What it takes to become India's most powerful CEOs

In Martin Scorsese’s academy award winning film, The Aviator, there’s a memorable scene where an angry Howard Hughes tells Katherine Hepburn, “Who do you think you are? You’re just a movie star.” Leonardo diCaprio, who plays the role of the eccentric industrialist and film mogul, invests the line with such genuine contempt that you pause and wonder: is he on to something here?

Are these celebrities who grab so much attention, command such high fees and live such glamorous lives just movie stars? It’s a powerful example of how nebulous fame and stature are; how easily they can be diminished and brought down to size.

How do successful people in any field get rid of that ‘just’ adjective and show themselves to be men or women of substance? Only once in a while do we have an icon like Amitabh Bachchan for instance, who is capable of transcending his primary identity as a movie star to stand for something more. It’s the reason why the 70-something star is still a regular fixture in advertisements for everything from cement to states, while his contemporaries languish in obscurity. The Big B, in short, is more than ‘just’ a movie star.

Power is defined in many ways, but my favourite is a simple one from an organisational behaviour text that I used at the IIMA. “A has power over B,” it says, “if A makes B do something he would otherwise not do.” This ties in neatly with the current thinking about leadership. While management is about promoting order and efficiency, leadership is about bringing positive change. And people don’t change easily — it takes a powerful leader to persuade them; one who transcends his role and is not ‘just a CEO’.

There are many CEOs who are passionate about their business, have a deep understanding of their markets and lead very efficient organisations, but not all of them manage to capture the public imagination. For the past six years, The Economic Times Corporate Dossier magazine has commissioned IMRB to conduct a pan-India survey to determine India Inc’s most powerful CEOs and the results have confirmed what we’ve suspected all along. Power comes not from the size of the organisation a CEO controls, but from the idea he embodies.

This year, a new CEO has made a breakthrough into the top ten rankings of Most Powerful CEOs. And an old stalwart, who has been among the top ten ever since the survey was started, has finally bowed out. We have launched two new listings this year: India’s most powerful women and India’s most powerful MNC CEOs.

This week’s eight-page special issue of Corporate Dossier also features an article by ET’s London-based editor, Sudeshna Sen, listing the do’s and don’ts for CEOs who want to make it to the list in future. And in an inspired section called CD Kitsch, we draw our ten most powerful CEOs as memorable characters from Bollywood films. They are, to paraphrase Howard Hughes in The Aviator, ‘just like movie stars.’