Why are Indian and Brazilian CEOs so globally good?

We usually read globalisation through trade balances, investment flows, patents and military budgets. There is another map, less discussed and in my view more revealing over the long run: the map of who actually sits in the corner office of the world's largest companies. Look at it carefully and two emerging economies stand out, for very different reasons. India and Brazil.

The Indian case hardly needs an introduction. Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Arvind Krishna at IBM, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Raj Subramaniam at FedEx, Nikesh Arora at Palo Alto Networks, Leena Nair at Chanel. The list keeps lengthening. This year alone, Shailesh Jejurikar stepped into the top job at Procter & Gamble, while Gunjan Kedia, who grew up in India and studied engineering there, became the first woman to lead US Bancorp and in her first full year delivered record net revenue of 28.7 billion US dollars. Forbes' 2026 ranking of the 250 most successful living immigrants in the United States includes 26 people of Indian origin.

Brazil's story is smaller in number and different in kind, but no less instructive. Cristiano Amon, born in Campinas, runs Qualcomm, one of the load-bearing companies of the semiconductor age. Carlos Ghosn, born in Brazil, built the Renault-Nissan alliance before his dramatic fall. And the Garantia and 3G Capital ecosystem built by Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira turned a Brazilian brewer into the command centre of the world's beer industry. Michel Doukeris, born in Lages, took over AB InBev in July 2021 from Carlos Brito, who had run the company for 15 years. The succession itself tells a story: one Brazilian handing the world's largest brewer to another.

So the more interesting question is not how many, but why. What makes some executives from emerging economies so exportable? And, for those of us in Central and Eastern Europe, can a country deliberately build the conditions that produce leaders trusted to run global companies?

First, a methodological warning

Visibility is not performance. A long list of famous names proves that a talent pipeline exists, not that the people in it outperform their peers. We need to separate three things that are often blended in celebratory coverage: selection (who gets chosen), visibility (who gets written about) and results (what they actually delivered).

Harvard Business Review's long-running ranking of best-performing CEOs was useful precisely because it refused the tyranny of the quarter. It judged leaders over their whole tenure, adjusting shareholder returns for country and industry and tracking changes in market value, later adding ESG criteria. A CEO who inherits a strong company in a boom year and one who spends five years rebuilding a declining business cannot be compared on annual share price alone.

The best executive search firms add a qualitative layer. Spencer Stuart's assessment work looks less at what executives know and more at how they cope with situations they have never seen before: conceptual thinking, social awareness, the ability to absorb new information and change behaviour. That is where the real test lies. The global CEO of this decade needs performance, adaptability and portability at the same time. India and Brazil are worth studying because they have produced leaders who combine all three, and because they did so through two very different schools.

India: complexity as a management school

The easy explanation is education. The IITs and IIMs matter, and so does the familiar path of an Indian engineering degree followed by an American graduate school. Arvind Krishna went from IIT Kanpur to a doctorate at Illinois and three decades at IBM. But education alone does not explain the phenomenon. Plenty of countries have excellent engineering schools and no comparable presence in global boardrooms.

The deeper explanation, I believe, is complexity. India is one of the most demanding management environments on earth: 22 officially recognised languages, several major religions, income levels ranging from subsistence to global affluence, infrastructure that is world-class in one city and improvised in the next. A manager who has served radically different customer segments inside a single national market arrives in a multinational already trained for heterogeneity. India works as a flight simulator for the global economy.

Add English as a working language, a knowledge-economy pipeline built on engineering and software, and a second layer of socialisation inside American universities and corporations, and you get a powerful hybrid: executives who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, fluent in emerging-market reality and in the institutional grammar of Western capitalism.

There is an irony here worth noting. The world did not simply discover Indian managers. The world economy itself became more Indian in its problems: enormous scale, technological disruption, fragmented customers, regulatory density, many stakeholders pulling in different directions. Many Indian executives had been training for that world long before it arrived.

The integrator, not the celebrity

A second feature is easy to miss. Most of India's best-known global CEOs are not founders parachuted in from outside. They are institutional climbers. Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and became CEO in 2014. Pichai joined Google in 2004 and took over in 2015. Narayen has led Adobe since 2007, one of the longest tenures in the group. Krishna spent decades inside IBM before reaching the top.

This matters because a modern multinational is not a machine waiting for a visionary to pull a lever. It is a political system with its own tribes, baronies and veto players. Transforming it requires coalition-building as much as command. Nadella's Microsoft, which moved from a defensive Windows culture to a cloud and AI powerhouse, is the textbook case of change led from within. The Indian archetype is rarely the loudest voice in the room. It is the integrator.

Brazil: management as competitive combat

If India trains leaders through complexity, Brazil trains them through volatility. A Brazilian executive who began a career in the late 1980s lived through hyperinflation running in the thousands of percent per year, a sequence of currency changes before the Real Plan of 1994, repeated devaluations, commodity cycles and political shocks. In that environment, a budget written in January could be fiction by March. The capability it produces is resilience, and a particular kind of operational nerve.

On top of that volatility, Brazil produced one of the most influential management experiments of the past half-century. The Lemann, Telles and Sicupira model rested on meritocracy, extreme targets, partnership and ownership mentality, relentless cost discipline and the fast promotion of young talent. Carlos Brito embodied it. The numbers from his tenure are hard to argue with: between 2005 and 2020, AB InBev's market capitalisation rose from 26 billion US dollars to 141 billion US dollars, revenue from 14.5 billion US dollars to almost 47 billion US dollars, and normalised EBITDA margin from 28.6 per cent to 36.9 per cent. After the Anheuser-Busch takeover, the new owners brought in Brazilian executives from InBev and introduced zero-based budgeting, under which every expense must be justified again each year.

That was a genuine management export. It also carries a warning against romanticising any national model. The same toolkit that worked brilliantly in consolidation and efficiency struggled when applied mechanically to businesses that needed investment in brands and innovation. Kraft Heinz's 15 billion US dollars write-down in 2019 and its later decision to split itself became a business-school case on the limits of cost discipline as a growth strategy.

That lesson strengthens the Brazilian case rather than weakening it. Good management cultures learn. The next generation of Brazilian global executives inherits not a spreadsheet method but a temperament: accountability, speed, entrepreneurial aggression and comfort with instability.

The data that punctures the myth

Here is the detail that turns this from a celebration into an analysis. In 2014, when Nadella's appointment triggered a wave of 'India's leading export: CEOs' headlines, Pankaj Ghemawat and Herman Vantrappen checked the claim against the Fortune Global 500. Their finding was sobering: in mid-2013 only three non-Indian firms on the list were led by Indian CEOs, namely ArcelorMittal, Deutsche Bank and PepsiCo. That was exactly the same number of non-Brazilian firms run by Brazilian CEOs, and fewer than the five led by South Africans.

Their broader point was even more important. Only 13 per cent of Fortune Global 500 companies were led by a CEO from outside the country of headquarters. The real myth, they argued, was not Indian success but the idea that the world's largest companies had become truly stateless in how they select leaders. They had not. Corporate nationality still shapes who gets the top job.

So what changed? India accelerated sharply after 2014, while Brazil did not scale in the same way. National character did not suddenly shift. The ecosystem did. And the decisive element of that ecosystem has a name.

Diaspora is infrastructure

India has built the most sophisticated human bridge between an emerging economy and the command posts of Western capitalism. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world, at around 18 million people according to the United Nations, and it sends home over $100 billion a year in remittances. But the money is the least interesting part. Engineers go abroad for graduate school, join multinationals, found companies, reach boards, mentor the next cohort. Capital follows talent, talent follows networks, and over three decades the process compounds.

We think of infrastructure as ports, rail and power grids. For internationalisation, people are infrastructure too.

This week's data makes the point with unusual force. A new Indian Diaspora Index from Prosus and Dealroom finds that founders who grew up in India have helped build 205 current and former unicorns outside India, worth about 560 billion US dollars in founder-share-attributed value, with 187 of them, roughly 91 per cent, based in the United States. The comparison is striking: the 102 unicorns based in India itself account for about 349 billion US dollars on the same basis. In other words, the Indian economy abroad is, by this measure, larger than the Indian startup economy at home. The number requires care, since it is neither a measure of founders' personal fortunes nor of what they actually own, but the order of magnitude is unmistakable.

This is no longer brain drain. It is brain circulation organised as a global network, and increasingly it feeds back: capital, mandates, R&D centres and political goodwill flow toward India because Indians sit where decisions are made.

Brazil has a diaspora too, across the United States, Portugal, Japan and Europe, and an exceptional managerial tradition. What it has not yet done is convert the two into a systematic leadership pipeline at Indian scale. That may be Brazil's next opportunity.

The emerging market CEO advantage

For most of the twentieth century, management knowledge travelled in one direction. Harvard taught, McKinsey advised, American and European multinationals exported their systems to the rest. The twenty-first century is more reciprocal, because executives from emerging economies bring something the West now needs: the experience of managing scarcity and abundance at the same time. They know the affluent consumer and the low-income one, the world-class logistics hub and the improvised supply chain, the boom and the crisis, the family owner, the state and the foreign shareholder.

I call this the Emerging-Market CEO Advantage, and it rests on five capabilities: tolerance for complexity, cultural adaptability, resource discipline, ambition under constraint and comfort with volatility. India and Brazil combine them differently. India adds scale, technology and an unmatched human network. Brazil adds entrepreneurial aggression, commercial creativity and a resilience forged in inflation. Both are preparation for a world that is less predictable, less homogeneous and less Western than it was twenty years ago.

Decision makers are an export category

Governments spend enormous political energy celebrating exports of cars, aircraft, medicines and software. There is another export category whose value compounds over generations: decision-makers. A country whose citizens become CEOs, board members, investors and founders inside the world's most important companies accumulates far more than prestige. It accumulates information, relationships, access and confidence. This is business craft working in parallel with statecraft, and in some cases ahead of it. India's leverage in Washington today rests not only on its market size and strategic weight but also on the fact that the American technology economy is, to a remarkable degree, run by people who grew up in India.

The lesson for Central and Eastern Europe

This is where the argument comes home. For three decades, Central and Eastern Europe has integrated brilliantly into Western production systems. We assemble cars, write code, make components and run shared-service centres for global companies. The region is now a roughly three trillion US dollars economy. Yet the number of CEE-born executives running global companies remains strikingly small relative to that weight.

Romania illustrates the paradox. We have one of Europe's largest diasporas, several million people, many of them highly qualified professionals in Western companies, universities and institutions. We have strong engineering and IT schools. What we lack is the connective tissue: mentoring networks, executive mobility programmes, diaspora-to-boardroom pathways and a national ambition that treats leadership as something to be exported deliberately rather than lost by accident.

A mature economy should measure itself not only by how many Fortune 500 companies invest on its territory, but by how many could one day be run by someone educated there. These are very different indicators of economic maturity, and the second one is the harder one.

Neither the Indian model nor the Brazilian one can be copied. India shows the power of combining domestic education, international education, diaspora networks and multinational careers over decades. Brazil shows what demanding domestic competition can produce when managers become confident enough to buy, restructure and run businesses abroad. Both carry the same message for ambitious smaller economies: internationalisation does not end when your companies cross the border. Its deepest form begins when your people join the leadership class of the global economy.

The twentieth century rewarded countries that exported products. The early twenty-first rewarded those that exported technology and capital. The next advantage may belong to the countries able to export what is hardest to manufacture: people the world trusts to run its companies.