Analytic mindset and soft skills
A third characteristic is an analytical mindset combined with soft people skills.
It is typical for the global Desi CEOs to have their thinking shaped by an undergraduate degree in engineering or another quantitative field such as economics. “It is a very analytical way of approaching things,” Kataria observed. “If you lay out the facts and the processes, you will be able to reach the right answer. You were able to approach almost everything by saying, “OK, let’s just get to the real brass tacks and we will find a way out. There is a solution.” It’s very scientific and you will be able to get there.
“The other thing that it did teach you was that even though you managed to get admitted to a great engineering school, there were really smart people around you. You were never allowed to have a chip on your shoulder. So it kept you humble and always open to learning.”
Kataria acknowledged picking up interpersonal skills at business school. “You realize that it was not the smartest kid in class who was doing the best, but the person who could work with other people,” he said.
Gupta believes that Indian culture’s roots in family and community tend to instill the value of working together. “Even though I learned Western human resource practices, having formal KPI systems, goal setting, and coaching and so forth, my instinct is to put my arm around somebody and to manage through personal connection and community,” Gupta said of his style of leadership. “I think it creates a gentler kind of leadership.”
It’s not surprising therefore to see “alpha male” corporate leaders being replaced by the gentler presence of Desi CEOs such as Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai.
Managing complexity
The fourth characteristic is what Gupta calls “learning to make the elephant dance”: how an Indian background helps when it comes to dealing with business complexity.
Kataria credits Hindustan Unilever for pushing its graduate management trainees to take responsibility for managing complex businesses very early in their careers: “If you were an area sales manager, you were expected to be the person who knew that area the best in the company. And early on take big decisions which impacted the revenue significantly. But also, very large teams in the field. I counted once – there were 1,800 people whose livelihoods depended on the decisions I made.”
“Most emerging markets – and India is a good example – are very complex,” said Gupta. “The system doesn’t work as smoothly. And so you’re trained in India from a very early age to try and make the system work for you. You’ve got to learn how to make an elephant dance, and that ability to do so is actually very useful in any situation.
“So, from a personal development standpoint, having an Indian background actually teaches you how to make these cumbersome systems work.”
A changing corporate environment
While these characteristics of Desi CEOs help to explain their rise, it’s also important to understand the environment into which such leaders are being propelled: the pull factor, if you will.
Gupta’s take on this was that, as late as the 1980s, there were only two or three global organizations where you would expect to see Indians break the “glass ceiling”, as he called it, citing Unilever and Citibank as among the first companies to start hiring Indians from Indian business schools as future corporate leaders.
Then India started liberalizing and, in the 1990s, investment banks and consulting firms as well as multinationals started sourcing talent out of India.
Finally, as Gupta pointed out, the world’s big banks have been shifting their approach. Citibank named Vikram Pandit CEO in 2007 and Deutsche Bank appointed Anshu Jain in 2012, signposting the elevation of Desi CEOs on the global financial stage.
“Until relatively recently, it would have been unimaginable to think of [a Desi CEO] in the [banking] industry,” Gupta said, citing the influence of diversity, equality, and inclusion policies and thinking as playing a key role. “So, I think it was a conscious shift in global companies to really focus and not make this [DE&I] a ‘check-the-box’ exercise. I think people started to get a lot more open to looking for diverse ethnicities in their management ranks.”
Pipelines to the future
So, what does the future hold for the Desi CEO? I believe the number of tech-focused CEOs in what we are calling the “Desi Tech CEO pipeline” will continue to climb at a steady rate due to sheer momentum. There is an installed base of talented Indian-origin professionals working in tech companies in the US who will continue to find their way to the top.
As India’s startup ecosystem becomes more sophisticated, the tech talent that would have migrated to the US will stay put. Over the next decade, a handful of unicorns with a homegrown startup CEO will break out to create a world-dominating business model relying on an international workforce. This breed of Indian leaders will join the bracket of Desi CEOs atop India’s largest tech companies: Rajesh Gopinathan (Tata Consultancy Services), Salil Parekh (Infosys), C Vijayakumar (HCL Tech), Ravi Kumar S (Cognizant), and CP Gurnani (Tech Mahindra).
There is even more potential in the pipeline of “Desi Business CEOs”, which could explode. For many multinationals, India is quite simply their biggest market by value and volume in Asia. Regional heads, such as Deepak Iyer at confectionary company Mondelēz and Vismay Sharma at L’Oréal, already handle businesses bigger in revenue terms than some of the businesses run by Desi CEOs on the list. It’s worth noting that the market capitalization of Hindustan Unilever amounts to at least two-thirds that of Unilever worldwide on any given day.
Finally, let us return to elephants, and especially to an elephant in the room: the numerical dominance of Desi male CEOs. Will we see a third Desi CEO pipeline, that of female Indian origin CEOs, following in the wake of Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), Leena Nair (Chanel), Yamini Rangan (HubSpot), and Revathy Advaithi (Flex)? Only then can we truly talk about the importance of diversity in the story of the Desi CEO.
India’s two distinct pipelines to the top
I by IMD has identified 26 CEOs of Indian origin that we are calling “Desi CEOs” – the Hindi word “desi” refers to all things Indian. They are divided into two lists, or pipelines: Desi Tech and Desi Business.
To qualify, an India-born CEO must have completed their undergraduate degree at an Indian institution. The bachelor’s degree is a pivotal rite of passage – there’s the anxiety of leaving home and the exhilaration of being free of parental shackles. As Piyush Gupta and Sandeep Kataria have noted, students who gain admittance to an elite program feel the pride of making it against the odds – and face the realization that there are people smarter than them in the room.
Of the 26, 22 Desi CEOs have an undergraduate engineering degree, while 19 of them followed up with a post-graduate business degree – 16 from the US or UK, and five from an Indian institution.