Success Crazy

The strange brouhaha over co-opting Satya Nadella’s achievement

A somewhat curious fallout of Satya Nadella’s appointment as CEO of Microsoft is the glee it has evoked among some because the man is not from an IIT. For example, a headline on NDTV.com on 10 February read: ‘An IIT-Manipal ‘Twitter war’ over Satya Nadella’. The report reproduced tweets in which Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) students jeered at IITians and wrung their 140-characters in glee because Nadella was from MIT. One believed the appointment would be good for MIT’s brand, implying students would now feel they could be another Nadella by going to the institution.

Does MIT have a reason to exult? It values merit and does not have a capitation fee system now, but in the mid-80s when Nadella graduated, MIT was an institution known mainly for catering to rich fathers who wanted to make their not-so- bright sons engineers. Nadella, a meritorious student, was more an exception to the rule of the times. Also, for that one rare Nadella from MIT, the list of present and past CEOs with IIT degrees could fill pages.

But it has little to do with education itself. It is the difficulty of entering its gates that makes an IIT such a reservoir of corporate leaders.

For 9,000 seats, half a million take the test. The Joint Entrance Exam for admission to the IITs is so tough that only the most brilliant students have any chance of getting through in the general category. High IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition; they also need to be hard workers to get selected. An IITian comes with the fundamental attributes of achievers even before he is admitted. Once in, students soon decide whether they want to be in ‘core’ or ‘non core’. The former are those who will go on to further studies and a career in their chosen engineering stream; the latter will join banks or management institutes like IIMs. Whatever they choose, the best companies will wait patiently to co-opt and groom them because they are a readymade outstanding human resource pool.

But what all this doesn’t change is that if students as gifted and toiling exist outside IITs, they will also make it big. They might not get the initial push of an IIT, but eventually, extraordinary ability and drive will always be met with demand. That is what Nadella symbolises.

The reaction to his appointment in India, however, reveals a greed to co-opt his achievement when we really had no part in it. Consider that Nadella’s Masters degree in computer science is from a university in the US. His bio on the Microsoft website says he was interested in the subject in India, but it was unavailable at his university so he was forced to take electrical engineering. Nadella’s MBA is from the US; his career has been shaped at Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. Nothing about his present achievement can be traced back to his country of birth. He might be Indian by origin, but his success is hardly the result of that.

Take an IITian like Arun Sarin, who became CEO of Vodafone. He studied metallurgy before moving to the US and doing his Masters and MBA. It is hard to see how his eventual success had anything to do with his IIT education except for making it easy to go abroad. Nadella’s appointment excites us because of our obsession with achievement; our belief that, in some circuitous way, it rubs off on us.

It doesn’t—there is no substance in misplaced pride.

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