I
believe my pedigree, persistence and strong passion for excellence has helped
me greatly to rise to the highest echelons of my career. All the efforts and the time I invested into my academics and thereafter my professional life are the
key reasons for my success today.
Tell us
about your background, journey and upbringing
I was born in a
small city in Uttar Pradesh. My dad was a Civil Engineer and my mom was a
homemaker. Due to the transferrable nature of my dad’s job, I studied in
multiple schools in smaller towns of Uttar Pradesh till class 7th.
Class 8th onwards, we shifted to Lucknow (the capital city) and
stayed there till class 12th. Despite few transfers, my mother
ensured that I and my elder brother got the quality education that we deserved.
She decided to stay alone with us in Lucknow while my dad completed his stints
in other cities.
I grew up in a very liberal family where I was told to chase my dreams no matter what. I don’t
recall a single instance where I felt that I was treated differently or told to
pursue different goals due to my being a female. My mother herself was a
Masters in Science and though she sacrificed her opportunity to work to take
care of the family, she always encouraged me to follow my dreams and ambitions
and take my career pretty seriously.
I have loved
maths and science since my childhood. As I grew, clearing JEE became the only
dream for me. I think these were the years that instilled a sense of focus and
pursuit of excellence in my personality. In 2001, I cleared my JEE and joined
IIT Roorkee in Electronics and Communications Engineering. I worked for a few
years after IIT and then decided to pursue management. I joined IIM Calcutta in
2008.
How did you
rise to the highest echelons in your career?
I believe my
pedigree, persistence and strong passion for excellence have helped me greatly
to rise to the highest echelons of my career. All the efforts and time I
invested into my academics and thereafter my professional life are the key
reasons for my success today. Also, choosing a career track that excites you is
very important. Till today, I don’t feel Monday blues – Mondays are rather
exciting for me when I get back to the office and catch up with my work and
colleagues. I am someone who gets excited by a business problem and is
comfortable in structuring a problem, identifying and evaluating potential
solutions and then working with cross-functional teams to ensure its
implementation. Ownership of delivery is also something which I enjoy.
What does
your typical workday look like?
Getting up at
around 7 am to catch up with my newspaper along with a cup of morning tea is a
daily routine for me. It gives me an hour before my kid gets up and I am able
to catch up with last night work emails, messages etc. 8 am onwards, I spend
time with my kid getting her prepared for school.
9:30 officially
is my start time for the day – a typical workday would include a mix of
meetings with multiple stakeholders as well as time to spend with my team to
come up with solutions/ deliverables. Given, I work in a global role, my
timetable is pretty scattered and don’t have a fixed starting and ending time.
I have daily meetings scheduled during different times of the day - US/ LATAM
scheduled during late evenings or early mornings, SEA/ Japan meetings are
scheduled during the first half of the day while Europe is towards the second
half.
All the time
between the meetings is what I spend with my team understanding their progress,
brainstorming with them and guiding them with problem-solving frameworks and
reviewing the project charters. Currently, the situation is different. But,
Pre-covid, travel also constituted a part of my job description.
I always end up
my day planning for the next day – I spend some time every day defining my
priorities for the next day, preparing for meetings/ discussions that are
scheduled and charting out a deliverable plan for myself. At the end of the
day, I will do a quick review of my day’s performance against the things that I
planned vs. the output that I was able to deliver.
Several
global companies have come out and thrown their support behind not needing a
formal education. What is your opinion about this?
I belong to an
era when one’s academic achievements and pedigree played an important role in
the entry process to a job. However, the career progression thereafter was not
that much correlated to one’s academic background. During the course of time, I
have seen companies transitioning to a newer philosophy of including more
people with diverse backgrounds (academic, work, etc.) Your work experience, EQ
and resilience are being valued more than your formal education during the
selection process.
Even the New
Education policy being adopted by the Indian government is more in the favour
of individual choices and flexibility rather than routine fixed formal
education for everyone. Though I support the newer thought process, I believe
it’s still in a very nascent stage in India. Formal education continues to play
an important role in one’s personal and professional development. I believe,
what companies are looking for are add ons on top of your education – rather
than just going through the formal educational route, one should also try to
upskill themselves in newer technologies and concepts. But formal education as
a base still holds an important place.
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What is the
best piece of advice you would like to give to those who want to rise in their
careers in the corporate world?
I believe
choosing a career/ work that excites you is an important factor to grow. Also,
whether you continue growing in one field or you transition your career, one
should always try to look for opportunities to rotate across roles/ geographies
to get more exposure. Also, upskilling and continuous learning is important for
an individual’s growth.
How are
things changing in your domain, what role will data and information play in the
future?
I think in
today’s world, board room discussions are all based on data and facts. Fancy
slides are out and excel based reviews are being encouraged in senior leadership
discussions. Multiple MIS, BI tools, etc. have made access to unified data and
its analysis simple, quick and insightful. All major ideas are generated out of
data trends and business decisions are being done based on the early results
being captured rather than intuition. The strategy function works very closely
with the data analytics function anyways.
How do you
handle someone who has lied on their resume?
Any information
on your resume regarding academic institutes (college/ university name, course,
etc.), or previous organizations’ names are verified by HR teams through
relevant documents and background checks and any misrepresentations there are
taken very seriously. However, with respect to work experience and job
responsibilities, business leaders typically go deep while interviewing and
anything explained superficially usually doesn’t go well in interviews. I
believe all candidates do like to embellish their achievements up to an extent.
But I believe it’s less about what you have written in your resume and more
about how you describe your work experience and your approach to solving
problems/situations are the things that count.
Which is
your favourite book and why?
Choosing one book is a difficult one. However, I recently read the book “Difficult Women” by Helen Lewis and was pretty impressed by it. It takes you on a journey of 11 significant feminist fights throughout history. What I loved the most about this book is how the author sets the idea of “difficult” female pioneers which have often been unlikeable against the typical societal norms of women pioneers being more morally upright and sisterly.
She hasn’t portrayed these women as
some badass rebels but she wanted us to take home the idea of women being mean
spirited, contradictory and obstinate. I think we as mothers have to let our
daughters know that they don’t need to aspire to be likeable, submissive or
perfect. Being flawed/difficult is okay and sometimes those flaws can be the
contributing factors to their success.
Interviewed by - Bhavana N
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