When Tracey Travis ('86) took the stage at Columbia Business School's Black Business Student Association Elevate Conference, she opened with a moment from early in her career that still resonates. She had agreed to run one of Pepsi's worst-performing bottling units, a move that made little sense on paper. She had built her reputation as a rising finance executive, leading a small analytical team and helping shape corporate strategy. Suddenly, she was responsible for 400 employees, daily operations across multiple facilities, and a business unit with a high likelihood of failure.
“It was my ‘put your money where your mouth is’ moment,” Travis says now.
That decision became the defining inflection point in a career that would eventually take her to the CFO role at Estée Lauder and board seats at Meta, Accenture, and Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Her trajectory offers a lesson increasingly valued in corporate leadership: companies want executives who can move beyond functional expertise and demonstrate operational credibility under pressure.
Travis began her career not in finance, but as a reliability engineer at General Motors, working directly with plant operations and manufacturing systems. At Columbia Business School, she combined operations management with finance, creating what became a distinctive leadership profile: someone fluent in both the mechanics of how products are made and the economics behind how businesses grow.
That blend proved especially valuable at Pepsi. Beyond strategy work that helped expand the company into water and juice categories, Travis learned to operate in a culture that prized speed and execution. But it was the bottling assignment that forced the biggest leap, from advising operators to becoming one herself.
The experience reshaped her understanding of leadership. Success depended less on analysis and more on motivating teams, managing culture, and delivering results in real time.
For Travis, the riskiest role became the most important credential of all.