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Generally, when legendary CEO Roger Enrico wasn\u2019t happy, just about every PepsiCo executive from junior grades on up knew about it. So it was that when David Barnes was told he would be presenting to Enrico on a subject known to inflame the CEO\u2019s ire, he knew that his presentation\u2014one way or the other\u2014would be career-defining.

\u201cEnrico was known to be very impatient with those who would present a bunch of facts but offer no insights,\u201d remembers Barnes, whose tryst with destiny surfaced via the guidance of none other than Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo\u2019s future CEO, who Barnes tells us was his \u201cgreat mentor and sponsor\u201d during his Pepsi years.

\u201cPepsi had hired a big consulting firm and they had dumped a lot of data on us, but they couldn\u2019t find any insights, so Indra asked me to work with the consultants and actually get the insights out of the data,\u201d continues Barnes, who had been hired in the mid-1990s to be part of a strategy group within PepsiCo that had been tasked with integrating strategy and finance across the company.

As it turned out, Barnes\u2019s presentation succeeded in delivering a number of new insights related to the profitability (or lack thereof) of PepsiCo\u2019s restaurant business in China.

\u201cWe had a small, money-losing business in China at a time when the Asian economies at large were experiencing deep recessions, so the questions being asked were \u2018Do we give up?\u2019 and \u2018Do we double down?,\u2019\u201d recalls Barnes, who would soon open a new career chapter in China\u2014an indication that perhaps his presentation had gone well.

\xa0\u201cThey wanted a known quantity in China\u2014someone with the company\u2019s corporate interests at heart\u2014so I became responsible for finance as well as our development activities around new stores for KFC and Pizza Hut,\u201d explains Barnes, who would subsequently use data to better expose an opportunity for new stores inside China\u2019s smaller tertiary markets rather than in big cities.

\u201cWe figured out that there was a better way to do capital resource allocation just for these markets,\u201d comments Barnes, who recalls the business leader who ultimately made the call when it came to opening new stores as saying: \u201cLet\u2019s get at it!\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0