Nadella, the Hyderabad-born cricket loving, engineering executive, who has been with Microsoft for over 20 years, has joined the league of Indra Nooyi, Lakshmi Mittal, Anshu Jain and Ivan Menzes, among many other Indian-origin persons at the helm at large conglomerates headquartered abroad.
There are many other Indians heading the businesses at relatively smaller companies abroad, specially in the IT sector, but at least 12 large companies have got India-born chief executives.
International magazine Time once termed CEOs as India's leading "export" and said that the subcontinent could be "the ideal training ground for global bosses".
The big conglomerations include Microsoft, PepsiCo, ArcelorMittal, Deutsche Bank, Diageo, Reckitt Benckiser (Rakesh Kapoor), MasterCard (Ajay Banga), DBS Group Holdings (Piyush Gupta), SanDisk (Sanjay Mehrotra), Global Foudries (Sanjay Jha) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen).
Anshu Jain serves as co-CEO of Germany's Deutsche Bank, while Menezes last year took over as chief of UK-based liquor giant Diageo.
Among non-promoter CEOs, Nadella now runs the largest company among those run by Indian origin persons.
In the past, giants like Citigroup, Vodafone and Motorola have also had Indian-origin CEOs.
According to human resource experts, professionals in India have become global professionals. The technical skills and the behavioural patterns of Indians executives make them very much adaptable to any kind of situation they come across.
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