A journey that had challenges and successes..

I look back those 40 years since my first days in an office….

The best part of career life for any individual is mid and late 20’s when you get introduced to a factory, a corporate set-up, an art world or a field work that provide you with loads of experience in understanding your customers, aligning your daily work to keep them happy, manoeuvring the challenges at work place and importantly, keeping pace with learning newer skills. I am no exception to this phase of life and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed working for corporates that were well known in the industry and at the same time learnt how one had to be always customer focussed to enjoy success. These corporate giants are still the leaders in their own industry having gone through a phenomenal growth.

Travel and work constituted a major part of my early work life, trying to find new customers and the good part of it was I could visit new places and befriend good people. Selling a varied product line was as exciting as a new recipe from your spouse’s kitchen and it gave an insight to industries, their customers and their success factors. Over these years I learnt the importance of improving the product or services to always keep your customers within your fold and later on when I had ventured into an entrepreneurial role, this aspect helped me to be always mindful of emerging customer trends and their expectations. In my late 30’s, I had an opportunity to indulge in social service and develop my public speaking and communication skills while serving a world wide service organization. That was also an important phase in my career when I had to take a few risks and seek a different career path. With income on a steady decline, I chose a new field, Information Technology in late 1990’s. In the beginning this was considered to be not a wise decision and there was every chance that I would be starting as an entry level programmer or junior business analyst at that age.

Thanks to the organization that had trained me to be an ERP Consultant, I was able to bring in all my functional experience into consulting and I could start my new career at a comparatively advantageous position than many of my colleagues. This move also had its own share of problems with dot.com bubble exploding at the dawn of the century. After a struggle for a year or two, I had to grab a new lease of life in moving out of the country for assignments. This gave me the required exposure to be on a firmer ground and there was no going back since then. The organizations that I had worked for in the first 10 years of this century, presented me ample opportunities to hone my skills in acquiring and retaining new customers with quality deliverables and be responsible to hire and mentor hundreds of budding and aspiring youngsters to take to Process and Business consulting as their professions. What is most satisfying in this stint was that I was able to take care of my family reasonably well, raise my children with good education / comfort and to build new homes as it offered me a much needed financial stability.

My decision to move to a well known global IT leader with an impeccable brand recall, certainly helped me to learn the pseudo- entrepreneurial side of running a business, provided me with a global exposure to different work ethics across geographies and to sharpen my consulting and people skills. It was indeed an fascinating experience to work with these multi-nationals and this has come handy TODAY to be able to continue my journey as an independent consultant after I bid adieu to a satisfied corporate life.