Mukesh Ambani - 5th best CEO in the world

Mukesh Ambani, who heads India's most valuable company Reliance Industries, has been ranked among top five best performing CEOs in the world by the prestigious Harvard Business Review. Ambani, the only Indian to feature among top 50 CEOs, is in the same league as Steve Jobs of Apple, Yun Jong-Yong of Samsung Electronics, Russian energy firm Gazprom's Alexey Miller and John Chambers of Cisco Systems. He is also ranked number two among the top 10 emerging market CEOs with Miller at the top.

K V Kamath of ICICI Bank is the other Indian in the list of Top 10 Emerging Market CEOs. He is ranked at number 9. The Harvard Business Review said it ranked CEOs of large public traded companies in a study conducted over 2000 CEOs worldwide. The entire group represented 48 nationalities and companies based in 33 countries. It put Ambani in the list of "up-through-the-ranks leaders" along with the Samsung boss. "Among the up-through-the-ranks leaders on our list are Yun Jong-Yong, who joined Samsung straight out of college and worked there 30 years before becoming CEO, and Mukesh Ambani, who joined RIL in 1981, when it was still a textile company run by his father.

"These CEOs may not all be household names, but here's an objective look at who delivered the top results over the long term," HBR said, ranking Steve Jobs as the top CEO in the world. Jobs, it said, delivered a whopping 3,188 per cent industry-adjusted return (34 per cent compounded annually) after he rejoined Apple as CEO in 1997, when the company was in dire strait. From that time until the end of September 2009, Apple's market value increased by USD 150 billion.

He was followed by Yun Jong-Yong, who ran South Korea's Samsung Electronics from 1996 to 2008. "Yun is an example of a leader who has stayed out of the limelight. During his tenure he capably transformed Samsung from a maker of memory chips and me-too products into an innovator selling digital products such as leading-edge cell phones." Miller was number 3 followed by Chambers. HBR said none of the top three CEOs had a MBA. Ambani and Chambers were the only two on the top five to hold degrees in business administration.

"CEOs who were promoted from inside the company tended to have stronger performance than those brought in from the outside," said HBR. Several CEOs that were "most respected" according to other reviews were nowhere in HBR's top 50. These include Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Satoru Iwata of Nintendo, Sam Palmisano of IBM and Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil. Many other celebrity CEOs also failed to make the cut.

They include Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan, Sergio Marchionne of Fiat, John March of Morgan Stanley, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, Daniel Vasella of Novartis and Robert Iger of Walt Disney. "Some of these well-known CEOs have not necessarily done poorly; they are just not among the top performers in the world according to the total shareholder return they have delivered so far," HBR said. The likes of Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates do not find mention in the list as HBR considered CEOs who assumed the job no earlier than January 1995 and no later than December 2007. "On an average the top 50 CEOs increased the wealth of their shareholders by USD 48.2 billion," it said. They delivered a total shareholder return of 997 per cent during their time in office. That translates into a spectacular annual return of 32 per cent.

Obama appoints Indian-American to key post

Indian-American Suresh Kumar, who served as a special adviser to the Clinton foundation and was a news anchor in India from 1970 to 1985, has been appointed to a key administration post by President Barack Obama. Kumar, known for his expertise of public-private partnership, has been nominated by Obama as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service in the US Department of Commerce, the White House said in a statement.

Kumar, President and managing partner of KaiZen Innovation, served as special adviser to the Clinton Foundation where he worked with governments in Sub-Saharan Africa and corporate CEOs to establish private-public partnerships to stimulate economic development in the region. He previously served on the Group Operating Committee at Johnson & Johnson and as Vice President of Consumer Products for Latin America at Warner Lambert/Pfizer.

Kumar has published on global management and served as adjunct faculty member at the Schulich School of Business at Toronto's York University, Bombay University, and has been appointed Professor of International Business at Rutgers University EMBA programme. Between 1970 and 1985, Kumar was a news anchor on national television in India, according to the brief bio-data put out by the White House.

SP Balu Conferred with P.Suseela Award

Noted playback singer, Padma Shri SP Balasubrahmanyam was Conferred with P.Suseela Award on 30 Oct 2009. He is well known as a singer, artiste and dubbing artiste. He sang over 40,000 songs in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi languages.

Hyderabad woman to head American college of Chest Physicians

The American College of Chest Physicians has elected Dr Kalpalatha K Guntupalli, the only woman president of the American Association of
Physicians of Indian origin, as its first Asian American woman president.

Hyderabad-born Guntupalli is currently tenured full professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, considered one of the top 10 medical schools in the US, and also chief of pulmonary/critical care and sleep division at BCM.

She will be inaugurated as the new president of the 75-year-old ACCP Nov 1 in San Diego. With 2010 declared 'Year of Lung' by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies, Guntupalli hopes the AACP will take on a leadership role in "contributing to celebrate lung health around the globe".

At home, her priorities are to make the ACCP the 'one-stop shop' "for education, practice, management, performance improvement and monitoring and the advocacy needs of our membership." Guntupalli did her MD from the Institute of Medical Sciences, Osmania Medical College, Hydrabad, before migrating to the US in 1974 to specialise in internal medicine.

She has received numerous awards including the prestigious 'Parker J Palmer Courage to Teach' award for 2007 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, making her one of just 10 program directors to receive the honour.

She has also been honoured with the World Lung Health award by the American Thoracic Society.

Her particular passion is in the field of tobacco control programmes, and over the years she has developed anti-tobacco material in seven languages besides anti-tobacco cartoons for children, inspiring more than 2,00,000 children in India to spread the message about the acute dangers of smoking and tobacco chewing.

An educational CD titled 'Evils of Tobacco', developed specifically for South Asia and containing a 12-minute video documentary and 186-video augmented power-point slides for medical professionals, has been translated into Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu and Gujarati and is in use in dental schools, elementary and high schools all over India and the US. Guntupalli was also the founding director of SHARE-USA, a non-profit that undertakes several projects in India including outreach, preventive and interventional care in rural areas. She has served on the board of Pratham-USA, a non-governmental organisation that focuses on literacy projects in India for over six years.