Saima Ikram
Born on July 12, 1972, Sundar, 46 now was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India in a Tamil family.
Sundar completed his early education in India. He did his degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering. Later he did M.S. from Stanford University in material sciences and engineering, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.
Pichai joined Google in 2004. In his early days at Google, Sundar led Google’s client software products such as Google Chrome and Chrome OS. He and his team also played an instrumental role in applications development and product engineerings such as Gmail, Google Drive and Google Maps.
Pichai was selected to become the next CEO of Google on August 10, 2015.
What did Sundar Pichai do that his peers didn’t and he accelerated his way to CEO of Google from a basic entry level PM in just over 10 years?
- Well, the first and foremost the most important thing is, Pichai led successful efforts for difficult projects as discussed above. They all were core to Google’s continued financial success and all became extremely popular in no time.
- Sundar led an amazing team in his 10 years of service at Google before becoming CEO. He recruited, closely mentored a great team. It is no open secret that Sundar’s team of product managers were known to be the best of the best in the business.
- Empathy, courteous to everybody at Google. He avoided making enemies. Mind you, Google has extreme politics like any other large company but Sundar acted smart and navigated his way to the top carefully.
- Sundar had this amazing ability to see the future. He could see what’s ahead and marshall his teammates to the important stuff at an important time.
- Focusing on results was the core feature of Sundar’s leadership all throughout different assignments.
- He cared for his people, he built amazing teams. He always supported hard working, result-producing people instead of political and opportunistic people.
- He has a great reputation for having fun at the workplace and keeps the spirits of his team high.
Apart from all the qualities, from the very beginning, he was in the right place to have an enormous impact on Google because of the amazing products he’d led.
Hard work, empathy, caring for his people, luck and the amaing team were few of the amazing attributes to the success of Pichai in just over a decade that made him navigate his way to the CEO of the company.
