She’s measured, rehearsed, deliberate, and particularly articulate. She’s clearly the person in class that knew the answer to every question the teacher asked - because she’d read every page of the textbook. She’s casually poised, calmly perspicacious, and quite sweet, charming, and affable.
She specializes in taking consumer products and brands and elevating the awareness into the everyday consciousness of its target consumer. She rose to Senior Vice President in Pepsi’s heyday - working closely with famed CEO Indra Nooyi, has been the Chief Marketing Officer of The Children’s Place, Keurig, and Peloton, and holds Board seats at several public and private companies.
In the fall of 2022, Lori collaborated with six other powerful and accomplished female business executives to write a book called You Should Smile More, that’s mostly about what it’s like to be a woman in the corporate world - and how to get ahead. “So the quick story is that a group of women who had all worked together at Pepsi and mostly overlapped for at least a decade, were invited to dinner by Indra after she’d retired as CEO in 2019. At one point in the conversation this women’s resource group that I had co-founded in 1993 somehow came up, and it sparked a conversation about our common experiences at work - not just at Pepsi, but all over,” Lori explains. “We were invited to speak as a group at Adweek in 2019, and we couldn’t get off the stage afterwards as there was endless interest in what we had to say. We were gearing up to start keynote speaking at different companies and conferences…when covid hit…and we decided writing a book would be a better idea than public speaking. We did hundreds of interviews with younger women to validate that our experiences navigating the corporate ladder as a woman were still common to women today, and also to get their advice on modernizing the advice around the digital age. We called ourselves the Band of Sisters!”
“What’s powerful about You Should Smile More is that, when you write a book with six women, there’s no one right answer. It’s not Sheryl Sandberg telling you to ‘lean in’, or Arianna Huffington telling you to sleep more. It’s six points of view, so it’s a little bit of choose your own adventure. Sometimes you might agree with what Katie says, what Mitzi says, or what Dawn says, and you also have to pick what works for you in the moment based on your level of psychological safety and all of that. So actually having six points of view, and then plus all the people we interviewed, makes for a strong product.”
Growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey, then Lori Tauber, she describes what she calls a blessed upbringing with a close-knit nuclear family and lots of friends, saying “I grew up on a very leave-it-to-Beaver kind of a little street. Me and my sister. And two very present and involved parents. We certainly weren’t privileged - we were middle class at best and both of my parents worked - but there was a sense of privilege in growing up with two involved and loving parents with all of the things we needed. I still feel very lucky.”
“My dad was definitely a feminist. I think it might have been out of practicality more than anything else. I’m a very practical person too. And his whole thing about raising two daughters was that he didn’t want us to be reliant on anybody else to support ourselves. We were taught the value of hard work, earning a living, and being able to take care of yourself. Not that he didn’t ever want us to get married or anything - but he wanted that to be a choice, not a necessity,” Lori shares. “He and my mother both grew up poor, and I think they were both very conscious, not of acquiring wealth, but being able to live a lifestyle with financial safety and security.”
“When it came time for college I thought I’d go to Rutgers - which was, and is, a great state school. But my sister’s friend was at Penn - which was the only reason I really had any awareness of it, or the Ivy League more generally - and so I had applied… and got in. My parents helped with whatever they could, and I took out loans. My sister, Shelley, was already at Brandeis - the Captain of the Tennis Team, I should add! She was majoring in Economics and I remember my dad saying, ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to open up the New York Times and find a job advertisement that says: looking for an economics major’,” Lori recalls. “But, funny enough, she did get a job right out of college, at Chubb - where she had a successful 40+ year career, and where her son works today.”
“Though there’s a part of me that wishes I’d had the chance to be a liberal arts major and really have time to partake in the joy of learning to write papers, and critical thinking, and general renaissance knowledge - because I think all of that is really important…I got to Penn and transferred into Wharton Business School as soon as I could!” Lori recounts. “I quickly landed on marketing and advertising as my focus, gravitating toward the tactile nature of that kind of business…versus, say, macroeconomics or something like that where you never get to see a product. I really fell in love with the storytelling of it all, and was really fascinated by everything I was learning. So when it came time to get a job, I went to the career planning office where you’d put your resume - your paper resume - in these little boxes for each company, and then the companies, GE, Macy’s, whoever, would do interview days on campus. I was pretty fixated on retail and wanted a big company with a renowned training program to launch my career. One of the guys I was friends with had already gotten a job with a company called Majers - a small private company that would ultimately become part of Nielsen, the giant marketing research company. I popped my resume in the box, and ended up taking a job there, at their office in Atlanta, right out of school.”
Now, I often talk about the value in having a first job that allows you to experience everything immediately and gain a wide skillset.
“Now, I often talk about the value in having a first job that allows you to experience everything immediately and gain a wide skillset,” Lori relays. “I really had three jobs in one. I was doing the analytics I’d taken the job because of, and then I was packaging and presenting my findings to boardrooms full of executives at companies like Coca-Cola and Tropicana, and then everyone had to do outbound cold-call sales too! I got to learn what I was good at and what I liked to do - and the key from there is to take that information and figure out how to move forward with it.”
“I had a great boss at my first job, Dave. He is actually the one that hired me right off the Penn campus. He was a really humble middle class kid from Minnesota who kind of reminds me of Tim Walz. On our first recruiting trip together I told him that I didn’t know how to recruit or what to look for… and he said: ‘You hire people that are smarter, more clever, more creative, and harder working than you are - and then we’ll all do really well and we’ll make a bunch of money!’ … And I was like, ‘That’s it?’ … and he said: ‘Yup, that’s it!’ …It taught me almost everything I needed to know about hiring. You can’t be successful without a great team.”
“He also demonstrated how to uplift people in the organization, and the importance of proper praise - something I carried forward into my career and my own leadership,” Lori chronicles. “I’d secured my first client, Dr. Scholl’s. I sold them a $90,000 contract - which was a really big deal in the early 80s. He reached out to both the Atlanta office and our Omaha HQ and - instead of telling them that I’d had this big win, which would have resulted in me getting a big W while everyone else around felt like they were getting an L - he announced, ‘this is a great win for the Atlanta office and helps us all get closer to our overall goals’. Sharing praise broadly and exuding positivity definitely gave me something to emulate later on.”
I think a good basic formula is working hard, head-down about 90% of the time, and using the other 10% to play the political game of climbing the corporate ladder.
“Dave was my first mentor and was instrumental to my career and my early success. And I’d be remiss not to dive a bit deeper into mentorship - especially for women,” Lori continues. “Mentorship is incredibly important, but I will also say that women tend to be over-mentored and under-sponsored. Mentors and coaches are people that speak with you, help with building leadership skills, teach you, give a curbside debrief after a meeting, or help to navigate the company. But if mentors are people that speak to you, sponsors are the people that speak for you. They are the people that use their power to advocate for you when you aren’t in the room. You can’t ask for someone to be your sponsor exactly, but you can ask for their commitment in supporting you for something specific, or to bring up your name when the opportunity arises. And always ask ‘What else can I say or do in advance of that to put myself in the strongest position?’, ‘Is there anyone else that you would suggest that I meet with ahead of time?’, and ‘Are there any naysayers?’ …You can’t be afraid to advocate for yourself, and be clear about what you want. The tricky part is being squeaky without being obnoxious. I think a good basic formula is working hard, head-down about 90% of the time, and using the other 10% to play the political game of climbing the corporate ladder. You need to let what you want be known, and then you need to find a way to work on projects with the people who are the gatekeepers for those roles, so that when your name comes up they’re happy to say: ‘I would love to have Lori on my team’.”
Strikingly, though she continues to provide detailed and well-thought out examples of challenges for women trying to get ahead in business that continue to persist, Lori’s optimism shines through in each tale.
“This stuff isn’t insurmountable! We just need to collectively acknowledge how we can be better and do better. Having the roadmap to overcome an obstacle puts the proven playbook in the hands of women that are coming up in their careers today - and helping other women to succeed is one of the great joys of my life,” Lori smiles.
As featured in the May/June 2025 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine