Executive chairman: Infosys
Born: Aug. 20, 1946, Mysore, India
Education: Electrical engineering at the University of Mysore and India Institute of Technology Kanpur
The most significant change to the management of large companies in the U.S. and Europe over the past 25 years has been the outsourcing of back-office processes. Much of that work has ended up in India, at Bangalore-based tech companies such as Infosys and Wipro, and at Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai. No man did more to spark that revolution than Narayana Murthy, the visionary founder of Infosys, who is regarded as the father of Indian information technology. In building a multibillion-dollar software and IT services firm, he showed that Indian companies could compete with the best in the world.