(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you harbor any doubt that a global view contributes to business success, consider this remarkable fact: Four of America's ten most admired companies are run by immigrant CEOs. J.P. Morgan's Dennis Weatherstone moved from London to New York City in 1971 for what he thought would be a four-year stint at Morgan's headquarters. His son learned to walk on the journey over aboard the QE II. Coca-Cola's Roberto Goizueta worked for Coke as a chemical engineer in Havana before leaving Cuba after the revolution. Livio DeSimone grew up in Montreal and joined 3M Canada out of college before being posted to the U.S. three years later. Rubbermaid's Wolfgang Schmitt spoke no English when his family moved from Germany to Ohio, only a few miles from his company's Wooster home. As companies increasingly cross borders, they're apparently better off run by executives who have done the same. Morgan's senior management group includes a Cuban-born American, a German, and two Americans, one of whom worked in the Middle East, the other in Britain. Schmitt notes an advantage of his experience: ''It gives you a certain empathy for minorities, because you've been one.'' The conflicting pulls of loyalty to one's country of birth and gratitude to one's country of residence can be wrenching, even for such a cosmopolitan cohort. Says Weatherstone: ''I decided that if we stayed in the U.S. for ten years, we should review whether we ought to become U.S. citizens as a matter of social conscience. After ten years, I could not bring myself to become a citizen.'' After 15 he could -- but he retained his British citizenship as well. These executives sometimes reveal a migrant's desire for permanence, a need to put down roots. Weatherstone and his wife, Marion, have lived in the same Darien, Connecticut, house since they moved from England. ''We wanted to give the children a sense of stability that we had taken away from them by bringing them here, where they have no relatives,'' he says. When someone spends his entire working life in different countries but just one company, his identity may be as much corporate as national. Cuban by birth and a long-time American, Goizueta told Time in 1985: ''I suppose I am of the Coca-Cola culture.'' Adds 3M's DeSimone: ''Two-thirds of our top 100 managers have spent more than three years outside the U.S. They are comfortable anywhere.'' These and other CEOs on the list might be called postnational executives. The architect of the dramatic turnaround at Compaq Computer (No. 142) is a German, Eckhard Pfeiffer. Anthony O'Reilly of H.J. Heinz (No. 131) is Irish but calls Pittsburgh home. As Labor Secretary Robert Reich once asked: ''Who is us?''