Indian-born Satya Nadella was appointed Chairman of Microsoft this year, seven years after he became CEO
"This is the result of a drastic shift in US immigration policy in the 1960s," write the authors of The Other One Percent: Indians in America.
Watch silicon valley season 3 online software#
More than 70% of H-1B visas - work permits for foreigners - issued by the US go to Indian software engineers, and 40% of all foreign-born engineers in cities like Seattle are from India. Indian-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.Ībout a million of them are scientists and engineers. "These are characteristics of top leaders anywhere in the world," Mr Gopalakrishnan says. Who is Sundar Pichai and what does Alphabet do? Indians celebrate new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal The competition and chaos, in other words, makes them adaptable problem-solvers - and, he adds, the fact that they often prioritise the professional over the personal helps in an American office culture of overwork. "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. "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India does," says R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director of Tata Sons and co-author of The Made in India Manager.