MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga on Taking Risks in Your Life and Career (Full Transcript)

Full Text — MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga on Taking Risks in Your Life and Career View From The Top talk at Stanford GSB

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga on Taking Risks in Your Life and Career

TRANSCRIPT: 

Interviewer: Thank you so much for being here today. It’s a real pleasure to have you. And before we dive in, I want to have a brief roadmap of where we’re going to go with today’s conversation. Want to begin with your career and its trajectory to date, 30 years, Nestle, Pepsi-Co.

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: You’re giving away my age very quickly.

Interviewer: So Nestle, Pepsi Co, Citi, and now MasterCard.

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: Yeah.

Interviewer: Then I want to move on to, in the last 10 years at Citi and now MasterCard, you’ve had a chance to develop a global perspective, and I want to explore that a little bit.

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: Okay.

Interviewer: And finally I want to pivot some more personal things like work life balance, family, diversity et cetera.

Now before we begin, I also have a deal for you. If you can forgive half my MasterCard debt, I’ll stick to the easy questions.

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: Now, what if I double your debt?

Interviewer: Okay, hard questions it is you guys.

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: Sucker punch.

Interviewer: So let’s start 30 years ago. You graduated. You went to Nestle as your first job. And you spent 13 years there. At the time when you were choosing your first job, how did you choose Nestle as the first place you wanted to work?

Ajay Banga –CEO, MasterCard: And so my wife and I were classmates at business school. She’s sitting right there. We were both, you know when we were in business school. This was a long time ago 1979 to 81. In India, India had just began to open up to the advent of multinationals coming in to build a lot of businesses there. Some had stayed on over the years and had changed their ownership model. Nestle was one of those, Unilever was another one. Others had left when the Indian government wasn’t as conducive to foreign investment as it is in the period in between. And so when we were graduating, multi-national corporations like Nestle, like Unilever, were places to work in of great attraction. They were terrific for learning the business. They were great for understanding the culture of a company that operated across the world. They were great for comprehending the concept of high quality products, of high ethics in how you worked. And all of us looked up to those companies as where you wanted to be. Because you would learn the things that you needed to learn in your early years of working life. And we guys, unlike you all who work and then come to business school, we didn’t risk to go, those days, straight from undergrad to business school. We were very young. I was 21 years old when I finished my business school career. And so, when you think about that, you think about the people in that frame of mind, Nestle was a very attractive learning place, with lots of strengths and attributes that I still think the company has. That’s how I ended up there. Getting in was not easy because everybody in the class would apply for these few jobs that were available, and they were very competitive, but —

Interviewer: And then, you chose to spend 13 years there?