What makes Indian Middle Class Ex Parte Top Notches of Fortune 500 Companies

Satya Nadella who took over as CEO Microsoft 

Sorry to be little late to react on elevation of Satya Nadella for the top notch job of CEO at Microsoft but the matter of fact is that three of my family members have been with us for their vacation all of them are holding their Post Graduate Degrees from USA and UK and two are under graduate from IITs. It was a great honor for an Indian to be CEO of one of the top global IT company, more important  fact is Nadella’s humble middle class upbringing. In fact Nadella is not a isolated case, Indian Ex Parte are managing very senior/ top jobs at companies like CISCO, Google, PepsiCo, Deutsche Bank.

Anshu Jain, Deutsche Bank 

We shall try to find out what make boys and girls from India loaded with degrees from IITs or other engineering colleges with middle class upbringing climbing ladders of Corporate World in US and other developed countries.   While there are Indians from wealthy segments in important positions as well, you will find a huge number of individuals from the middle-class in leading positions in different companies or running their own companies.

Just before liberalization in India, private jobs were few and due to high reservation in government jobs options were very limited so entire emphasis on education and the pressure to prove themselves because you simply could not afford to fail. Nikesh Arora, who is the most important executive in Google after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, had made similar point in an address at Northeastern University. Said he, "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 around Rs 1.5 lac, his life-savings. Failure was not an option in most of the techno warriors who come from middle class family background.

IIT Kharagpur First among the equals

It was vision of Pt Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime minister of India to bring India on technology map of the world that culminated into the First Indian Institute of Technology or IIT in short  at Kharagpur, a sleepy town of West Bengal in the barracks of Cellular Jail or Kala-Pani in 1950. It was followed by IITs at Kanpur, Madras, Delhi and Mumbai where logistics, syllabus, part of infrastructure came from USA, Germany and France and Russia. The IITs soon earned the reputation of churning out world-class engineers; much of that was contributed by the rigorous and most fair criteria for entry. Despite the mushrooming of Technological Institutes after liberalization, a seat in an IIT continues to be highly prized. In the year 2012, nearly 500,000 wrote the entrance exam for the 9,000 undergraduate seats across 17 IITs in which admissions depended solely on the exam.

The pre-liberalization brain drain transported the reputation to the US.  The best and brainiest among Indians in the US seem to share a common credential: they're graduates of the IITs. Though Nadella has been 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 Vicy 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.

Former IITians also give credit to the ecosystem on campus. While the curriculum is rigorous and challenging, my son who is from IIT Kgp says that he benefitted most from being challenged by a lot of smart people around him. So, when he came to LSE to do his M.Sc Finance , it wasn't as difficult a transition as it might otherwise have been. 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 North Virginia, Bay area in San Francisco individual IITs have active chapters. That's also a factor in the continuance of the success of IITians in the US.

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. 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. It is dangerous to confuse causality and correlation.

But irrespective of whether one studied at IIT or a regional college, an Indian undergraduate is usually held to possess certain qualities such as superb written and spoken English, familiarity with textbooks, technical papers and online courses, and experience with modern software technologies. There are attributes among Indian students that sets them apart from other foreign students. The hunger to succeed among first-generation immigrants holds also  true for Indians. Extending this to the analysis about why Indians are occupying senior positions in more and more Fortune 500 technology companies. 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. and the discipline it inculcated his "secret weapon. You can have a debate about which education system is better. For a majority of Ex Parte Indians, what worked in the Indian education system was the rigorous.

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. He observed that  playing cricket taught him more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout his career.

Equally important was their experience in US universities and, later, in corporate America, 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. Despite the occasional talk of racism and glass ceilings, the culture of meritocracy in the US is crucial. 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 color. The US, of course, has its own deeply troubled history with regard to race, but its path has tended toward more equality. 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. If we are able to create such a free and fair working environment in India probably our productivity and innovative skill will be improved.