Indian Origin CEOs Ruling The World

India has produced some of the world’s top engineers and computer scientists. Many Indian tech CEOs have studied at prestigious universities like the?Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and others (IITs) across the country. Almost all Indian-origin executives have studied in IITs at some point.

Admission into the IITs is like Ivy League admissions on steroids, and the students studying there have great work ethics.

According to a 2020 analysis by the group Boardroom Insiders, roughly 56 Fortune 500 CEOs (about 11 per cent) are immigrants. They come from 28 different countries, but the study reveals India has given America the most chief executives — a total of 10 in the year 2000 class of F500 companies, followed not-so-closely by Italy (4), the UK (3), Taiwan (3), Argentina (3) and Brazil.

They also stretch across industries and sectors now. Although the common perception is they are hitting the high spot in the tech industry (with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai the most celebrated), you can see them in banking and finance, consulting, medicine and pharmaceuticals, fashion and apparel, logistics and infrastructure, and even in retail.

Albertsons, America’s second-largest grocery major with more than 2,500 outlets, is now headed by Indian-American Vivek Sankaran. Last month, in one of the biggest milestones for the community, FedEx, the global courier major that has never had a CEO beyond its founder Fred Smith in the 50 years of its existence, promoted Raj Subramaniam to the corner suite.

As in many spheres, women are hopelessly underrepresented in the corporate stratosphere, accounting for only 41 of the 500 CEOs in the Fortune 500. But even here, Indian women made a splash — going back to Indra Nooyi’s pioneering stint as CEO of PepsiCo, shattering a glass ceiling for other women to follow. In 2020, India-born Canadian Sonia Syngal was named the president and CEO of apparel brand GAP.

India has produced a number of people who hold positions of power across the world. Here is a list of Indian-origin CEOs who run a few of the most powerful companies in the world.

Hard work, thrift, and industry. Having come to the west after a bruising struggle, Indians waste no time in moving up the social and economic ladder. If they come as students, many of them, to paraphrase what one of them told this correspondent many years ago, have a life that does not extend beyond “Apartment and Department, Adviser and Budweiser”.

In other words, they never live beyond their means, wrap up their coursework quickly, spending as little as possible, and are ready to plunge into work. Of course, there are always exceptions, but one can see this even among second-generation Indians. In almost every university in the US, Indians are prized students for professors, who like them for their diligence and focus.

India and America are worlds apart, but what is common to them is part of the secret sauce that has propelled many Indian executives to heights of corporate excellence — the ability to embrace diversity and dissent.

They are both plural, secular, multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies, and, warts and imperfections notwithstanding, they strive to be equitable societies albeit with deep inequities.

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