Neelam Dhawan in top 50
By Ria Sharma

Fortune and Forbes are the two most successful business magazines in America.  Being market leaders in America ensures their ideas and reporting are picked up in most countries.

Fortune has just released its list of 50 Most Powerful American Women in Business. PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi is the most powerful American businesswoman. Technology heavy weights who make it to this list are Carol Bartz of Yahoo at No. 8, Ursula Burns of Xerox at No 9, Ginni Rometty of IBM at No. 11, Safra Catz of oracle at No. 12, Ann Livermore of Hewlett Packard at No. 13, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook at No. 22.  This American list includes many more women from Google, Hewlett Packard, BAE and eBay.

The Fortune list of 50 Most Powerful Global Women in Business has only one Indian woman operating in the IT, BPO and KPO sector.  While Chanda Kochhar of ICICI Bank makes it to this global list, Hewlett Packard (HP) India boss Neelam Dhawan is placed at No. 37.

Hewlett Packard (HP) India’s Neelam Dhawan has a reputation of being intelligent, hardworking, tough but fair.  The HP website describes here as

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Neelam Dhawan is the Managing Director of Hewlett-Packard India. She has countrywide responsibility for revenues and profitability and ensuring the greatest leverage from HP’s Services, Personal Systems and Imaging & Printing businesses. With a portfolio that extends to offshore activities, BPO, Software Engineering, Research and IT Services, Neelam is focused on shaping the company’s overall business agenda and leading its strategy and corporate development efforts to make HP the most admired company in India.

Previously, Neelam was the Managing Director of Microsoft India, a position she held from 2005 to 2008. During her tenure, she sharpened Microsoft’s strategic focus and improved its operating efficiency and execution, as well as its financial performance and customer focus. Prior to this assignment, Neelam held a variety of successful leadership positions in leading Indian IT companies, including HCL and IBM.
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While this is a very commendable achievement for the Indian tech sector, it would be interesting to see how this is reported in India.  You see, Fortune has a business relationship with one Indian media house and so few others may not give it the prominence it deserves.