NEW DELHI: IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Mastercard’s Ajay Banga, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen… the list of Indian Americans who’ve made it to the top job in the US is much longer than the names we’ve reeled off. How about CEOs with Chinese roots? Let’s see… John Chen of BlackBerry and Eric Yuan of Zoom Video leap to mind. But surprisingly, there aren’t too many others even after some frantic searches on Google guru.

So why do South Asians, especially Indians, make it but East Asians don’t, even though there are 1.6 times more East Asians than South Asians in the US? Researchers from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Columbia Business School, and the University of Michigan, who have studied the causes and pervasiveness of this ‘bamboo ceiling’ that blocks the ascent of people of Chinese, Japanese or Korean origin in major US companies, found that the reasons are actually cultural: those of ‘desi’ origin are more comfortable with assertive communication than their East Asian peers. By assertive, the researchers mean the ability to speak up, constructively disagree, and stand one’s ground in a conflict.