The freshly painted domes of the Hyderabad Public School rise up amid ornamental trees in southern India. In its imposing halls surrounded by carefully mown lawns, India’s aristocracy was once educated. After them came boys who grew up to be heads of the country’s largest companies. And the world’s. Both Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Shantanu Narayen, CEO of US software company Adobe, went to boarding school here.
They are not the only Indian citizens to have risen to pre-eminent positions in western companies. “India has an incredible amount of management talent,” in the view of Manjeet Kripalani, former Indian head of Business Week, the New York-based magazine. Kripalani, who is co-founder of the Indian think-tank Gateway House, lists Anshu Jain, co-CEO of Deutsche Bank; Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo; and Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard, as examples. Ajit Jain is being touted as a possible successor to star investor Warren Buffett, CEO of the Berkshire Hathaway investment conglomerate.
All of them are united by the fact that they went to elite schools in India. “Our students are eagles, just like our school emblems,” says Hyderabad Public School’s G Jayanand, who taught Nadella. “They fly high and don’t need to worry. They can cross every river.”
School board member Faiz Khan notes that the language of instruction is English. “That means we have a huge advantage in the globalised world over competitors from other countries,” Khan says.
Kripalani sees other advantages in being an Indian. “We are an extremely competitive country, merely because there are so many of us,” she says in reference to India’s population of 1.25 billion people. “Anyone who makes it here in India can make it anywhere,” Kripalani says. “At the same time India is a country of differing cultures, languages, castes and religions, implying that children learn to get along with different people. “We can fit ourselves into all surroundings.”
Herman Vantrappen of the Akordeon business consultancy dismisses this kind of theory, saying that his research shows that there is little diversity at the top of western business. Of the 500 global firms with the highest turnover in 2013, just 16 were led by chief executives from developing countries, three of them Indians and none Chinese.
But Pankaj Ghemawat, director of the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management at New York University, notes that strong economic growth over recent decades has meant that developing world managers have had greater opportunities in their own countries. He adds that India’s education system, with its roots in the era of British control, transmits the skills that are valued by western companies.
Emigration by talented Indians to the United States is by no means a new phenomenon. “So they have had plenty of time to make their way up through the hierarchies of the large multinational companies,” Ghemawat says. Indians are also strongly represented in organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde said during a recent visit to India that Indians formed the largest national group in her team of economists.
Silicon Valley also has a large Indian cohort. A study conducted by researchers at the universities of Stanford, Berkeley and the Stanford Law School found that between 2006 and 2012, Indians had founded 8 per cent of all tech start-ups, even though Indians make up less than 1 per cent of the US population.
Jitendra V Singh, who was born in India, studied at Stanford and is today dean of the HKUST Business School in Hong Kong. He says he is not at all surprised.
“Indians flourish primarily in brutal, performance-oriented industries,” he says, pointing to their ability to show their skills despite a lack of capital. Kripalani adds: “There is sometimes a glass ceiling for migrants in companies. But that does not apply to entrepreneurs.”
A study has revealed that between 2006 and 2012, Indians had founded 8 per cent of all tech startups in the US, even though they make up less that 1 per cent of the total American population.