Another Indian to head Adobe: Are they better at running Big Tech?

Anil Chakravarthy is about to become the latest Indian-origin executive to take charge of a major American technology company. Adobe has chosen Chakravarthy, a company insider who joined in 2020, to succeed Shantanu Narayen after more than 18 years under his leadership.

The succession is striking because it means one Indian-origin executive is handing the CEO job to another just as artificial intelligence is putting Adobe's business model under pressure. But Chakravarthy's appointment is also part of a much bigger phenomenon. Indian-origin executives are now deeply embedded in the leadership ranks of American technology.

The question is no longer why a few Indians have made it to the top. It is why so many of them appear particularly well suited to running some of America's largest and most complicated technology companies.

Chakravarthy fits a familiar pattern

Chakravarthy's career illustrates the type of leadership pipeline that has produced many of the industry's Indian-origin CEOs. He studied computer science and engineering at the IIT Varanasi, before earning a master's degree and PhD from MIT. He worked at McKinsey and held senior positions at VeriSign and Symantec. He then spent four years as CEO of cloud data-management company Informatica before joining Adobe in 2020.

At Adobe, he initially led the Digital Experience business before taking on broader responsibility for customer relationships, global sales and customer support. That makes his promotion particularly relevant to Adobe's current challenge. The company is not simply looking for someone who understands software. It needs a leader capable of managing a huge organisation while responding to AI-driven changes in its market.

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That is a description that fits many of the Indian-origin executives who have risen through American technology.

The leadership bench has become much deeper

For years, the Indian presence in Silicon Valley was represented by a handful of superstar CEOs such as Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Narayen at Adobe and Arvind Krishna at IBM. That is no longer an adequate description.

Vaibhav Taneja is CFO of Tesla. Sabih Khan is Apple's senior vice president of operations. Neal Mohan runs YouTube. Sachin Katti has a senior leadership role at Cisco. Indian-origin executives have also risen into important positions at companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Rubrik.

What matters is not simply the number of Indian-origin names at the top. They are spread across engineering, product, finance, operations and sales. These are precisely the functions that feed the senior-management pipeline in large technology companies.

There is therefore something more substantial happening than a series of individual success stories. A generation of technically trained Indian professionals has moved through American corporations and accumulated the experience required to run them.

The traits may matter as much as the talent

This is where the explanation goes beyond immigration, education and professional networks.

A 2025 Newsweek analysis conducted in partnership with leadership advisory firm ghSMART drew on its proprietary CEO Genome data covering roughly 30,000 CEOs and C-suite executives.

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The analysis found that executives of Indian descent were more than five times as likely to take calculated risks and nearly six times as likely to embrace challenges. They were also three times as likely to demonstrate resilience and process orientation, while scoring particularly strongly on proactive adaptation.

The findings are important because they point towards a potential leadership advantage rather than merely a selection advantage.

It would be too strong to conclude from this that Indian-origin executives are inherently better leaders. The data comes from ghSMART's proprietary assessments and the published analysis does not provide enough methodological detail to establish why these differences occur or whether they apply across every industry.

But the findings are difficult to ignore when considered alongside the actual careers of Indian-origin technology leaders.

The traits identified by ghSMART are unusually relevant to large technology companies. A CEO running a global technology company must take risks without gambling the organisation's future. They must deal with repeated technological disruption. They must absorb setbacks without losing strategic focus. And they must make a vast organisation execute consistently.

Resilience and process orientation are particularly valuable once a company has grown beyond the startup phase.

Big Tech increasingly needs operators

The nature of the technology industry has changed, and that may have increased the value of the leadership characteristics associated with Indian-origin executives.

The largest technology companies are no longer simply collections of brilliant engineers pursuing ambitious ideas. They are multinational institutions with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, enormous supply chains, complex regulatory relationships and customers spread across the world.

Running them requires patience and organisational discipline. A CEO has to reconcile competing interests among engineers, product managers, sales teams, investors, regulators and governments. The ability to align large groups can matter as much as having a compelling personal vision.

This is one reason the careers of Pichai, Nadella, Narayen and Krishna are revealing. None built their reputations primarily as charismatic founders. They spent years inside large organisations learning how products are developed, how teams function and how decisions get made.

They learned the internal mechanics of the corporation before being asked to run it.

Chakravarthy follows the same broad trajectory. His experience spans consulting, enterprise software, CEO-level management and then a senior operating role inside Adobe. That kind of background is valuable to a company that has to navigate an enormous installed customer base while transforming its products around AI.

The selection effect still matters

None of this makes the selection argument irrelevant. The Indians who reach the upper levels of American technology are a highly selected group. The journey from India to an elite engineering institution, an American graduate school or a major technology company involves intense competition.

India's huge population also creates a very large pool from which this group can emerge. The United States then attracts a substantial proportion of its most technically ambitious professionals.

Immigration reinforces the effect. Indians accounted for roughly three-quarters of approved H-1B petitions in 2023, with computer-related occupations making up the overwhelming majority of H-1B employment. Indian students have also become the largest group of international students in the United States.

That means the Indian-origin population inside American technology is not representative of India as a whole. It has been filtered by education, ambition, professional achievement and the ability to navigate an extremely competitive migration system.

Selection therefore helps explain who gets into the pipeline. It does not necessarily explain why those who get into it appear to perform so well as leaders.

Culture may reinforce the corporate advantage

The leadership characteristics identified by ghSMART could have several explanations, and culture is one possibility.

Indian professionals often grow up in environments where academic competition is intense and educational achievement is heavily emphasised. Engineering has traditionally enjoyed exceptional status in India's professional hierarchy. Many ambitious students are pushed towards technical education and competitive examinations from an early age.

That can produce habits that later translate well into corporate leadership such as persistence through difficult problems, comfort with competition and a willingness to work within demanding systems.

But there is another cultural feature that may matter. Many Indian professionals who enter American corporations have spent their careers navigating between different institutional environments. They may have studied in India, earned advanced degrees in America, worked with colleagues across several countries and managed teams with very different professional backgrounds. That experience can cultivate adaptability.

It can also make consensus-building and stakeholder management less foreign. In a multinational corporation, the ability to persuade people who do not share the same assumptions can be an important leadership asset.

The immigrant experience can produce resilience

There is also a more personal dimension. Moving from India to the United States for university or work often means entering a highly competitive environment with few guarantees. The professional journey can involve immigration uncertainty, cultural adjustment and the pressure to succeed far from home.

It would be impossible to establish from the available evidence that these experiences directly cause stronger leadership. But they could help explain why resilience and willingness to embrace challenges show up so prominently in the ghSMART analysis.

The important point is that this is not simply a story about Indians being good at technology. It may be a story about a particular combination of technical training, ambition, adaptability and organisational behaviour that happens to match what modern technology companies increasingly need.