New York: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has named IIT Mumbai, central school alumnus, Parag Agrawal, as his successor. IANS refreshes a list of prominent CEOs of US Inc. and the schools in India (and the US) that shaped their lives.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, attended Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, and did electrical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka. Nadella then shifted to the US for an M.S. degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Sundar Pichai, helming Alphabet, earned a degree in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kharagpur and. an M.S. degree in material science and engineering from Stanford. He followed this with an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Indra Nooyi, Chairperson of Pepsico until 2019, has a Bachelor’s degree in physics, chemistry and maths from Madras Christian College and a post graduate diploma in management (PGDBM) from IIM Calcutta. In 1978, Nooyi attended Yale where she earned a Master’s degree in public and private management.
Like Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Inc. CEO since 2018, attended Hyderabad Public School. His electronics and communication engineering degree was at the University College of Engineering, Osmania. He moved for a Master’s degree in computer science from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. An MBA came next from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sanjay Mehrotra, boss of Micron and co-founder of SanDisk, started with Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in New Delhi. He then transferred mid- way from BITS Pilani to attend Berkley for a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science at the age of just 21 years. In 2009, Mehrotra attended a Stanford Graduate School of Business executive education programme.
Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup until October 2012, started from Bishop Cotton School in Nagpur but completed his schooling at the Dadar Parsee Youths Assembly High School in Mumbai. He moved to the US at the age of 16 years and attended Columbia for the entire academic track thereafter. This included an undergraduate programme, a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering, and a turn to economics and finance for an MBA and PhD in finance.
Nikesh Arora, Chairman of Palo Alto Networks Inc, attended Airforce School in New Delhi and then IIT Benaras for his electrical engineering. He then did an MBA from Northeastern University.
Ajay Banga, Executive Chairman of Mastercard, is part of the Hyderabad Public School club followed by economics at St Stephen’s College in Delhi. He then went to IIM Ahmedabad for a PGDBM.
Ashok Vemuri, former CEO of Conduent Inc and IGATE, received a Bachelor’s degree in physics from St Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and then did his PGDBM from IIM Ahmedabad.
Victor Menezes, helmed Citibank, and has an electrical engineering degree from IIT Mumbai followed by an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. His younger brother, Ivan, though not part of a US Inc.list, headed Diageo in the UK and did hois schooling at St Columba’s in New Delhi followed by Baschelor’s degree in economics at St Stephen’s and MBA at Kelloggs.
IBM Group CEO, Arvind Krishna split his schooling at Stones Anglo Indian School, Coonoor, and St Joseph’s Academy, Dehradun. A BTech in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur came next, followed by a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
This list of US XI is only indicative. The bench strength of Indian-origin CEOs could go one to another eleven. Illustratively, Dinesh Paliwal, CEO; Reckitt Benckiser’s CEO Laxman Narasimhan; Arista Networks’ Jayshree V. Ullal; Vivek Sankaran of Albertsons Companies; Punit Renjen, Deloitte; Vasant “Vas” Narasimhan, Novartis; Niraj S. Shah, Wayfair; and Rakesh Gangwal former boss at US Air, Srikant Datar, Harvard Business School (HBS) and a constellation of academic leaders, including Nitin Nohria, HBS, and Deepak Jain, Kellogg.
As for Parag Agrawal, our trending CEO of the day, the academic voyage began at a central school under The Atomic Energy Education Society and then to computer sciences in IIT Mumbai and a PhD at Stanford.