India CEO mafia: Techies with a social heart

BENGALURU: Some are beginning to call it the ‘India Mafia’, like the PayPal Mafia. The latter was used to describe the many former PayPal employees and founders who went on to found and develop other technology companies such as Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.The India Mafia of Satya Nadella (chief of Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks), George Kurian (NetApp), and now Arvind Krishna (IBM) are all heading some of the biggest technology companies in the world. There are others too, like Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware. And of course, the latest appointment of Sandeep Mathrani at WeWork.What makes Indians so good in technology leadership? Vivek Wadhwa, distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University’s college of engineering at Silicon Valley, says the combination of formidable technical abilities with strong business acumen and management skills have enabled Nadella and Pichai to build the most valuable companies in the world. 73889834 “But what people don’t realise is that they also have something which is usually missing in the tech world — a sense of humility and understanding of human needs. Too many of Silicon Valley’s leaders have grown up in its bubble, they are cut off from the realities of the world. They get lucky and begin to believe they are Gods. This is not a problem that Indiaborn leaders have,” he said.Something similar was pointed out by The Wall Street Journal in 2015 when it quoted a then recent cross-cultural study from Southern New Hampshire University that examined managers from the US and India. The study found that more Indian managers achieved the highest ranking in terms of leadership traits. Indian managers, the study said, are future-oriented, and had a “paradoxical blend of genuine personal humility and intense professional will...These leaders achieved extraordinary results and built great organisations without much hoopla.”Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck at Dartmouth, also says that to lead in today’s world, a CEO must embody ‘Social Heart, Business Mind’. Indian-Americans have the ability to cultivate this,” he says.Indian CEOs are seen to have an uncanny ability to spot the “new” and turn disagreements and dissents within the firm into preparing it for the future. Nirmalya Kumar, Lee Kong Chian professor of marketing at Singapore Management University, calls it the “browning of the top management team”. Kumar says given the huge technology disruptions that are happening, companies are seeking CEOs who understand the evolving technological landscape and combine it with market insight.“It is easier to teach a technologist about markets and sales compared to bringing a marketing/sales person up to speed on technology. Previously, we needed CEOs with sales capability and an understanding of finance to compete in relatively undifferentiated, slow-moving markets,” he says. All of the India leaders built their careers as technologists, before getting into the sales and marketing side. Krishna, for instance, was a researcher for much of his career, and has co-authored 15 patents. Govindarajan says since every company is a digital company today, he expects more and more technologist CEOs, since domain knowledge is key for leading an enterprise.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3b3Hpgd