Nationality is no longer irrelevant for global CEOs

Foreign-born executives are more exposed to scrutiny and attacks in an era of harder borders and political pressures.

- Anjli Raval

Mr Satya Nadella’s rise to the helm of Microsoft in 2014 was both remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. For many Indians, it was a proud moment to see someone from Hyderabad run a US tech giant. Yet he wasn’t the first Indian to rise to the top of a US corporate, and for Microsoft, his background was incidental, featuring only in the last paragraph of his company biography.

He had, after all, been at the company since 1992, working his way around various divisions and was arguably the best qualified to take the top job. But with the retreat of globalisation and rising nationalist pressures, is it going to be harder for a foreign-born executive to rise to the top of companies in the US and elsewhere?

Some of America’s largest companies are led by foreign-born individuals - from Ms Jane Fraser at Citigroup to Tesla’s Mr Elon Musk ~ but there is now a more hostile political climate towards outsiders. Amid the Trump administration’s widespread crackdown on immigration in the past year and America First agenda, where a CEO comes from now matters more.