India-born Silicon Valley CEOs: Ruthless training behind success?
Parag Agrawal was recently appointed as Twitter's CEO, again raising the question why so many India-born techies have the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies.
Indian-origin people account for just about one percent of the US population and six percent of Silicon Valley's workforce -- and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass, reports BBC.
Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent.
"No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India does," the BBC reports quotes R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director of Tata Sons and co-author of "The Made in India Manager" as saying.
"From birth certificates to death certificates, from school admissions to getting jobs, from infrastructural inadequacies to insufficient capacities," growing up in India equips Indians to be "natural managers", he adds, quoting the famous Indian corporate strategist C K Prahalad.
The competition and chaos make them adaptable problem-solvers. They also often prioritise the professional over the personal helps in an American office culture of overwork, Gopalakrishnan adds.
"These are characteristics of top leaders anywhere in the world," he says.
India-born Silicon Valley CEOs are also part of a four million-strong minority group that is among the wealthiest and most educated in the US.
About a million of them are scientists and engineers. More than 70 percent of H-1B visas -- work permits for foreigners -- issued by the US go to Indian software engineers, and 40 percent of all foreign-born engineers in cities like Seattle are from India, states the BBC report.
"This is the result of a drastic shift in US immigration policy in the 1960s," according to the authors of "The Other One Percent: Indians in America".
In the wake of the civil rights movement, national-origin quotas were replaced by those that gave preference to skills and family unification. Soon after, highly-educated Indians -- scientists, engineers and doctors at first, and then, overwhelmingly, software programmers -- began arriving in the US, BBC explains from the book.
This cohort of Indian immigrants did not "resemble any other immigrant group from any other nation," the authors say. They were "triply selected" -- not only were they among the upper-caste privileged Indians who could afford to go to a reputed college, but they also belonged to a smaller sliver that could finance a masters in the US, which many of Silicon Valley's CEOs possess. And finally, the visa system further narrowed it down to those with specific skills -- often in science, technology, engineering and maths or STEM as the preferred category is known -- that meet the US' "high-end labour market needs".
"This is the cream of the crop and they are joining companies where the best rise to the top," reports BBC quoting technology entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa as explaining. "The networks they have built [in Silicon Valley] have also given them an advantage - the idea was that they would help each other."
Wadhwa adds that many of the India-born CEOs have also worked their way up the company ladder -- and this, he believes, gives them a sense of humility that distinguishes them from many founder-CEOs who have been accused of being arrogant and entitled in their vision and management.
Wadhwa says men like Nadella and Pichai also bring a certain amount of caution, reflection and a "gentler" culture that makes them ideal candidates for the top job -- especially at a time when big tech's reputation has plummeted amid Congressional hearings, rows with foreign governments and the widening gulf between Silicon Valley's richest and the rest of America.
There are more obvious reasons as well. The fact that so many Indians can speak English makes it easier for them to integrate into the diverse US tech industry. And Indian education's emphasis on math and science has created a thriving software industry, training graduates in the right skills, which are further buttressed in top engineering or management schools in the US, BBC reports.
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