Poke Me: Can Indians capable of leading global companies strut their stuff in India?

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At Home with Mr Pichai?

By Vasant V Bang

Sunder Pichai’s elevation as CEO of Google earlier this month has given us Indians yet another opportunity to feel proud. One can make a list of at least 20 people of Indian origin who have made it to the top of global companies in the recent past. Add to these names at least eight more who have reached the top echelons in academia, and the Indian chest swells an inch or two farther. And this, besides several highly respected management gurus like CK Prahlad, Jagdish Sheth and Ram Charan.

But while we bask in this reflected glory of achievements of Indians abroad, the question that lingers like a sore tooth at the back of the mouth is: Do people like Sundar Pichai need to leave India to reach their mark they do? Indian industry and educational institutions could certainly do well to ask themselves that question.

World class organisations and educational institutions are not created by narrow parochial considerations or false pride in one’s ethnicity, culture or community. Google, a company founded by Larry Page, an American, and Sergey Brin, a Soviet Union-born Russian-American, did not bat an eyelid while appointing an Indian as the company’s CEO. Neither did Reckitt Benckiser (CEO Rakesh Kapoor), DBS Group (CEO Piyush Gupta), Deutsche Bank (where till recently Anshu Jain was co-CEO), and Softbank (COO Nikesh Arora) where Indians reached the top in British, Singaporean, German and Japanese companies respectively.

On the other hand in India, ‘surnames’ still matter when it comes to appointments and promotions. And it's not just individuals, but even our companies are viewed as 'Marwari', 'Gujrati', 'Punjabi', 'Tamil', 'Jain' or 'Parsi'.

World class institutions thrive on diversity. Among many of the factors that make American universities what they are, welcoming diversity with open arms is one of them. A diverse class of students and members of faculty, in terms of nationalities and ethnicities, facilitates truly world-class thinking. India’s great diversity needs, for starters, to be leveraged by actively promoting the intermixing of students and teachers from all over India in its universities and colleges. Unfortunately, in the name of protecting local interests, most of them still have regional quotas for admissions and teaching jobs.

We also need to understand the limitations of ‘practical wisdom’. Proponents of practical wisdom often cite the examples of JRD Tata, GD Birla and Dhirubhai Ambani, none of whom went to a university to earn a degree. They tend to forget that the generation(s) that followed went to the best educational institutions in the world.

Bill Gates, whose example is often cited as a case study of a college dropout-made-good, recently warned students to not to emulate him. According to him, the chances of becoming successful through good education far outweigh those of opting for the alternative. The amount of disdain that we exhibit about ‘theoretical learning’ in India reflects not only in our poor academic research output, but also in our unimpressive record for innovations.

We need truly world-class universities. While we take pride in the achievements of Indians, we need to candidly ask: how 'Indian' are these Indian CEOs?

Ajay Banga (CEO MasterCard) and Piyush Gupta are both alumni of St Stephens College, Delhi University and IIM Ahmedabad. While Rakesh Kapoor is a BITS Pilani and XLRI product, Rajeev Suri (CEO Nokia) is an alumnus of Manipal Institute of Technology. Ivan Menezes (CEO Diageo) and Indra Nooyi (CEO PepsiCo), after obtaining their post graduate diploma in management (PGDM) from IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Kolkata respectively, went for further management education at Kellogs and Yale. Indian management gurus and academics who became deans at institutions like Harvard, Chicago, Kellogs, INSEAD, Cornell, University of California, and Carnegie Mellon Engineering College, have all obtained their terminal degrees from institutions abroad.

I don't mean to undermine the academic standards of our institutions in India. It can be said that institutions here in India enabled these successful Indians to pursue further education in the world’s top universities. But the question lingers: Why couldn't our institutions not hold them back? Why can't conditions in India be conducive -- seductive -- enough to make them do whatever they do best here?

World class universities need to be headed by people whom others can look up to. That is why we need to be worried if the likes of Amartya Sen and Anil Kakodkar opt out of the system.

David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, used to gift a collection of Russian nesting dolls -- one hollow doll inside the next -- to his managers. Written around the smallest doll the would be the message: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” It's time we break free from all our reflected glory and create one of our own.

The writer is a Pune-based management research guide