LinkedIn:  Rajiv top CEO name
By Shalini Singh

While general social networking websites like Facebook and Orkut have the numbers in India, LinkedIn dominates the business and senior executive niche.  Many senior Indian executives can be found at LinkedIn, networking and sharing their knowledge. In March, 2011, LinkedIn had announced that it has a reached a major milestone of 100 million professionals signed up worldwide.

LinkedIn has just published its research titled ‘Top CEO Names across the globe: Brad, Bland or Brand?’  Its introductory paragraph says: “Are some names more successful than others? Is your name influencing your career (as David Brooks suggests, noting that Dennis is more likely to become a dentist and Lawrence a lawyer)? Or are both your career and choice of name influenced by factors like personality and values? Any attempt to explore these questions would need some cold, hard data”

The LinkedIn report continues

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Short Names, Long Names and the Gender Divide

We started by contrasting CEOs across the globe with the average LinkedIn professional to find the top names that are over-represented among CEOs. At first glance, the top CEO names are a reflection of the CEO demographics. Looking more closely, however, we observe a different trend: over-indexed CEO names tend to be either short or shortened versions of popular first names. Onomastics specialist Dr. Frank Nuessel  suggests that shortened versions of given names are often used to denote a sense of friendliness and openness. Female CEOs, on the other hand, use their full name to project a more professional image.

Short, four-letter names are even more popular in sales (Chip, Trey) but not in engineering (Rajesh) or the restaurant industry, where the top over-represented names are Thierry, Philippe and Laurent.

Monosyllabic CEO names are also not necessarily popular in all countries – here are the top over-represented CEO names across the globe:
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In India, the top CEO name, who is also on LinkedIn, is Rajiv.