Why there are so many more South Asian CEOs than East Asian CEOs in the US (davelu.com)

From my experience percentage of Indians with good English exceeded that of Chinese in Silicon Valley, I always thought this observation was due to that fact.

This article feels like it generalizes quite a lot about a very, very large population. I'm always wary of pieces that try to put the vast majority of people from a given territory into some broad buckets in order to draw conclusions about them. There are a grand total of two citations in the whole thing unless I missed some, and they're not supporting most of the generalities.

> Much of East Asian culture is rooted in the teachings of Confucius.

Really?

Interesting topic at the very least. Any time there's a big population disparity in selective groups it's usually worth investigating how that disparity came to be to see if we can learn something from it and potentially equalize it (if it exists for a bad reason).

As a bicultural Chinese Canadian with a fancy STEM background, this is a terminally flawed argument because it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid. It is shortsighted, self-centered, and actually undermines itself because it is meta-conflict avoidant. Comply with capitalism or you're out. That's compliance with more steps; it talks about "embracing conflict" but its philosophy is essentially a broken one.

(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)

This is a dangerous topic. If you change the races in the headline, the only acceptable answer becomes "racism", and the only acceptable debate becomes whether it's mostly racism today or racism historically.

"people are more complex than cultural caricatures. You can’t just map behaviors onto someone because of where they’re from. Understanding generational differences, personality, and professional context matters just as much, if not more, than making broad cultural assumptions."

But the rest of this article literally does nothing but make broad cultural assumptions

If by "South Asian" he means "Indian", I think there are more Indians than East Asians in US tech in general, so it's not surprising they're more of them in CEO positions.

Hmm. Aren't the East Asian CEO class off being CEOs in East Asia? Whereas, for jurisdiction arbitrage reasons, it's a much better environment for CEOs in India to leave India and work in the US than to try to build in India.

I'm always mindful of the quote "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops" from Stephen Jay Gould. If we assume that CEO-ness, whatever that property actually is, is evenly distributed among people at birth, it becomes a question of opportunity. It seems that the business culture in Japan, Singapore, possibly Korea, post-90s China, and some other places is pretty good compared to India.

- English-medium education.

- H1B visa share: 70% india, 10% china (2022). So that's 7x more Indians meaning even a random choice will likely end up with an Indian.

This is 80% of the reason. Remaining 20%:

- Assorted cultural reasons

People make a huge deal about how making "broad cultural assumptions" is wrong but the fact is they play a role contextually. "As broad as the context, and no broader". Here's the logic behind it. Most of the things people do in their life they do not do because they innately want to do it, rather it is because they are expected, or incentivised to. Culture, when it is strong, sets a lot of incentives and expectations. Broad cultural assumptions in $CONTEXT work accurately when(and only when) said culture sets expectations and incentives that result in behaviours overlapping with those displayed in $CONTEXT.

What I have heard from someone with 1st hand experience: For Indian/chinese culture, set CONTEXT=board_room, you will find a difference.

Edit: it's important to add that these cultural differences are observable at the population level and not the individual level. i.e Akash Patel won't necessarily get the CEO position more often than Lee Wei. However, in a population of 100 Akash Patels and 100 Lee Weis, a larger fraction of Akash Patels will end up as CEO. Stereotypes are probabilistic information and thus lose their error bars as you take more and more samples.

Immigration patterns 50 - 20 years ago, Japan and WW2, Vietnam war, modern American attitudes to China and "they all look the same" takes care of the rest.

I think there are a lot more sides to this. I also think the mentioned paper has been extrapolated a bit too much for this substack article. It's from almost 10 years ago, and it's mostly centered in India's population.

For reference, it's titled "Boomers Like to Confront, Generation Y Is Okay with Withdrawal, But They All Love to Negotiate in India" in March 2016 "Conflict Resolution Quarterly". DOI:10.1002/crq.21163

But I'm surprised how it just passes over the language (English is an official language in India), that also have lead to India having lots of business relations with the USA due to offshoring. And, of course, how Chinese nationals are seen as a risk in any meaningful position in American companies, specially in the last ten years.

Indians are basically the same race as whites, just darker, in comparison with the vast difference in East Asian personality.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Genetic_...

Sheer numbers. In Singapore there is more chinese ceos than indian.

I am not american so i wonder what is the situation like in US but in Singapore it is very visible that each race stick to its own and pushes its own up. Indians to indians, chinese to chinese, filipinos to filipinos.

SG is touted to be multicultural but what is the true meaning of this?

> You have to be willing to be direct and to the point. Beating around the bush only shows you don’t believe that what you need to say is valid or worthy. Stuttering or dancing around the topic at hand conveys uncertainty and undermines your position. You must be intentional and explicit in what you say, if you want the other party to fully grasp where you are coming from.

I don't know about the premise of the article but this suggestion definitely resonates with me. It's easy enough for misunderstandings to arise even when people are trying their best to communicate what they mean. Once you start beating around the bush it's almost guaranteed the other party is going to hear something completely different than what you intent.

The article is based on stereotypes, not research. It confuses people and organizational cultures.

Research on organizational cultures confirms some stereotypes about China, like high power distance between people, low individualism, and high self-restraint.

What it misses are some very positive straits;

- very high task-orientation (versus person-orientation)

- very high tolerance to uncertainty (much higher than US or never mind Germany)

- very long term oriented (equal to Germany, much higher than the US)

ps. China and India are about the same in individualism and most other issues. China is slightly better at uncertainty tolerance and much better in long term orientation.

Even within "South Asia", India is over-represented. Haven't heard of too many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan CEOs.

Nepotism, plain and simple

"There are far fewer East Asian CEOs in the Fortune 500, and most of them are the founders of their companies like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Tony Xu (DoorDash), Lisa Su (AMD)"

Lisa Su only joined AMD in 2012?

South Asia? They’re all Indians.

too small sample of represent the culture , I can also argue that south asian prefer climbing the ladder (traditional of social class) while east asian prefer to be their own boss (appears more east asian have their own business)??

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