Indian CEOs in America Are More Common Than Ever—What Sets Them Apart?
July 28, 2025 | Published InsightThe old joke was you could not become a CEO in the U.S. if you are Indian,” Eric Garcetti, then U.S. ambassador to India, remarked last year during an interview in New Delhi. “Now the joke is you cannot become a CEO in America if you are not Indian.”
The stunning global business success of the Indian diaspora is no joking matter. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft, Sundar Pichai leads google, Leena Nair heads Chanel, Raj Subramaniam pilots FedEx and, until last year, Laxman Narasimhan led Starbucks. All told, on this year’s edition of the Fortune 500, 11 companies are led by CEOs with Indian heritage who oversee enterprises with a combined market cap of more than $6.5 trillion.
The transformation behind the joke’s punchline was at first gradual, then sudden. Ramani Ayer became the first Indian-born CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took the helm of The Hartford in 1997. Indra Nooyi’s 2006 appointment at PepsiCo marked another milestone as she became the first Indian woman to lead a Fortune 100 company. By 2010, Ajay Banga’s appointment at Mastercard established what would become a recognizable pattern. Today, executives like Nooyi and Banga (who transitioned to World Bank president in 2023) are often viewed as dean figures of the Indian CEO community, mentoring subsequent generations.
Previous attempts to explain this phenomenon have relied heavily on cultural anecdotes and personal theories. During a 2022 roundtable discussion on the “Rise of Indian CEOs on the Fortune 500 List” hosted by India’s leading business channel CNBC-TV18, prominent Indian executives offered their own perspectives: Piyush Gupta of DBS Bank proposed his “H.A.T.” framework—hunger, adaptability and tenacity. Prem Watsa, chairman of Fairfax Financial Holdings, emphasized democratic values and family orientation. Shobana Kamineni, founder and chairperson of Apollo Hospitals, highlighted entrepreneurial drive emerging from health care challenges.
Newsweek decided to move beyond speculation. We investigated career trajectories to understand how historical forces have contributed to the success of Indian business leaders. To ground our analysis in data, we partnered with ghSMART, a global leadership consulting firm that has assessed 30,000 CEOs and C-suite executives across industries and geographies as part of its proprietary CEO Genome research, which is used by Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms to select and develop senior leaders. Their data on executives of Indian descent found that they are over five times more likely to take calculated risks, nearly six times more likely to embrace challenges and three times more likely to demonstrate resilience and process orientation, competencies essential for leading through complexity and change. Their scores also disproportionately spike in adapting proactively, one of their core predictors of CEO success. We also conducted extensive interviews with Indian-heritage CEOs, examining how they built careers and navigated global corporate structures.