Subramaniam, 54, is originally from Trivandrum, India and lives in Memphis, Tennessee—the company’s global headquarters. He is married to IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus Uma who also works at FedEx. A gold medalist from IIT Bombay, he promises to keep the company’s people-service-profit philosophy at its core. He backs his colleagues and adds, “I’m immensely proud of our 600,000 team members around the world. Together we’ve set into motion ideas that have changed the world for the better.” 

Over the last six months alone four Indian-Americans have been elevated as CEOs of major firms. They include Lal Karsanbhai at Emerson, C. S. Venkatakrishnan at Barclays, Sanjeev Lamba at Linde, and Parag Agrawal at Twitter. Agrawal at 37 is the youngest CEO when it comes to the top 500 publicly-listed US companies. 

This commendable Indian-American success story started in 1994 when Rajat Gupta was made Managing Director of McKinsey & Company. After him many Indians have made it big and some of the more talked-about names would have to include the likes of Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo, 2006), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe, 2007), Sanjay Jha (Motorola, 2008), Ajay Banga (Mastercard, 2010), Satya Nadella (Microsoft, 2014), Sundar Pichai (Google, 2015) and Arvind Krishna (IBM, 2020). 

These are by far the pole stars of America’s corporate skies. Subramaniam is the latest addition to this stellar list. 

There are many other stories of interest. Hope you enjoy browsing through the rest of the content in this edition of the magazine.

(sayantanc@gmail.com)