These days, if you fling a stone into Silicon Valley, you are most likely to hit an Indian-origin CEO.
Until a decade ago, there was only a handful of them, mostly in consumer goods, tech, and finance: Pepsi Co’s Indra Nooyi, who roleplayed leaders at the dinner table with her mother and sister in Madras when she was young; Google’s Sundar Pichai, the Madurai-born techie who was a major force in pushing Google to enter the browser wars with Chrome; and branding and finance wizard Ajay Banga, who led MasterCard for a decade before moving to General Atlantic earlier this year.
Others, like Citibank’s Vikram Pandit, did not last long at the top. Yet, more and more companies have turned to Indian-origin talent for their top brass.
Besides academic pedigree—several of these high performers are alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) or other such elite institutions of the country—and robust resumes, Indian-origin managers bring to the table competitiveness, diversity and inclusion, an acute awareness of family commitments, and more.
The first two years of the 2020s alone have seen almost as many Indian-origin CEO appointments as did the entire 2010s. This even excludes second-generation immigrants like Vimeo’s Anjali Sud, Workday’s Aneel Bhushri, or the more contentious Niraj Shah of Wayfair.
Here is a non-exhaustive Indian-origin CEOs in the US.
Raj Subramaniam, FedEx
The chemical engineering graduate from the IIT Bombay hails from Thiruvananthapuram in the southern Indian state of Kerala. He has spent more than 30 years at FedEx. Subramaniam held an array of strategy and operations roles in various geographies before being made president and CEO of the logistics giant on March 29, 2022.
Leena Nair, Chanel
A native of a small town in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Nair took charge at Chanel from Alain Wertheimer on Dec. 14, 2021. She is the first woman to take that position at the French luxury fashion house.
Read More at https://qz.com/india/2148535/indian-origin-ceos-leading-american-companies/