Kickstart: Picture women in charge

Next time you're in Washington, stop by the National Portrait Gallery and spend some time with business leader Indra Nooyi, the former Pepsico Inc. CEO who worked to convince the snack food giant to invest in some healthier options, bio-based plastic for its packaging and recycled PET.

Nooyi, who stepped down from Pepsico in 2018 after 12 years as its leader, is one of six people (or 10 if you want to count the members of Earth, Wind & Fire separately) to have their portraits added to the museum on Nov. 17. The oil painting by Jon R. Friedman is part of the Smithsonian "Portrait of a Nation."

In a Q&A with the New York Times, Nooyi noted how she was recruited to Pepsico by its former CEO, Wayne Calloway, who pointed out that the company didn't have "somebody of my ethnicity or international outlook who was female in senior management at PepsiCo." And, she added, businesses still need to address the "leaky pipeline" that discourages women from advancing in the corporate structure.

If you're in Washington on Dec. 5, you can hear from her directly as the museum hosts her in its free Talks & Tours event.

Maybe our researcher Hollee Keller hasn't found all of them, but as she notes in her blog this week, she tracked down contact information on at least 200.

She also would like to offer a prize to the 57 firms who have responded to requests for the volume of business since she started tracking that data. "All things being equal, these totals were up 4.5 percent over last year," she noted.

Topping the resin stats chart for compounders? Polypropylene, with 68 percent of the respondents offering PP in some form. (And the top state for compounders, if you were wondering, is Ohio.)

Before you finish writing that letter to Santa (or you head out for black Friday sales on Santa's behalf) you may want to know you can add something for the prototyper or future engineer in your family. Or, OK, artists too.

Time magazine's top toy list this year includes a 3D printing pen, from 3Doodler, as part of a set that lets them create a 3D printed "sumo battle bot." 3Doodler pens heat a plastic filament — available in PLA, nylon and ABS — allowing you to create a 3D version of whatever you can picture. And draw.

The battle bot set has templates that can be used to mold according to specifications. Or you could just wing it and come up with something no one else has ever imagined.