 "Nikesh Arora, Satya Nadella, Padmasree Warrior & Sridhar Ramaswamy")
"I was reminded from childhood that education was the only salvation, the only security you had, the one thing nobody could take away from you," recalls Anil Menon, president of smart + connected communities at Cisco. His father worked in a telecom company, his mother was a homemaker and his life in Bombay those days was "typically middle-class", says Menon, one of the senior-most executives in Cisco.
The milieu Menon talks about would be familiar to many Indians who have risen through the ranks of Fortune 500 technology giants, newly-appointed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella being the latest to join the tribe. While there can be no "formula" for success and without getting into stereotypes, a look at other Indians at the forefront of top US tech companies does reveal similarities.
The kind of background Menon describes is one. "While there are Indians from wealthy segments in important positions as well, you will see a huge number of individuals from the middle-class in leading positions in different companies or running their own companies," affirms Deepak Visweswaraiah, India MD of NetApp. His firm's executive vice-president and one of those next in line for the top job is also an Indian from a similar background: George Kurian's father worked with Graphite India in Bangalore and he and his twin, Thomas, migrated to the US when they were 17. Thomas is now executive vice-president at Oracle, reporting directly to Larry Ellison and, like his brother, talked about as a CEO candidate. Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior's father was a professor, Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora's an Indian Air Force officer and Nadella's, an IAS officer.
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Being a member of this great Indian middle class before liberalisation (an age marked by high reservations in government jobs and few opportunities in the private sector) had several implications, principal among them being the emphasis on education and the pressure to prove themselves because you simply could not afford to fail. Arora, the most important executive in Google after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, made a similar point in an address at Northeastern University. "My goals were simple when I came here: I had to get through two years, I had to make sure I didn't run out of money, I had to make sure I did well, and I had to make sure I was able to return his money (Arora's father loaned him $3,000, his life-savings). Failure was not an option."
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The foolproof route to success in the pre-'90s India, where these executives grew up, was a seat in one of the five Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs. Established in 1950 with the first campus in Kharagpur in West Bengal, the IITs soon earned the reputation of churning out world-class engineers; much of that was contributed by the rigorous criteria for entry. Despite the mushrooming of options after liberalisation, a seat in an IIT continues to be highly prized: nearly 500,000 wrote the entrance exam for the 9,647 undergraduate seats across 17 IITs in 2012, the last year in which admissions depended solely on the exam.
The pre-liberalisation brain drain transported the reputation to the US. As a CBS feature titled Imported from India notes, "The best and brainiest among them (Indians in the US) seem to share a common credential: they're graduates of the IITs." Though Nadella, a graduate of Manipal Institute of Technology, proved that not all Indian success stories are from IITs, its alumni continue to hold key positions: Cisco's Warrior as well as Google's senior vice-presidents, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Sundar Pichai and Vic Gundotra, to name just a few. Oracle Senior Vice-president Sonny Singh, a Stanford graduate who completed his engineering from Punjab Engineering College, says while Indian engineering colleges in general enjoy a good reputation in the US, the IIT brand continues to remain above the rest. "The quality of education at IIT is extremely high, but more important is the selectivity. When you take the best and brightest of a country the size of India, you're already getting the cream of the crop. And you end up seeing a lot of them come to the US to topnotch universities," says Singh.
Former IITians also give credit to the ecosystem on campus. "While the curriculum is rigorous and challenging, I think I benefitted most from being challenged by a lot of smart people around me. So, when I came to Berkeley to do my PhD, it wasn't as difficult a transition as it might otherwise have been," says Ramesh Govindan, professor of computer science at University of Southern California and an IIT-Madras alumnus. The highly competitive atmosphere in class is considered to serve as a useful training ground for the cut-throat corporate world.
Such has been the export of IITians to the US that the moment you get out of grad school, you become a part of an enviable network. "Many American cities have pan-IIT alumni chapters, while in places like the Bay area in San Francisco individual IITs have active chapters. For example, at an IIT-Madras alumni meeting there, at least 100 people turn up. That's also a factor in the continuance of the success of IITians in the US," says R Nagarajan, dean (international and alumni relations), IIT-Madras.
It is tempting to buy into the theory that "Indians are good at technology", and that technical careers in the US are the fiefdom of Indians especially with Microsoft founder Bill Gates famously remarking that South Indians are the "second smartest people in the world, after the Chinese." But this notion is more the result of the numbers than just a stereotype, argues Singh, currently based in California. "If you take all the people of Indian origin in the US workforce and which part of a company they work in, you will see a lot of people in finance, human resources and at various levels of management but the concentration of people, just by the virtue of how they've come here, happens many a time to originate in the technology side - it's less of a stereotype than the reality." But that doesn't mean that they are not good at other things, he cautions, with a chuckle. "It's dangerous to confuse causality and correlation."
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But irrespective of whether you studied at IIT or a regional college, an Indian undergraduate is usually held to possess certain qualities. Mani Chandy, professor emeritus of computer science at California Institute of Technology, says there are attributes he has noticed among Indian students that sets them apart from other foreign students. These include "superb written and spoken English, familiarity with textbooks, technical papers and online courses, and experience with modern software technologies." The hunger to succeed among first-generation immigrants holds as true for Indians. Extending this to the analysis about why Indians are occupying senior positions in more and more Fortune 500 technology companies, Chandy says: "Many learn disciplines in addition to their undergraduate majors - some computer science graduates also learn, informally or formally, about business, law or even medicine."
The Indian system develops the ability to work long hours and to be focused, adds Menon, who considers his formative years at a Mumbai Jesuit school and the discipline it inculcated his "secret weapon." Arora, in an interview to The Indian Express, had expressed similar sentiments: "You can have a debate about which education system is better, and I think for a majority of us, at least for me, what worked in the Indian education system was the rigour."
Many life-skills are also picked up outside the classroom, growing up in India. For Nadella, it was playing cricket when he was in the Hyderabad Public School team that helped him learn some valuable lessons. "I think playing cricket taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career," he had said after he was named CEO. Google's Arora, in a 2012 interview with Business Standard, credited his ability to adapt to any situation to the peregrinations that came with being the son of an Air Force officer: a quality he had been told at his Google interview would be essential
Equally important was their experience in US universities and, later, in corporate America. "In my experience, the key to the success of Indians is that deep down they have developed a confidence, not just in their abilities, but in the fact that if you put in the hours, the system will reward you," says Menon. Despite the occasional talk of racism and glass ceilings, the culture of meritocracy in the US is crucial. Author Suketu Mehta, currently working on a book on migration, wrote in TIME recently, "When my family went to America, we left behind a system in which people are often denigrated because of their caste, religion, language or skin colour. The US, of course, has its own deeply troubled history with regard to race, but its path has tended toward more equality." Govindan agrees. "The US system comes close to a meritocracy: at least in the tech industry, it matters less who you know, and what your history is, and more what you're capable of technically and whether you have the emotional maturity to lead and to be effective in teams."
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The other claim that Nadella's elevation has provoked is that Indians are finally increasing their representation in the top management of Fortune 500 companies. Success stories like PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga would lend credence to this. Oracle's Singh, while agreeing that there are definitely more Indians in managerial roles now than a couple of decades ago, sees it as a natural result of more Indians joining the workforce. "It's a natural expansion of opportunity that takes place as the numbers go up. As the size of the Indian diaspora and population in the US increases, you will find more people of Indian origin in the workforce and simultaneously, more people in different parts of the organisation and hierarchy."
But when an Indian makes it to the top of a Fortune 500 company, is the ecstatic reaction "back home" justified, given that their success had been achieved outside India? (Some even suggest that India, with its excessive emphasis on frugal engineering and environment management, may not be the best place to nurture global CEOs - which calls for highly evolved skills in innovation, finance and human resources.) Cisco's Menon says we need to differentiate between taking pride, which is acceptable, even natural, and taking credit. Nadella, he says, could be a role model for many students growing up in India. The jubilation in India is not really about chest-thumping, MindTree Chairman Subroto Bagchi says. "We only take pride in the 'certificate of origin'; we have the humility to accept that way too many factors contribute to an individual's success in life," he adds. "We feel happy that one among us has made it. It is an illustration of what we can achieve both individually and collectively, despite the state of the environment in the country."
Oracle's Singh says even taking credit would not be entirely amiss. "We should not take away from the fact that people like Nadella or Nooyi or Anshu Jain (Deutsche Bank co-CEO) have achieved pretty significant positions in their respective companies - that in itself is cause for celebration. That they are Indian is a great source of pride - we should enjoy and celebrate that. And if there's a bit of media frenzy, so be it."
