Laxman Narasimhan And Other Indian-Origin CEOs Leading Companies Across The World

Laxman Narasimhan, a veteran in leading and advising global consumer-facing brands, has been named as the new CEO of coffee giant Starbucks. He joins the long list of other Indian-origin business leaders heading international companies.

Mr Narasimhan, 55, was previously the CEO of UK-based Reckitt Benckiser, a multinational consumer health, hygiene and nutrition company. He will join Starbucks on October 1, 2022 after relocating from London to Seattle and will work closely with Howard Schultz, the interim CEO, before assuming the leadership role and joining the Board on April 1, 2023, the company said.

Leena Nair: The first female and youngest-ever Chief Human Resources Officer at Unilever, Ms Nair stepped down from her role in December 2021 to join French luxury fashion house Chanel as their Global CEO. An alum of Xavier School of Management, Ms Nair started her new position at Chanel in January 2022.

Parag Agrawal: Mr Agrawal was promoted in November 2021 from his previous role as Twitter's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to become the company's new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He replaced co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who chose Mr Agrawal as his successor once he decided to step down.

Sandeep Kataria: He was elevated as Bata's global CEO in 2021. This has happened for the first time in the company's 126-year history that an Indian was named to the top post. He was earlier working as CEO of Bata India. Mr Kataria is an alumunus of IIT-Delhi and XLRI-Jamshedpur. He was a gold medallist of the 1993 PGDBM batch at XLRI.

Sundar Pichai: Mr Pichai is one of the biggest success stories that India has seen in the last decade. He is the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google. Mr Pichai became the CEO of Google in 2015.

Satya Nadella: Hyderabad-born Nadella, 54, was named CEO of Microsoft in February 2014. In June 2021 he was also named the company's Chairman, an additional role in which he is leading the work to set the agenda for the board. Mr Nadella was given India's third-highest civilian award Padma Bhushan on the eve of its 73rd Republic Day in January this year along with Mr Pichai.

Shantanu Narayen: CEO of Adobe Systems, Mr Narayen joined the company in 1998. He was appointed to the top post in November 2007.

Arvind Krishna: He has been the CEO of IBM since April 2020. In 2021, Mr Krishna was given the additional charge as the Chairman of the IBM Board of Directors. He succeeded IBM Executive Chairman Virginia M Rometty, and started the position in January 2021, after over 30 years at the company.

Rangarajan Raghuram: He was appointed the CEO of VMware in June, 2021. The 57-year-old previously served as Chief Operating Officer - Products and Cloud Services in the company.

George Kurian: Mr Kurian has been the CEO of storage and data management company NetApp since 2015. He also served as its executive vice president of product operations.

Nikesh Arora: Mr Arora joined as the Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks in June 2018. Before joining the company, he served as president and chief operating officer (COO) of SoftBank Group Corp.