People who follow business news may have noticed two financial industry companies headquartered half a world apart reporting stellar results within days of each other.

Ten days ago, when DBS Group Holdings published results for 2019, it revealed that net profit had risen 14 per cent on year to a record $6.39 billion. Impressively, return on equity - a widely studied benchmark - had advanced more than a percentage point to 13.2 per cent, also a record.

Days earlier, New York-based Mastercard published its 2019 results. Exceeding market expectations, revenue was up 13 per cent on year at US$16.9 billion (S$23.6 billion). Adjusted operating margins were up 2.1 percentage points. Over at bigger rival Visa the same week, first-quarter revenue missed expectations by a whisker.

Investors in Mastercard have little to complain about. They have seen the company's share price soar from US$20 to its current US$340 since India-born Mr Ajay Banga was made CEO.

Likewise, in the decade he has been CEO of DBS, Mr Piyush Gupta has more than trebled net profit, which was $2 billion when he was handed charge of South-east Asia's No. 1 lender. Return on equity (ROE) in 2009 was 8.4 per cent. Last year, Euromoney named DBS the world's "best bank".

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that these two high-performing companies should be led by Indian-born executives who are naturalised, perfectly adjusted citizens of the countries they live in. Mastercard's Mr Banga was among three Indian-Americans who made Fortune magazine's Top 20 list of Business People for 2019. That list was led by Microsoft's Mr Satya Nadella, who has taken the company's market capitalisation from US$302 billion when he took charge, to its current level of US$1.4 trillion, making it the most valuable company alongside Apple.

Indians broke through the glass ceiling at Western multinationals when Mr Bhaskar Menon was named chief executive of Capital Records/EMI in the early 1970s, the label that produced hits such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.

In the 1980s, global multinationals such as Citigroup and Unilever actively began sourcing Indian talent and pushing them out into the world. By the turn of the century they had come to be recognised as a phenomenon, heading up companies like Coca-Cola, Citi and Vodafone.

These days, they are reckoned to rank only behind American-born CEOs in the list of ethnicities with leadership roles within the Standard and Poor's 500 companies.

Months after Microsoft named Mr Nadella to succeed Mr Steven Ballmer, Alphabet Inc's Google surprised the world by elevating Mr Sundar Pichai, an engineer born in Tamil Nadu, to be chief executive.

The trend continues. Last month, IBM, that most iconic of American tech firms, named the India-born engineer Arvind Krishna as chief executive officer. Mr Krishna is credited with midwifing IBM's US$34 billion purchase last year of hybrid cloud provider Red Hat, one of the boldest strategic moves executed by Armonk, New York-based Big Blue in its 109-year history.

What's the secret sauce that goes into the making of the Indian professionals who are so visible in the world's C-suites?

I brought it up recently with Mr Pat Gelsinger, Intel's first chief technology officer who led the team behind the era-defining 80486 processor. The next big money spinner for the firm after the microprocessor he produced was the Pentium chip, designed by an Indian engineer named Vinod Dham, who had arrived in America with US$8 in his pocket.

Now CEO at Palo Alto-based VMWare, a company valued at US$66 billion, Mr Gelsinger has three chief operating officers under him who, between them, handle customer operations, products and cloud services. Not only are all three of Indian origin, they are of southern Indian origin specifically, something they have in common with Messrs Nadella, Pichai and Krishna, not to speak of Abode CEO Shantanu Narayen.

"Many of our Indians rose from humble circumstances," says Mr Gelsinger. "They know where they came from. That gives you this deep sense of commitment, humility and gratitude and it has created a leadership perspective that we have benefited from."

Without question, deep commitment to study and work, and humility, are all part of the story. Google's Mr Pichai was raised in a two-bedroom apartment in Chennai, where his mother supplemented the family income by working as a stenographer. The first plane ride for Nanyang Technological University president Subra Suresh, an eminent scientist who was dean of the engineering school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, later, president of Carnegie Mellon University, was when he flew from Chennai to study in the United States. His parents had never been to college and, at the time, he had no more than US$100 in his pocket.

But, surely, there are other ingredients that go into the making of the successful Indian CEO, especially those who work beyond pure technology and in areas such as banking and consumer goods.

What could they be? A close look at some CEO profiles suggests a surprisingly broad similarity in orientation and outlook.

For one thing, many of the CEOs, including former company heads like Ms Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo and Mr Vikram Pandit of Citi, came from solid middle-class backgrounds with a focus on education and values that continued to help them stay well-rooted throughout their careers.

Many are children of bureaucrats, military officers and railway officers used to being uprooted every few years as they followed their parents on postings, continually adapting to new situations and languages from early years.

Mr Dham, the scientist behind the Pentium chip, is the son of an army civilian officer who translocated his family from what now is Pakistan during the Great Partition of India in 1947. IBM's Mr Krishna is the son of a military man as well. Mr Ivan Menezes, the CEO of Diageo, is the son of a railway officer and his brother Victor retired as vice-chairman of Citigroup after serving in every continent practically. Likewise, Mr Harish Manwani of Blackstone, formerly global COO at Unilever, is a railway kid too.

"Indian managers are extremely comfortable with ambiguity," the former Apac head of a major multinational told me. "They coped with poor infrastructure and ever-changing rules in their formative years. They are comfortable with the idea of scale and all show high mobility and adaptability."

Second, many of them emerged from a few key learning centres such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management.

That includes Mastercard's Mr Banga and Mr Gupta of DBS who both count Delhi's St Stephen's College and IIM, Ahmedabad, as alma maters and emerged from the great corporate training ground that is Citi.

The selection standards for the colleges they went to are so stringent - about one in a hundred applicants make the cutline - they are famously reputed to be more difficult to enter than Harvard or MIT. Once in - says a former member of the teaching staff - these students are so bright they can pretty much finish the course on their own without help from teachers.

To be sure, not every egg in the basket turns out to be equally wholesome. Perhaps the most spectacular supernova burnout was the case of IIT Delhi-alumnus Rajat Gupta of McKinsey, a Harvard MBA, after he was found guilty of passing on insider knowledge of key companies in which he had a boardroom seat.

Is there a lesson here for Singaporeans who dream of breaking into the C-suite? Most definitely.

While there's not a lot they can do about their country's size or complexities, Singaporeans are fortunate that their society is not monochromatic and celebrates diversity. There also is no shortage of opportunities to expand their mental horizons and step out of their comfort zone.

Mr Amol Gupte, Citi's head of Asean and Singapore, told me a while ago that convincing his Singapore staff to try postings overseas was always a challenge. Those who do move, he said, have found it an enriching experience and the bank has duly rewarded them.

They include Mr Gary Chan, head of the corporate bank, who spent seven years in Vietnam; Hong Kong-based Ms Susan Kwek, head of operations and technology; and Mr Lee Lung Nien, Citi's CEO in Malaysia, who came up in the bank's markets business.

"There are good examples like these but I wish there were more," said Mr Gupte. "People we send overseas and flush through the network value us in a different way. That's why I would like to send more Singaporeans out."

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