Is it “reverse colonization?”. Will such a CEO have cultural sensitivity to employees, customers and other stakeholders?
I think of how Sundar Pichai felt compelled to replace Google Pay (success if not profitable because the banks wouldn’t give them a break) with service that was successful in India but failed in the first world, it’s like the “appropriate technology” discourse of E. F. Schumacher but the problem here is third world technology failing in the first instead of the other way around.
What message do young people in the US get about their prospects for social mobility?
I already have the feeling that people in the U.S. are sorted by ethnicity, even if they are “white.”
My wife’s family is Italian and my relatives there are so typecast it seems like a parody. Men work in construction or own pizza restaurants. The women work as hairdressers or schoolteachers.
My own family is French Canadian and Polish and the fraction of my cohort who are cops or first responders (even the girls!) is a little scary. (My uncle rose high as a bureaucrat in a city government and it helped that he married into an Irish family which might have been low status overall but was higher status than where he came from.)
People from other ethnic groups might think their only options are college professor or reporter for a prestigious newspaper and when they bomb out of that their parents might have more respect for them being a notorious conspiracy Youtuber than if they got one of the above jobs.
East asians frequently get it drilled into them from preschool that they are a nobody if they don’t get a professional degree, etc.
“Anti-racists. struggle to get to the bottom of “systemic racism” but look closer you see not every white has the same “white privilege” and anyone who tries to go outside the tracks of their family history will find all sort of mysterious ways that they don’t fit in, things go wrong, etc.
It is all a mockery of competence, equity, etc. so when i see a new “typecast” is catching on I think that’s automatically a bad thing.
I was speaking to my brother about this the other day. Yes we are both Indian. First off, there is a lot more nuance to this topic. There are Indian entrepreneurs who become CEOs of their companies and there are corporate ladder climbers who become CEOs.
As for the latter, they are as talented as any technical professional with a smidge of business knowledge and a lot of knowledge on internal rope climbing. The preference towards Indians came out from global forces largely not controlled by individual companies. They are Global and driven by pan global organizations with immense influence such as World Economic Forum. And internal political shifts towards equity regardless of merit and progressive women organizations distaste for white men. These manifest in the vociferous push within organizations for nonwhite leaders and the company’s are happy to collect their equity badges by putting up alternative candidates as CEOs without disrupting their operations. They all march within the guard rails setup by the board and the stock market forces. There are lot more nuances in the above arguments but in my opinion these are the larger forces.
5 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.4 ms ] threadI think of how Sundar Pichai felt compelled to replace Google Pay (success if not profitable because the banks wouldn’t give them a break) with service that was successful in India but failed in the first world, it’s like the “appropriate technology” discourse of E. F. Schumacher but the problem here is third world technology failing in the first instead of the other way around.
What message do young people in the US get about their prospects for social mobility?
But I do feel it has been a good partnership overall as India was coming out of the shadows and US was and still is the most inviting place.
My wife’s family is Italian and my relatives there are so typecast it seems like a parody. Men work in construction or own pizza restaurants. The women work as hairdressers or schoolteachers.
My own family is French Canadian and Polish and the fraction of my cohort who are cops or first responders (even the girls!) is a little scary. (My uncle rose high as a bureaucrat in a city government and it helped that he married into an Irish family which might have been low status overall but was higher status than where he came from.)
People from other ethnic groups might think their only options are college professor or reporter for a prestigious newspaper and when they bomb out of that their parents might have more respect for them being a notorious conspiracy Youtuber than if they got one of the above jobs.
East asians frequently get it drilled into them from preschool that they are a nobody if they don’t get a professional degree, etc.
“Anti-racists. struggle to get to the bottom of “systemic racism” but look closer you see not every white has the same “white privilege” and anyone who tries to go outside the tracks of their family history will find all sort of mysterious ways that they don’t fit in, things go wrong, etc.
It is all a mockery of competence, equity, etc. so when i see a new “typecast” is catching on I think that’s automatically a bad thing.
As for the latter, they are as talented as any technical professional with a smidge of business knowledge and a lot of knowledge on internal rope climbing. The preference towards Indians came out from global forces largely not controlled by individual companies. They are Global and driven by pan global organizations with immense influence such as World Economic Forum. And internal political shifts towards equity regardless of merit and progressive women organizations distaste for white men. These manifest in the vociferous push within organizations for nonwhite leaders and the company’s are happy to collect their equity badges by putting up alternative candidates as CEOs without disrupting their operations. They all march within the guard rails setup by the board and the stock market forces. There are lot more nuances in the above arguments but in my opinion these are the larger forces.