The global background of UK’s new Prime Minister

A point I make frequently on this blog is that to be successful in today’s world, you must be global.

This applies to all professional class workers – as noted, 100% of my colleagues who moved up had global experience, and nearly all my former managers had global experience.

If you lack global experience your career will stagnate and plateau.

The UK has a new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Born in the UK, of ancestry that had lived in Africa, but originally from India and Pakistan. One grandfather was an MBE. His Dad was a doctor and his Mom a pharmacist. He attended private prep schools, then Oxford, and then abroad to earn a Stanford MBA. After that, he went to work for Goldman Sachs and obtained a U.S. residency visa (a.k.a. Green Card); he relinquished his U.S. residency permit recently.

His wife is a citizen of India, attended college at Claremont, in the U.S., and then earned a Stanford MBA. She worked for a Dutch company a couple of years before she and her husband founded the UK branch of InfoSys (her Dad is the founder of InfoSys in India). She maintains “non-domiciled” tax status in the UK, which excuses her from paying UK taxes on earnings from outside the UK. She apparently still retains her U.S. permanent residency permit and also has permanent residency in the UK.

The couple are worth about a billion due to their InfoSys share holdings (aka billionaires).

Little known but former PM, Boris Johnson, was a dual citizen of the United States and Great Britain. He was born in the U.S. to British parents; he relinquished his U.S. citizenship near the time he became PM, ostensibly because he owed taxes to both the US and the UK and wanted to end that.

The point: being global is 100% required to achieve major success in business or leadership.

Photo from Wikipedia: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – Wikipedia