4 ms·

Why there are so many more South Asian CEOs than East Asian CEOs in the US

34 points by United857 1y ago

mikelitoris 1y ago
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.
- boxed 1y ago
  The lack of any numbers in the article seems a bit weird too. Overrepresented it says, but how much? In what region?
- jychang 1y ago
  Honestly, this is probably the easiest and most accurate answer. India being a british colony for a long time means that the top 1% of Indians had a lot more exposure to English than the top 1% of Chinese people. From there, statistics comes into play. There's just a bigger pool of Indians to select CEOs from.
kevingadd 1y ago
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).
calf 1y ago
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.)
- JSR_FDED 1y ago
  What does this word salad even mean? The research mentioned in the article just says that Indians’ approach to conflict lines up better with the approach favored by Americans.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    People with personal boundary issues see studies about how things currently are as prescriptive. They see a survey that says that most people put mustard on their hot dogs, then 1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs, 2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs. 3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works. 4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person. The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
- eadmund 1y ago
  > it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid That’s like complaining that the 100 yard dash decides whether more or less speed is good. ‘Capitalism’ (really, the free market) is just a voting and sorting system. Cultural norms which produce more value outcompete those which produce less. That’s part of why Protestant Europe (with fewer feast days) outcompeted Catholic Europe (with many more). That’s why blue laws in the U.S. have faded out. Does that mean that days off are bad? No, it just reflects that a day spent not working is a day spent not producing. Chasing economic value is what has created the entire modern world: science, medicine, an economy in which farmers are less than 1% of the population.
booleandilemma 1y ago
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.
dmurray 1y ago
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.
- CodeNest 1y ago
  [dead]
eddijkstra 1y ago
"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
- Filligree 1y ago
  Many cultural assumptions are accurate on average, at the population level. It's nevertheless important to remember that they're mostly uninformative regarding individuals. This is an article about population level statistics.
- simianwords 1y ago
  I hate this line of thinking. The truth is in the middle - you can and should do generalisations because patterns do exist in real life. Indians do behave meaningfully differently than other races. And it is okay to notice those differences. There's a new trend to oppose any pattern finding in races. The retort is always "we are so diverse that no pattern exists at all". I don't agree at all.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mola 1y ago
    So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals? "Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other". Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.
pjc50 1y ago
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.
- eru 1y ago
  I don't think you have to assume that CEO-ness is evenly distributed. I can even believe that kids born in Singapore have more CEO-ness in them on average than kids born in eg Indonesia or PR China. Even if for no other reason than that Singapore is the kind of place that's comparatively more tolerable / less horrifying for the kind of people with CEO-ness traits. (It's also pretty expensive, so only rich people can really afford to have kids here.) (I'm assuming here that CEO-ness runs in families.) In any case, the rest of your argument still makes sense, even if someone born in Singapore statistically has a 3% higher chance of becoming a CEO than someone born in Portugal or whatever.
- smt88 1y ago
  This seems like the best explanation to me. Chinese CEOs can lead companies in the US, China, or even Taiwan. Indian CEOs are choosing between climbing the ladder in India or the US, and all tech opportunities are much more plentiful and lucrative here. We are brain-draining India to a greater degree than we are China.
porridgeraisin 1y ago
- 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.
blitzar 1y ago
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.
tecleandor 1y ago
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.
showdeaduser 1y ago
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_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Genetic_...
- eru 1y ago
  You know that there's lots and lots of different Indian people, and even just going by skin colour, they have a lots of variation? What the 'East Asian personality'? And when you say 'whites' do you include Irish and Italians? They only recently became 'white'. (And a bit earlier Benjamin Franklin didn't even include Germans amongst the properly 'white' people.)
  - showdeaduser 1y ago
    That's right, you'll note the different columns and rows in that chart for different parts of South Asia.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    Incorrect line of thinking. Indians are diverse but very similar. Patterns do exist among them - lets not try to dismiss that.
    - eru 1y ago
      Well, Indians are humans. So in that sense they are similar. Or do you mean that Indians are less (or more) diverse than eg Americans?
      - simianwords 1y ago
        its the same way you think about men vs women. they are similar as humans but there are patterns.
mathverse 1y ago
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?
- k3nt0456 1y ago
  Singapore has government enforced racial quotas, both in housing policy and in PR/citizenship grants with the goal of maintaining a stable 75/15/7.5. So it's really not a good example of merit based
  - mathverse 1y ago
    Racial quotas for non chinese :)
- highfrequency 1y ago
  Huh? There are more Chinese than Indian in the US.
  - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    But Indians have much lower barrier to cultural entry, given colonialist history
    - smt88 1y ago
      Many Chinese Americans have been here for generations, since the 1800s. Few Indians lived here before 1950. Ease of assimilation doesn't explain it.
      - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
        Many Chinese Americans, sure. But how many in relationship to the Indians ?
willprice89 1y ago
> 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.
nabla9 1y ago
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.
hiyer 1y ago
Even within "South Asia", India is over-represented. Haven't heard of too many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan CEOs.
drno123 1y ago
Nepotism, plain and simple
- amadeuspagel 1y ago
  This is a claim that you can actually bet on. For example, you could have shorted Microsoft when Satya Nadella became CEO.
jphoward 1y ago
"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?
- tecleandor 1y ago
  I think the author has been using an LLM to extend the text or get facts and it's making weird phrases and/or mixing statements together. It's specially visible on the 'The Costs of Conflict Avoidance' section when the theme changes for no reason and it starts listing "things to do to avoid conflict". In the case you're mentioning, in the Indian CEO list he lists FORMER Indian CEOs: > Among the Fortune 500, the CEOs of Alphabet/Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft, (Satya Nadella), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), Chanel (Leena Nair), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora) and former CEOs of Mastercard (Ajay Banga) and Pepsi (Indra Nooyi) were all born in India and were appointed the CEO position. In the East Asia CEOs list, he mixes together the "founders" list with others, misses a bunch of East Asia CEOs and creates a weird phrasing: > 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) and Hock Tan (Broadcom). Three of these are in the semiconductor industry and two of them founded their companies. This is just a list of the Fortune 500 CEOs [...] That's not a list of Fortune 500 CEOs.
SanjayMehta 1y ago
South Asia? They’re all Indians.
wzrr 1y ago
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)??
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

34 points by United857 1y ago

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.

boxed 1y ago
The lack of any numbers in the article seems a bit weird too. Overrepresented it says, but how much? In what region?
jychang 1y ago
Honestly, this is probably the easiest and most accurate answer. India being a british colony for a long time means that the top 1% of Indians had a lot more exposure to English than the top 1% of Chinese people. From there, statistics comes into play. There's just a bigger pool of Indians to select CEOs from.

kevingadd 1y ago

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).

calf 1y ago

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.)

JSR_FDED 1y ago
What does this word salad even mean? The research mentioned in the article just says that Indians’ approach to conflict lines up better with the approach favored by Americans.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  People with personal boundary issues see studies about how things currently are as prescriptive. They see a survey that says that most people put mustard on their hot dogs, then 1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs, 2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs. 3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works. 4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person. The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
eadmund 1y ago
> it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid That’s like complaining that the 100 yard dash decides whether more or less speed is good. ‘Capitalism’ (really, the free market) is just a voting and sorting system. Cultural norms which produce more value outcompete those which produce less. That’s part of why Protestant Europe (with fewer feast days) outcompeted Catholic Europe (with many more). That’s why blue laws in the U.S. have faded out. Does that mean that days off are bad? No, it just reflects that a day spent not working is a day spent not producing. Chasing economic value is what has created the entire modern world: science, medicine, an economy in which farmers are less than 1% of the population.

booleandilemma 1y ago

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.

dmurray 1y ago

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.

CodeNest 1y ago
[dead]

eddijkstra 1y ago

"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

Filligree 1y ago
Many cultural assumptions are accurate on average, at the population level. It's nevertheless important to remember that they're mostly uninformative regarding individuals. This is an article about population level statistics.
simianwords 1y ago
I hate this line of thinking. The truth is in the middle - you can and should do generalisations because patterns do exist in real life. Indians do behave meaningfully differently than other races. And it is okay to notice those differences. There's a new trend to oppose any pattern finding in races. The retort is always "we are so diverse that no pattern exists at all". I don't agree at all.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mola 1y ago
  So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals? "Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other". Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.

pjc50 1y ago

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.

eru 1y ago
I don't think you have to assume that CEO-ness is evenly distributed. I can even believe that kids born in Singapore have more CEO-ness in them on average than kids born in eg Indonesia or PR China. Even if for no other reason than that Singapore is the kind of place that's comparatively more tolerable / less horrifying for the kind of people with CEO-ness traits. (It's also pretty expensive, so only rich people can really afford to have kids here.) (I'm assuming here that CEO-ness runs in families.) In any case, the rest of your argument still makes sense, even if someone born in Singapore statistically has a 3% higher chance of becoming a CEO than someone born in Portugal or whatever.
smt88 1y ago
This seems like the best explanation to me. Chinese CEOs can lead companies in the US, China, or even Taiwan. Indian CEOs are choosing between climbing the ladder in India or the US, and all tech opportunities are much more plentiful and lucrative here. We are brain-draining India to a greater degree than we are China.

porridgeraisin 1y ago

- 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.

blitzar 1y ago

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.

tecleandor 1y ago

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.

showdeaduser 1y ago

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_similarities_between_51_worldwide_human_populations_(Euclidean_genetic_distance_using_289,160_SNPs).png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Genetic_...

eru 1y ago
You know that there's lots and lots of different Indian people, and even just going by skin colour, they have a lots of variation? What the 'East Asian personality'? And when you say 'whites' do you include Irish and Italians? They only recently became 'white'. (And a bit earlier Benjamin Franklin didn't even include Germans amongst the properly 'white' people.)
- showdeaduser 1y ago
  That's right, you'll note the different columns and rows in that chart for different parts of South Asia.
- simianwords 1y ago
  Incorrect line of thinking. Indians are diverse but very similar. Patterns do exist among them - lets not try to dismiss that.
  - eru 1y ago
    Well, Indians are humans. So in that sense they are similar. Or do you mean that Indians are less (or more) diverse than eg Americans?
    - simianwords 1y ago
      its the same way you think about men vs women. they are similar as humans but there are patterns.

mathverse 1y ago

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?

k3nt0456 1y ago
Singapore has government enforced racial quotas, both in housing policy and in PR/citizenship grants with the goal of maintaining a stable 75/15/7.5. So it's really not a good example of merit based
- mathverse 1y ago
  Racial quotas for non chinese :)
highfrequency 1y ago
Huh? There are more Chinese than Indian in the US.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  But Indians have much lower barrier to cultural entry, given colonialist history
  - smt88 1y ago
    Many Chinese Americans have been here for generations, since the 1800s. Few Indians lived here before 1950. Ease of assimilation doesn't explain it.
    - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
      Many Chinese Americans, sure. But how many in relationship to the Indians ?

willprice89 1y ago

> 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.

nabla9 1y ago

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.

hiyer 1y ago

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

drno123 1y ago

Nepotism, plain and simple

amadeuspagel 1y ago
This is a claim that you can actually bet on. For example, you could have shorted Microsoft when Satya Nadella became CEO.

jphoward 1y ago

"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?

tecleandor 1y ago
I think the author has been using an LLM to extend the text or get facts and it's making weird phrases and/or mixing statements together. It's specially visible on the 'The Costs of Conflict Avoidance' section when the theme changes for no reason and it starts listing "things to do to avoid conflict". In the case you're mentioning, in the Indian CEO list he lists FORMER Indian CEOs: > Among the Fortune 500, the CEOs of Alphabet/Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft, (Satya Nadella), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), Chanel (Leena Nair), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora) and former CEOs of Mastercard (Ajay Banga) and Pepsi (Indra Nooyi) were all born in India and were appointed the CEO position. In the East Asia CEOs list, he mixes together the "founders" list with others, misses a bunch of East Asia CEOs and creates a weird phrasing: > 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) and Hock Tan (Broadcom). Three of these are in the semiconductor industry and two of them founded their companies. This is just a list of the Fortune 500 CEOs [...] That's not a list of Fortune 500 CEOs.

SanjayMehta 1y ago

South Asia? They’re all Indians.

wzrr 1y ago

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)??

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]