Global Indian CEOs— Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks—have been a phenomenon for more than two decades. However, high-achieving global Indian sibling CEOs have come to greater attention with the nomination of Ajay Banga as World Bank president.
Brothers, sisters, twins
Ajay was nominated by the United States President Joe Biden on 23 February. He is the vice chairman at a private equity firm General Atlantic. Prior to this, he held top positions at Mastercard and Citigroup. He started his career with Nestle in India and also worked briefly at Pepsi.
His brother, Manvinder ‘Vindi’ Singh Banga, is the former chairman and CEO of Hindustan Unilever Ltd. He was later elevated as the global head of the foods and HPC divisions of Unilever. He now serves as a senior partner at private equity fund Clayton, Dubilier and Rice. Both of the are IIM Ahmedabad graduates. Their father, Lt. Gen Harbhajan Singh Banga, was a celebrated officer in the Indian Army.
Indra Nooyi is well known as the former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, but what may be not so known is that her elder sister Chandrika Tandon is also an accomplished global leader, both in business and the arts.
Indra started her career with Beardsell Ltd. and Johnson & Johnson in India after completing her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, and then went to Yale University. Chandrika, on the other hand, graduated from IIM Ahmedabad and is a former partner of McKinsey and Company, founder of Tandon Capital Associates and a Grammy-nominated artist.
Their grandfather was from Palakkad, Kerala and shifted to Chennai where the sisters were born. Their father Krishnamurthy was a bank officer and their mother is a homemaker. They lived with their grandfather who had a strong influence on them during a disciplined, happy childhood, attending a Convent school and finishing their day with both Christian and Hindu prayers.
The Kurian twins from Kerala, Thomas and George, are the youngest of four siblings. They both graduated from Princeton University. They were also accepted to IIT Chennai but left for the US after six months. They are now the CEOs of Google Cloud and NetApp respectively.
At Princeton, Thomas graduated summa cum laude while George secured the second position. Thomas and George’s father, P.C. Kurian, was a chemical engineer from Pampady, a small village in central Kerala. Since their father had a transferable job, the twins boarded at the Jesuit St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School in Bengaluru.
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A common thread?
The Kurian twins and the Krishnamurthy sisters can broadly be said to have had middle-class moorings while the Banga brothers perhaps came from a more privileged background. The life and career stories of sibling CEOs are not easy to define or put into a box. Sometimes, there are commonalities, but at times they are like chalk and cheese.
Ajay, Vindi, Indra and Chandrika have in recent years been involved with causes with a purpose. Ajay has his eyes towards global digital inclusion, while Vindi’s focus has been sustainability. Indra on the other hand has been on a mission of women empowerment and work-life balance while Chandrika has her heart in higher education, arts and wellbeing. All four studied in one of the leading IIMs and three of them have been conferred with the Padma Awards. The Kurian brothers are younger and still focused on their corporate careers.
“I have a sister who is older than me. A healthy competition with her helped because I always looked up to her and wanted to be at least as good as her,” Indra Nooyi said, summing up the role and importance of siblings in her life and career.
The writer is a former editor at the Indian School of Business. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)