|
|
 |
|
Hottest
Young Executives : The Business Today - June 20, 2004 They're
young, they're successful, and they're happening. The second Business
Today listing of the country's finest managers under 40. India
Inc. is getting younger. The basis for that sweeping statement is the
fact that the panel Business Today put together to identify India's
hottest young executive talent, a panel that comprised some of the
best-known executive search firms in the country, had no difficulty
identifying 25 people under the age of 40. The last time this
publication embarked on a similar exercise (See India's Hottest Young
Executives, September 29, 2002), the panel was hard-pressed to meet the
age constraint, and eventually extended the bar to 42. The times are
responsible for the sudden profusion of young executive talent-including
reserves, our list numbered almost 40-and, to flip the argument on its
head, surely, an economy that presents so many young people with an
opportunity to prove themselves cannot be anything but booming? RAJAGOPALAN 'BALKI' BALAKRISHNAN Lowe (previously Lintas) India was supposed to be the advertising
agency that attracted the best suits and the best strategy-minds, not
the finest creative pros. Until, a bearded bear of a man who was
expelled from Chennai's Guindy Engineering College for playing cricket
(an obsession with the gent) when he should have been attending classes
for the Master of Computer Applications course in which he was enrolled.
Soon, R. Balakrishnan was in Ahmedabad, watching some 180 motion pics
(another obsession) and participating in some mind-exercises, all part
of a six-month training programme at Mudra Communications. Then came a
seven-year stint at Mudra, Bangalore, followed by a short stint at
Lintas' Bangalore office. Soon, he was asked to shift to a city he
didn't really fancy, Mumbai, and take over as Executive Creative
Director. Ideas, not awards, are all that matter for this son of a
teacher and an insurance exec. "Nothing can match the feeling (you
get) when you know you have got it right," he says. "You must
be able to tell in an instant what will work and what's junk." A
creative animal himself, Balki is focusing his energies at Lowe at
(apart from writing great copy), creating an environment that helps
other creative pros deliver their best. Leadership suits the man who
loves spicy vegetarian food. In the four-plus years he has headed
creative at Lowe, he claims, he has done some of his best work ever. And
work is where you are likely to find him. Unless a game of cricket is
on. National Director, Global Tax Practice, Ernst & Young The Taxman Cometh The man who was picked by international tax Review as India's
leading tax adviser (in September 2003, and it is a Euromoney
publication) could have so easily ended up a cricketer. A smashed
knee-cap cost Mukesh Butani a chance to play competitive cricket, much
to the relief of his parents-dad wanted him to join the IAS and mom
wanted him to be a lawyer. And so, the man who once trained under the
legendary Ramakant Achrekar (Sachin Tendulkar's coach), and who, by his
own admission "was never good in academics in school" ended up
with a commerce degree before coming in 24th in the national ca exams.
By 31, he was a partner at Andersen. The desire to become a tax expert
was logical the way Butani sees it. "There are two vital things in
the world: life for which you need a doctor, and money for which you
need a taxman." And so what if he couldn't play competitive
cricket: the sport is part of the very fabric of Butani's life. "I
am biased towards people who have played competitive sport," he
says, referring to his approach to hiring. "They are resilient, can
work in teams, and accept defeat." MADHABI PURI-BUCH Seven key assignments in seven years: that's Madhabi Puri-Buch's
track record at ICICI Bank. And it all began innocuously enough in 1997
when, as the head of research firm ORG MARG's financial research
division, she called on ICICI's Nachiket Mor (now Executive Director)
with a presentation on financial intermediaries. Mor was impressed
enough to call her the next day with a job-offer. Since then, the gold
medalist from Delhi's hoary St. Stephen's college and Indian Institute
of Management Ahmedabad alum has done it all: head of corporate brand
management, CEO of ICICI Capital Services (under her, it became the
largest distributor of mutual funds, sold a record Rs 4,000-crore worth
of ICICI bonds), CEO of ICICI Web Trade (again, it became the leader
with a 65 per cent share of the market), and CEO of ICICI Home Finance
(she grew the home loanbusiness seven times in a year). Most of these
achievements owe something to Puri-Buch's mantra of ''zooming in'' to
understand the business and ''zooming out'' to get the big picture. When
ICICI and ICICI Bank merged in 2002, the lady realised she knew little
about banking; so, in keeping with her ''zooming in'' philosophy she
decided to learn all about it by getting her hands dirty with
operations. Another mantra followed-this one says that people multiplied
by processes raised to the power technology equals customer value.
Today, apart from operations and service delivery, Puri-Buch heads
transaction banking and technology (corporate banking) and the brand
management group. That's a bit, and the high-flying mother of a
13-year-old boy is still zooming in, zooming out. MEENA GANESH Four times lucky. That is how Meena Ganesh describes her work life.
Then, the lady has always been different (and not just in terms of
appearance; she is 5'8" tall, a few inches above the average for
men of her generation). A peripatetic entrepreneur-within organisations
or while running her own start-up, Customer Asset-Ganesh has played
multiple roles that range from coding to marketing to consulting to
grooming a team. And she has helped three companies, NIIT, Microsoft and
Tesco, find their feet in the Indian market and successfully started-up
and sold a company of her own apart from picking up some helpful
consulting experience during a three-year stint at
PricewaterhouseCoopers. ''Start-up DNA seems to be in my genes. I like
the freedom and the challenges,'' says Ganesh. Not surprisingly then,
the IIM Calcutta alum-she is married to K. Ganesh, a batchmate and an
entrepreneur in his own right; he started up and sold one of India's
first third party it maintenance and networking services firm,
IT&T-has always been open to challenges, whether it be new jobs, or
small things that have little to do with her work life. ''I once
challenged myself to learn to play the keyboard,'' laughs Ganesh, who
actually did so in four months. ''Right now, my challenge is to learn
Kannada.'' MANISHA GIROTRA Competition begins at home for Manisha Girotra. The Delhi School of
Economics topper is a rainmaker for her investment bank, just as husband
Sanjay Agarwal is for his, Deutsche Bank. These days, the self-confessed
deal junkie who says she is happiest "when winning deals" and
her team of 50 are busy with armloads of cross-border deals of the type
that has become UBS' speciality. Before she signed on with UBS, Girotra
worked at ANZ Grindlays and BZW Investment Banking (she led the team
that won the GAIL privatisation deal and spent 11 months at BZW,
London), but it is at UBS that the lady has come into her own. That
leaves the avid golfer-five years ago, she won a prize for the longest
drive at a Pro Am golf tournament organised by this magazine-little time
to indulge her pastime. Result? Her handicap has slipped to 16; still,
Girotra finds the time on Saturdays to don an apron and attend RapidX
cooking classes so that she can bake a signature dish for her year-old
daughter. That's not the only thing cooking. Several deals are, and two
ADR (American Depository Receipts) issues are already on the stove. 37/Managing Director, Adobe India Thriving On Discontinuity Anyone who believes the truly-nerdy cannot lead companies need only
look as far as Naresh Gupta. Let's prove the nerdy bit first: Gupta, who
routinely turns up for work in jeans and sneakers (and sometimes, a
blazer), is a gold medallist from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur,
and a M.S. and Ph D from the University of Maryland. His paper on
Process Planning addressed problems researchers had been grappling with
for years and received a honourable mention at the American Association
of Artificial Intelligence Conference and his doctoral dissertation on
Motion Vision was nominated for the Association of Computing Machinery
Distinguished Dissertation Award. "I worked on the foundation and
then disappeared instead of reaching for the obvious low-hanging fruit,
so people must be wondering who this obscure writer is," laughs
Gupta. Adobe India was born over a few days in 1998 when Gupta quit
Adobe to return to India (He was asked what it would take for him to
continue working for Adobe and famously answered "Adobe
India"). In six years, the organisation has grown to a 300-person
operation, and Adobe PageMaker 7.0 was developed almost exclusively in
India. That's something. SAUGATA GUPTA Failure is a great motivator. Saugata Gupta had everything going for
him: a chemical engineering degree from Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, and a post-graduate diploma from Indian Institute of
Management, Bangalore. Yet, Gupta failed to land a job with a company
that is still hot on B-school campuses, Hindustan Lever Limited. That
hurt. "I think that spurred in me a desire to prove myself, a
feeling that lasted for five, six years," says Gupta. Hindustan
Lever's loss was Cadbury's gain. In the nine years he spent with the
chocolate maker, including a one-year stint at its famed Bourneville
plant, Gupta proved his mettle over and over again. The launch of Perk
wafer chocolates in 1995 is something he still remembers with great
pride. "I not only got my hands dirty, but learnt how to
effectively galvanise all the corporate resources.'' Soon "category
fatigue" set in and when he got a chance to head marketing at ICICI
Prudential in 2000, Gupta grabbed it. "Insurance was just opening
up; it was a chance to do something different.'' At first the going was
tough; financial services was a completely different ball game . But
over the three years Gupta spent at ICICI Prudential, he did the rounds
working in functions as varied as marketing, product development,
customer service and business intelligence. The big chance came when
Marico approached him late last year. Now, four months into his new job,
Gupta's brief is to create a buzz around the company's products and take
them to the "next level". "Despite being a family-owned
concern the degree professionalism is amazing," says Gupta. And for
the record, fulfilling his brief may just help this avowed fan of
India's cricket captain Sourav Ganguly a chance to put one past Lever. PRASOON JOSHI That this magazine, an avowed proponent of eschewing the Vern in
English-language publications should choose to feature a headline with a
Hindi word (Matlab, and it means er...means) is testimony to the
movement pioneered by Prasoon Joshi, an MBA who has set the country's
imagination afire with advertising incorporating street-speak. "I
think I am successful when my work becomes part of people's lives and
conversations," says Joshi who pens Hindi poetry when not cracking
out an ad or two. And so Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola has become an ad anthem
of sorts, and Joshi, a star. Not that the last helps him at work.
"Creative people do not look up to anyone unless they
deliver," he says. "You have to lead by example." That he
has done, restoring the flagging creative sheen of McCann Erickson, and
helping the agency bag accounts such as LG, Pears, NDTV, and Dabur. And
for all those struggling to manage creative teams, the son of a civil
servant and classical music teacher has this advice: "With creative
people the lines between personal and professional space is blurred; we
can't be compartmentalised. Don't brush issues and problems under the
carpet." Joshi never does. ZUBIN KARKARIA When he was 12, Zubin Karkaria spent 45 days in a Parsi fire temple
training to be a priest. Even today the Bombay boy makes it a point to
visit the temple everyday on the way to work. Given the way his career
is progressing, the Gods are definitely smiling on Karkaria. Growing up
in Dadar's Parsi colony, Karkaria's first brush with what would become
his future profession came when in college. "My friend had a travel
agency, Orbit Travels, and before and after college I used to hang
around there." After joining SOTC, he was sent by the company for
an executive management programme, conducted by the National University
of Singapore in association with Stanford University, and cut his teeth
in the Trade Fairs unit taking delegations across Europe. This was
followed by stints in the then fledgling Incentives & Conferences
division, which organised large corporate- and dealer- trips, and in the
cash-cow packaged tours business. Along the way SOTC was acquired by
global travel major Kuoni. It was in the packaged tours business that
Karkaria really came into his own. He came up with a buy-now-pay-later
concept for holidays. "A detailed survey of the market told us that
while many people were eager to travel abroad, the upfront cash required
put them off," elaborates Karkaria. Today a tenth of Kuoni's 30,000
package tour customers opt for this scheme. Once upon a time, Karkaria
used to polish vintage motorbikes to unwind; these days he prefers to
unearth un-spoilt wildlife reserves. We can spot a logical extension of
his business there. RAVI KRISHNAN He's played cricket with Shane Warne and competed in the Australian
Open. It seems only apt that Ravi Krishnan, a Tamil from Australia heads
the world's best-known sports marketing agency, IMG, in India. In 1995,
Krishnan was the youngest of a four-man team sent by IMG to set up its
Indian operations. Starting off selling hospitality ( think boxes) for
cricket series, Krishnan quickly rose up the ranks, his eye for
opportunity helping IMG create several firsts. "In our business,
timing is critical," he says. Over the past nine years IMG has
organised some high-profile sporting (the Tata Open tennis tournament)
and fashion (Lakmé India Fashion Week) events, and facilitated some of
the biggest deals in Indian sporting history (like Samsung's over Rs
20-crore bid to be the title sponsor of the recently concluded
India-Pakistan cricket series). No other agency comes close. SHUBHA KULKARNI In 1989, when Shubha Kulkarni, a trained Carnatic musician and a
masters in social work from Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia signed on with
HCL-hp (the two companies had a hardware manufacturing joint venture in
those days), she wasn't prepared for what she would face: appearances on
behalf of the company in labour courts, managing unionised workers, and
surviving the HCL culture that, as the lady recollects "expects
everyone to hit the ground running". Kulkarni enjoyed every bit of
it. In 1992, she moved to IBM as its fifth employee in India. Her brief
was to grow the company's (it then had a joint venture with the Tata
Group) software operations. "IBM had terrific brand equity, but
aligning compensation structures (to India), and evolving best practices
in hr for a multinational was a real upside." In 1995, when IBM was
a 1,000-person organisation, Shubha left and signed on with hp. However,
her life continued to be as filled with key-events and challenges,
including the hp-Compaq merger and the synergisation of Digital
Globalsoft with hp. Today, hp's software operations is reported to be a
7,000-strong operation and Kulkarni is looking to hire laterally (read:
people with work experience). And to keep an eye out for the next
crisis. ASHISH KUMAR Blue doesn't get any bigger than IBM. picture this: in early 2004,
hp bags an it services (read: outsourcing of entire it requirements)
contract from Bank of India for $150 million (Rs 675 crore). The deal is
touted as the biggest-ever domestic outsourcing contract and analysts
wonder whether IBM has lost its touch. The answer is measured and
slightly slow in coming, but it does. In April, IBM India announces that
it has won a 10-year $750 million (Rs 3,375 crore) outsourcing contract
from Bharti Tele-Ventures. Scrupulously absent from the photo op when the deal was finally
inked was the quiet man responsible for the 18-month negotiation
process, Ashish Kumar, the Country Manager for IBM Global Services.
Kumar and IBM refused to speak to Business Today for this story, but it
is evident that the electrical engineer from Indian Institute of
Technology, Delhi and the management graduate from Indian Institute of
Management, Calcutta, is marked for bigger things within IBM India.
After all, the man and his team have ensured that IBM India starts each
of the next 10 years with revenues of $125 million (Rs 562.5 crore, and
that's the value of the multi-year contracts it has signed). Speaking to
Business Today earlier, Kumar had said, "These are large, annuity
based long-term deals which involve everything from consulting to system
integration to application development to deployment to routine
maintenance. IBM has done this internationally. We understand the entire
generation of technologies." Indeed, thanks to this deal and the
acquisition of Daksh e-Services, a business process outsourcing firm
(this was acquired not by IBM India or IBM Global Services, but the
parent), Big Blue has been the biggest tech story of the year thus far.
And Kumar has scripted at least part of that. part of that. PRATIK KUMAR As unflattering as this may be to the subject of this piece, it was
only when Wipro became the first company in the world to be assessed at
Level 5 of the People Capability Maturity Model (it is a model developed
by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and it
really is a big deal, a very big deal) that people sat up and noticed
Wipro's hr, and the man behind it, Pratik Kumar. If things had worked
out differently, Kumar, who hails from a family of doctors and
engineers, would have been just another successful example of the great
Bihari dream, making it to the Indian Administrative Service. While
majoring in economics from Delhi University he saw "people
mindlessly cramming to become another nameless, faceless
bureaucrat". He hated it. Gradually, he drifted to hr and ended up
at XLRI, Jamshedpur for a two-year diploma. When he graduated, he had
the option of choosing between working for a multinational he doesn't
wish to name and HMT. He chose the latter. He spent a year there and
insists he learnt all about managing scale (HMT then employed around
40,000). He spent the next two years at TVS Electronics. The job was
great, but it was based in Tumkur, a three-hour commute from Bangalore.
So, in 1992, when Wipro approached him, commuting-weary Kumar had no
hesitation in signing on. From 200 employees (Wipro Systems) then, Kumar
now oversees a workforce of 35,000 spanning 22 nationalities.
''Cross-cultural issues are something we work on continuously,"
says Kumar. ''Excellence is a moving target and we want to be the
best.'' The man considers it ''a honour'' a run the hr function in an
organisation that employs 35,000, but wants to find out whether he has
it in him to do other things as well. "I would love to have
cross-functional expertise," he says. ROHIT KUMAR Get a job you love and you will never have to work a day. Thus Spake
Confucius. Rohit Kumar has clearly taken that to heart. The man's zest
is writ large on his face and, fortunately for Wipro, it has translated
into success of the greenback variety: in two years, Kumar has more than
doubled the size of the company's Energy & Utilities practice to
$120 million from $50 million. Like most young professionals, Kumar is
quick to attribute the success to the entire team (which again, has
doubled in size to 1600 in the same period). Still, it is a well-known
fact in tech circles that it was Kumar who identified the global energy
management practice of American Management Systems as an ideal
acquisition target for Wipro, sold the story within the organisation,
and steered the integration process. Today it research firm Gartner
reckons Wipro is among the top 10 global it service providers in the
energy and utilities domain. Well, Wipro's gain is Infosys' loss in this
case. In early 2002, when Kumar, a University of Roorkee (now IIT
Roorkee and Kumar hates the place) and Wharton School alumnus wished to
leave the Valley-he set up the internet products group for Oracle;
earlier, he worked with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and Boston
Consulting Group-he was juggling offers from Bangalore's glimmer twins.
"I was attracted to Wipro's vision of an Indian company becoming a
global heavyweight," says Kumar. The avid squash player is sure
helping that cause. SANJIV LAMBA One day in 1989, Sanjiv Lamba, a young socially aware-he founded
Motivation, an anti-drug movement while still at college-chartered
accountant and a commercial assistant at Lipton India interviewed with
two companies ITC, and Indian Oxygen (BOC's precursor). The first
promised to get back to him; the second offered him a job on the spot.
And so it was that Lamba found himself doing "all the things no one
wanted to do, including photocopying documents and fetching coffee for
the bosses." Still, the company's work-group orientation meant the
young accountant got to work with senior managers. Over the next three-and-a-half years Lamba impressed the senior
management enough to earn a two-year stint at the UK parent of the
company, and off to London he went, wife (college-sweetheart Usha) and
one-month-old son in tow. He spent the first year in internal audit and
the second in corporate finance, backpacked across Europe with his
family, and filled up on theatre. "I learnt a lot about gases and
developed a world view that went beyond the accounts department of the
company," says Lamba. BOC Plc was pleased enough with his efforts
to extend his stint by two years, When he returned to BOC India as
General Manager, Finance in 1997, the company's finances were in a mess.
He was named Director, Finance, in January 2000. "In March that
year, we announced an annual loss of Rs 40 crore and wrote off Rs 79
crore... hardly a good omen," he grins. He worked on overhauling
the systems and "embedding new control mechanisms in
processes". BOC India clawed its way back into the black. Late in
2001 came an offer from BOC Plc to shift to Japan as Director, Finance;
then, BOC India decided to appoint him MD. Lamba was the 36-year old CEO
of a company where the average age of the employees was 43. He went out
and bought a book, How To Act Like A CEO, but realised that it made no
sense. And so he decided to follow his instinct, creating "an
organisational vision, establishing goals, and measuring
performance" at the macro level and "drilling the importance
of cash" at the micro. Today, the company is again regarded as a
blue chip. So where does he go from here? There's a buzz about a bigger
role for Lamba in BOC's global operations. But the man himself is not
saying anything. "If you look at my career, I've typically had
four-year stints. I'll have spent four years on this job next year.
Let's see what happens then..." ASHOK MITTAL If
it's difficult to find investment bankers with hobbies is it because: You wish the answer was c but, rather disappointingly, it's A. And
perhaps a bit of B, as Ashok Mittal will testify. Whenever he isn't
travelling-three days a week-he's doing 12-13 hour stretches.
"There's plenty of excitement and glamour, but it's also hard
work," quips Mittal, who's been doing mergers and acquisitions
along with equity-raising for 12 years now, six of those at Lazard
Capital. Mittal was at the forefront of India's "first real
disinvestment," of IBP. If he's disappointed with the new
government's policy of not meddling with profitable psus-hsbc after all
has (or should that be 'had') the mandate for the disinvestment of
Hindustan Petroleum-Mittal isn't showing it. He'd rather look forward to
the privatisation that's on the anvil, of, for instance, airports: HSBC
is the financial advisor for the 50:50 JV formed between Sunil Mittal's
Bharti group and Changi Airport of Singapore to bid for the
modernisation of the Delhi and Mumbai airports. Mittal, whose team is at any given time working on 10-12
"fairly active" transactions, also expects M&As to pick up
in cement, telecom and pharma. And he's hopeful of foreign investment
picking up in industries like power. If that happens, 12 hours at the
office would provide Mittal with the kind of buzz that even bungee
jumping or para-gliding can't. PANKAJ MITTAL The very fact that Pankaj Mittal is now trying to staff Delphi's
China operations with the right people is a measure of the man's
success. So, the "strict vegetarian" travels 25 days a month
all over Asia, works 15 hour days and smiles-he should-about the fact
that he has "an extremely understanding family." Mittal
believes in details, a trait he picked up at the Usha Shriram Group-he
signed on as a trainee and worked with it for seven years on a hotel
project, doing everything from buying the land to recruiting
people-before he took a sabbatical for a degree in law, a certification
in cost accounting, and a MBA (from Delhi's Faculty of Management
Studies). True to form, he started as plant human resources manager at
Delphi eight years ago and worked his way up. Today, 80 per cent of the
firm's 1,300-strong workforce has been hired by him. Not too many hr
managers can make that kind of claim. -Amanpreet Singh PANKAJ RAZDAN When he isn't deciding how and where to deploy some Rs 15,000 crore
of investor wealth Pankaj Razdan is either working out (45 minutes post
10 p.m.) or learning Hindi classical music, or partying (on weekends) at
Mumbai hotspots like Enigma and Rock Bottom. But as Managing Director of
Prudential ICICI-an asset management company that's a 55:45 JV between
Prudential Plc, a UK insurance company, and ICICI Bank-Razdan is of
course most busy leading the charge of his mutual fund's 17-odd schemes
in a highly-competitive market that involves managing a total of some Rs
160,000 crore (the total market size) of cash. If that appears an awfully-huge stash, Razdan for his part isn't
exactly impressed. "That's peanuts. Penetration of MFs is still
just 0.03 per cent. We have barely scratched the surface." To
appeal to more consumers, a better understanding of their needs is
necessary, he adds. Razdan is perhaps best placed to develop that insight, not because
he's a veteran of sorts in the fledgling mf sector but because of the
wealth of experience he's collected in Indian markets. And how! In the
early nineties, he chucked up a cosy engineering job at Tata company
Nelco, and plunged headlong into the stockmarkets. His timing wasn't the
best. A certain Harshad Mehta was running riot, and by the time that
artificial boom turned to bust, Razdan had "lost a lot, but learnt
even more." If investors in Razdan's funds are getting a bit edgy by the first
half of that statement, a quick run through what he's been up to since
the Mehta-triggered bourses scandal should put them at ease: He set up
the Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Delhi offices of Kale consultants (today a
major software products and services player), moved to Pru ICICI in 1998
at inception time, took charge of sales and distribution for the western
region, in a couple of years moved on to head that function nationally,
took charge as deputy MD in 2003 and early this year assumed charge as
MD. Barely months into the hot seat, and the fund was slammed for
switching pf funds into equity. Razdan acknowledges there was a fraud,
but assures he's taken adequate steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.
If investors aren't impressed by the action taken, they should for sure
be by Razdan's transparency: It's not often you find CEOs admitting
frauds do happen at their companies. ARNAB SEN There must be something different about a young man who walks away
from McKinsey & Company after an all-too-brief stint to be an
entrepreneur. There is and there isn't. The career of Arnab Sen, a
"poet at heart" and a "high risk taker", both by his
own admission, is typical up to a point: a degree in electrical
engineering from IIT, Delhi, followed by a diploma in business
management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a campus
placement with McKinsey & Company (Sen came in second in a batch of
200). The atypical part comes from his role models, people who have made
their mark in the world starting virtually from scratch and preferably
against all odds. That could explain why the consultant left the Firm in
early 2000 when he spotted an opportunity in the technology side of the
hospital services business. The result was Emedlife Health Services, a
company he co-founded with two colleagues and with the Burman family
that runs Dabur. In 2001, Apollo Hospitals acquired Emedlife and Sen became the
company's point man for initiatives in telemedicine, web solutions, and
other such technology services. "He inspires an element of trust,
faith and fairness," says Namit Agarwal, Vice President and Head,
Operations (BPO), Apollo Health Street. Agarwal should know: he was
Sen's batchmate at IIM-C and left a fast-track career at Citibank to
sign on with Emedlife. "He is cool at work, yet has the ability to
transform even a normal team into an aggressive one." Sen, the son
of a psychology-professor couple has already worked on key healthcare
informatics assignments for the Ministry of it, World Health
Organisation, the Government of Kerala. And he lists engineer-MBA wife
Swati Karkun Sen- "she probably believes more in me than I myself
do"-as a big help. Significant other, significant support system. SUDIPTA SEN Growing up in Kolkata, all Sudipta Sen Gupta wanted to be was an
astrophysicist. She nearly became one: after completing her bachelors
degree in physics at the city's Presidency College, she enrolled for the
masters. Then came a year of what she calls "soul-searching".
She learnt German, dabbled in theatre, and read anything she could lay
her hands on. It did not take long for Sen Gupta to realise that she
wasn't cut out for a career in research. So, she packed her bags and
fled to distant Delhi for a management degree from the Faculty of
Management Studies. Two years later, she was working for Coca-Cola
India. "I wanted to work for the biggest possible brand and it
didn't get any better than Coke," she recalls. For four years she
cut her teeth selling sugared water; then, in 2001, she quit to sign on
with Café Coffee Day, a retail chain promoted by a then-unknown
Bangalore firm, Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company. "I knew
retail had great potential," says Sen Gupta simply, explaining the
rationale behind her move. Then, the company had 14 outlets in five
cities; today, it boasts 153 across 37. Much of the growth has come from
innovations introduced by Sen Gupta and her nine-member team:
merchandising, loyalty programmes, an in-café magazine, and specialised
formats such as book- and music-cafes. "A lot can happen over
coffee," say the business cards of all Café Coffee Day employees.
Sen Gupta, who likes to travel or whip up Bengali delicacies for her
husband, Marut, the Head of Confederation of Indian Industry's Western
India Operations, believes it can. SANGITA SINGH Married at 22, saleswoman for Borland, Adobe, and Microsoft
products, sales manager for Kerala and Karnataka, youngest vice
president at Wipro (and arguably, the first woman to hold down a senior
position in the still-slightly-old-fashioned company), chief marketing
officer, custodian of the global Wipro brand, mother.... phew! That's
Sangita Singh for you: dimunitive, almost frail in person, fast in
speech, and a bundle of energy in action. Not surprisingly, her stated
goal is to position Wipro among the top 10 it services brands in the
world. "There is no magic bullet," she says. "It needs a
series of small, incremental, yet very important things." Well, if
Wipro's now-ubiquitous appearance in the global press is any measure the
company is getting there, and Singh's hand is beginning to show. PRANEET SINGH If there was more happening in the auto sector when I graduated, I
wouldn't have ever left my core area of mechanical engineering,"
laughs Praneet Singh, a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi, and an auto- and aeroplane-enthusiast. Well, he did, and the
results have been nothing short of the spectacular: A post-graduate
diploma from IIM C, stints at Godrej Soaps and P&G, and seven years
at McKinsey & Company (where, among other things, he gained insights
into the US, Latin American and South African markets). In late 2003,
Singh moved to Nicholas Piramal, and is likely to be there (or at least
in the industry) for the next five years. "You need to last at
least five years in an industry to have any kind of impact," he
says, interjecting that his choice of companies is driven by "the
people there". Well, the man himself is said to have some skills in
the 'people' domain. "(He is) an outstanding leader of
people," says Rajat Gupta, Principal, McKinsey & Co. He will
have enough opportunities to prove that at Nicholas Piramal. SUMANT SINHA For someone armed with a masters in international banking and
finance from Columbia University, and who's done stints with Citigroup
and ING Barings in New York before taking on the mantle of Corporate
Finance Head Honcho at the Rs 27,000-crore A.V. Birla Group, it can't be
very flattering to be known as son of a Finance Minister. Or rather, as
things stand today, the son of a former fm. A big reason for that
phenomenon could be that Sumant Sinha is still young (37, in fact) .
"And that (the fact that he is under 40) may (also) be the biggest
and only reason for me featuring in your list," chuckles Sinha, who
maintains that he doesn't "carry it-that he is Yashwant Sinha's
lad-on my shoulders." What he does carry with oodles of responsibility and élan is the
corporate finance function at Kumar Mangalam Birla's companies-which
involves both external-facing functions like M&A and investor
relations as well as more inward-focused roles such as planning and
budgeting. Typically, the November-March period is when Sinha has his
hands full with the internal-facing oriented tasks thanks to the fiscal
year-end deadline. During the rest of the year, Sinha's team pretty much
functions as an in-house investment bank, sniffing for acquisition
opportunities, keeping in mind the mandates handed out by the various
business heads. "We assist if there is inorganic growth to be
done," (under)states Sinha. Such "assistance" has been in ample display over the two
years Sinha has spent with the A.V. Birla Group. For one, Hindalco has
been transformed into a much larger company with a diversified metals
portfolio. For another, the acquisition of Larsen & Toubro has
propelled group company Grasim to leadership position in the cement
industry. Sinha clarifies he is always a part of a larger team when
working on such deals, which typically also includes the head and the
CFO of that particular business and the Chairman. Sinha acknowledges the difference between working for an investment
bank and a corporation. "As a banker implementation doesn't matter.
Today, I have to live with the consequences of what I dictate."
He's doing that pretty well so far. MURALI SUBRAMANYAN My job is not stressful," smiles Murali Subramanian, confessing
that he manages to steak an extended 40-minute luncheon break in a
workday that is just a tad short of 12 hours. Still, there's no denying
the fact that the graying-at-the-fringes six footer who holds masters
degrees in statistics and computer science from Madras Christian College
and the University of Texas, El Paso, is key to Oracle's Indian and
global strategy. Subramanian, a table tennis enthusiast who loves a game
with his colleagues-he is ensuring that the company's new campus in
Hyderabad, where he is based, "will have plenty of table tennis
tables" cricket nets, and a state-of-the-art gymnasium- heads the
Hyderabad centre that employs a sizeable portion of the total 5,000-plus
staff of Oracle India and is completely responsible for the company's
e-business development group. He deserves that 40-minute break. ARUN TADANKI Not too long ago, Arun Tadanki was the head of sales and marketing
at Jobs Ahead, a jobs portal (yup, it's a dotcom), the IIT Madras, IIM
Ahmedabad alum's second job after Nestle, where, among other things, the
built the Polo brand (he still nurses a Nestle hangover and names former
CEO Darius Ardeshir as a role model). He admits he took too long to
"figure out the market". He got a second chance when he signed
on with Monster India as its head. There the movie-buff-he sometimes
watches four movies back to back and insists that he has no "flashy
hobbies" like golf-learnt all about growing profitably and managing
by instincts. "I am not interested in research; by the time it is
done, the market has already moved on," he says. Now that Monster
has acquired Jobs Ahead, the man who insists he has to learn to delegate
more has an opportunity to set the record right. He probably will. The Panel That Chose
The Hottest StantonChase's
Venkatesh Shastry, Shilputsi's
Purvi Sheth,
TransSearch's Atul Vohra, Accord's Sonal Agrawal, and Ma Foi's K. Pandia
Rajan. |
|
Human
Resource Development & Shilputsi | Our
Services | HR
Consulting & Advisory Services | Recruitment
Services | Assisting
in Partnering for Outsourcing Business Processes
| Partial List of Our Clients
| Our Management | Our
US Office| |
|
|
