributing to the potentially record-setting achievement. The event will also include other football-themed activities, delicious snacks and more. Highlights from this one-of-a-kind celebration will be shared during the nationwide broadcast of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl on ESPN on January 2, 2012.

Fans across the country who are unable to join the party in Times Square can also be part of the action and make donations to Big Brothers Big Sisters by visiting the Tostitos Facebook page between Dec. 16, 2011 and January 1, 2012. The Tostitos brand will match consumer donations made during that time period, up to a maximum of $25,000. Check out the buzz that’s already building around this exciting event.

Thanks to PepsiCo’s support of the Power Lunch program through the amazing organization WITS (Working in the Schools), a dozen fellow employees and I hopped on a yellow school bus last Thursday to go to our students’ school and read one-on-one over our lunch hour. Some volunteers read with a student every Thursday, while other volunteers, like myself, alternate and read bi-weekly. By the number of returning volunteers from last year, it is evident that we see the incredible value in the program and have a lot of fun, too.

More than 67% of all U.S. fourth graders are not reading at grade level, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Education Progress Reading Test. At the school where we volunteer, that figure is 55.5%. Therefore, the need is great for students to have access to programs like WITS to improve their reading proficiency.

The first session of each school year starts with students and volunteers signing a contract to put their best efforts forward in the program and talking through some “getting to know you” questions that build an instant bond. All I had to do was say that my name is Jennifer. Antwan’s smile and observation, “Like Jennifer Hudson’s name,” gave me instant credibility.

Because there were more students than volunteers the other week, Mariah and Antwan both read to me. I was beaming with joy during the last five minutes of our session as they read briskly, in unison, long stretches of Dr. Seuss poetry that taught them to breeze through words like would, could and anywhere — words they had stumbled through and misread just a half hour earlier. With progress like that in one session, I have big hopes for what we can accomplish this school year!

I encourage everyone reading this article to support WITS in Chicago, or a local program in your town. I promise — you’ll realize your impact quickly and deeply!

On a sunny and hot Saturday morning in July, a line of families stretched up to two blocks adjacent to Humboldt Park in Chicago, all waiting patiently to receive a breakfast of milk and Quaker Oatmeal to Go from the PepsiCo Food for Good truck, haircuts, dental and eye exams, immunizations and school physicals from the health fair, a free hot lunch, a new backpack full of school supplies, and a reusable bag full of groceries including Life cereal, Tropicana orange juice, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, Doritos and Cheetos.

Megan Swierk, Frito Lay national account manager for the Walgreens team, led PepsiCo’s volunteer and donation efforts and also engaged Walgreens in the event. Walgreens donated 5,000 reusable grocery bags, backpacks and pedometers and had staff on hand to provide health screenings. The 900 volunteers working the event were identifiable in light blue T-shirts with the Hopefest logo on the front and PepsiCo on the back. Volunteers, including dozens from PepsiCo, and recipients stayed hydrated and cool with ice-cold Gatorade and Propel.

My first job at Hopefest was to stand by an entrance and re-direct people to the correct line. After about an hour there, I got recruited to help with registration and the action really picked up! Part of a team of about

ten volunteers, I went from family to family in line, documenting contact information for the participants, and the number of students present. The experience was especially unique for me because the first necessary step with each family I encountered was determining if their predominant language was English, Spanish or Polish and if I would be able to converse in English with someone in the family. I could talk with about 80% of the families, and if the language barrier was too great, a bi-lingual volunteer would step in to help. It really gave me perspective on the daily struggles that new Americans encounter as they learn English.

The smiles of eager students, grateful parents and joyful volunteers were endless and I look forward to helping out again next year. Seeing the valuable resources shared, it really made me proud to work at PepsiCo!

Dew Girl

and in Zuccotti Park, lower Manhattan …

and it quite possibly could be the future of Leadership.

What do you call it when you get a general assembly – thousands strong – where anyone can propose anything (and join a working group to make it happen, if enough people sign on)? Or you get two teams from the world’s second largest food & beverage company who helped improve Ketu South district’s access to clean drinking water without bothering with job titles, organizational charts or managers?

To hear the ‘mainstream’ media describe Occupy Wall Street, it is a “non-hierarchical” and “leaderless” movement. Guess you could say the same for the two pilot PepsiCorps teams that just returned from a month in rural Ghana. And you would be right on the first adjective and dead wrong on the second.

Start saying your goodbyes to ‘command & control’ leadership. And give a warm welcome to a new, more open-sourced model. Not leaderless as much as leaderful! It’s quite a simple model, actually. It just assumes that in any given crowd, different people will step up to lead at different times depending on their different abilities and what the crowd wants done at that point in time.

Simple, ok, but does it work?? – some of you are thinking. I know the jury’s out on whether OWS ‘works’, but the PepsiCorps pilot surely did, in that it 1. exceeded the wildest dreams of the people who made it happen, 2. changed everyone that was a part of it, and 3. gave all of us quite a few ideas on how to do it better next year.

So, this new, elegantly egalitarian, all-horizontal leaderful-ness, is it just my imagination? Impractical millenarian nonsense, or intimation of a paradigm-shift (what professional futurists call “weak signals” of things to come)? I’ll leave it for you to decide, but first, a few choice thoughts to help you make up your mind:

• Seth Godin, ‘best-selling author’, who has made a career out of telling business folk what they ought to be – marketers (Purple Cow), storytellers (All Marketers Are Liars), leaders (Tribes) – now says we are all artists (Linchpin)!! {and I’ll allow Gertrude Stein’s character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris the pleasure of reminding you that “(t)he artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence”}
• Just because anyone can be a leader doesn’t mean everyone automatically is! Leaderful doesn’t mean mob-rule or chaos. And it doesn’t mean leaders can’t be developed. They just have to develop differently.
• Most people don’t realize exactly how they can lead until they are put in situations where qualities they possess are suddenly and urgently needed.  And if you’re developing people to lead the businesses of 2020, you could do a lot worse than sending them to the world’s fastest growing economy for a month to see what business interest may be embedded in the human right to clean and safe drinking water.

If you are skeptical still, I have no choice but to hit you with the truly awesome example of Semco.

A Dutch business-journalist named Dominique Haijtema profiled Semco and its leader Ricardo Semler (along with Muhammad Yunus, Jack Welch, Deepak Chopra & Madeleine Albright) in his book, The Essence of Leadership.  Semco is a “democratic company… where employees set their hours, determine their salaries and choose their bosses. Meetings are voluntary and every employee has a say in everything. Once, when Semler organized a meeting to discuss developing a speedier dishwasher for the consumer market, no one showed up. And the idea was shelved.”

Semco employs more than 3,000 (with almost zero turnover) and is a fast-growing company with more than $250 million in sales. Ricardo Semler has been Brazil’s businessperson- of-the-year, twice, has written two bestsellers – Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace (1993), The Seven Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works (2003) – and taught at the MIT and Harvard business schools.

An idea that was wildly ahead of its time in 1982 (when Ricardo, at 22, fought his dad for control of the family business) might be on its way to becoming the new normal. Or not.

It’s up to each one of us. Really.

In early 2010, an internal, employee-led team started the “Go for Your Goal” program. It’s simple — declare a goal and commit to accomplishing it by the end of the year.  For the second consecutive year, the program has achieved nearly 100% participation across all functions and levels, including our highest ranking leaders, Massimo D’Amore (President of the Global Beverages Group (GBG)) and Sarah Robb O’Hagan, Gatorade President North America and Global Chief Marketing Officer, Sports Nutrition for PepsiCo.

In addition to helping employees achieve a better work-life balance, the program has also helped bring employees closer to the consumer to better understand the unique needs of athletes. Through our internal Facebook page, we’ve been able to post and share the stories of our accomplishments and the new challenges we’ve met along the way.  As athletes, we are experiencing firsthand what it means to battle back from injury, struggle to achieve the proper balance between nutrition and training, fall short of a finish, and enjoy the feeling of triumph.  These experiences have helped generate insights that serve as the catalyst for innovation and drive the forward thinking that is responsible for the brand’s evolution.

A growing trend in the halls has been the increase in participation of endurance sports.  This year, we’ve had over 30 employees demonstrate their commitment to live the brand by competing in races including 5Ks, 10Ks, 15Ks, half marathons, marathons, triathlons and IronMan events. The endurance bug has been contagious, evidenced by the over 25,000 miles logged by Gatorade employees.  I’ve never considered myself a runner, but after a push from a few friends at work I decided to give it a try.  Earlier this year, I declared that my goal would be to train and compete in a race.  I used Nike+ as a tool to set goals, track my runs, find new running paths, and also share my progress with friends at work via Facebook and Twitter.  Twelve hundred training miles and four races later I’ve become absolutely addicted to endurance sports, completing my first half marathon in September.  Running has not only helped me gain a deeper understanding of our athlete consumer, it’s also been a great way to bond with my fellow G-team members.  In addition to the positive impact on our day-to-day job responsibilities, the idea of declaring a goal and working to achieve it has inspired us all to live more healthy and active lifestyles.

Next year I have my eyes set on the Chicago Marathon.  There’s no doubt that running 26.2 miles will be challenging, but with the support of the resident endurance athletes on the floor, I’ll be more than prepared for race day!