Nilesh Shrivastava - Inflection Career Arcs From Evolving India

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Copyright 2017 Prakash Books India Pvt. Ltd.

Copyright Text Nilesh Shrivastava & Pushp Deep Gupta

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise (except for mentions in reviews or edited excerpts in the media) without the written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 93 8777 932 7

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Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
I dont much care where
Then it doesnt matter which way you go.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To the next generation, my son Naman

Nilesh Shrivastava

To my wife Shelly and son Garv and my parents
who put up so well with my idiosyncrasies.
To my managers, colleagues and clients who have
shaped the professional me!

Pushp Deep Gupta

We thank the 32 batchmates and friends who candidly shared their career stories with us and the many others whose stories we could not include, but who shared their ideas and insights frankly, as this book came into being. Thanks also to our agent, Kanishka, for his belief in the concept and for continuously egging us on.

CONTETNS

The idea of this book came about over a phone call on a summer day in mid-2016, with one of us standing in hot and dusty Lucknow, and the other in barmy Singapore. We are batchmates and have known each other for almost two decades. The meandering conversation eventually veered to our careers and the way they had evolved in the last eighteen years or so. Before it could gush into another case of midlife angst on a random afternoon, it metamorphosed into a broader question. We knew each other and had some sense of what the other had done; but what of the over 300 others who had passed out with us at the same time from IIMKolkata? More importantly, in these eighteen years, what had changed in the collective view of the batch in the way we viewed careers? Eighteen years also happened to be a good point to ask this question since it seemed roughly the half-life of a traditional working career. It was like looking into the rear view mirror before adjusting the gears ahead. It was also a rhetorical question embedded in curiosity about something we spend most of our days onour career and the assumptions we build around it.

With the internet all around usit was easy to dig out research on career journeys. One of us has been in the field of human resources, so could access even more of the formal research. However, as we spoke, any formal research seemed quite alien and foreign. The simplest way seemed to be to go out on our own and meet people, hear their stories and trace their career arcs and, in that process, reflect on our own careers and more broadly, what we had become.

We were half-way through our working careers. While the world view we had developed in all this time was rich in its experiences, it was certainly not unique by itself. Individually, each of us had gained a perspective of life and careers that could only be relevant to us individually. What was missing was a sense of comparison with peers and people in the same boat. In the early part of ones career, this comparison seems more like boxes on an excel sheet, with distinct items like designations and compensation, make of the car or size of the house. Hopefully, age provides the wisdom to look beyond the excel sheets and into the stories of transition, self-doubt, learning, and convictionall of which can have meaning beyond numbers. This is what we set out to do, painting career stories and arcs at a personal level while trying to draw out all that was common and uncommon among them. In that process, we were also trying to connect the flow of careers with the evolution of the person within.

None of the people whose stories we share are famous in the way famous is conventionally defined. They are not an Elon Musk or Steve Jobsat least not yet. They are however successful professionals in their own rightand many of them would certainly be well known in their respective fields, and possibly become even better known in the years to come. However, our focus is not what these professionals are in their fields today, but what they think about yesterday and tomorrow, and how that can make sense for many others. Importantly, we wanted to question the definition of the word successful with the innate sense in which it has evolved substantially over the past eighteen years. We didnt know what colour it was now from the simple black/white definitions of the past, without hearing it firsthand.

We are mid-career professionals ourselves, and we spoke to other mid-career professionals and entrepreneursmany of them in India but a number of them based across the globein Singapore, London, the US, and other places. It is a peek over the shoulder at peers, trying to make sense of the evolution of careers in a simple, empirical way. It is also a comparison of what we thought of the world when we passed out of B-school in 1999, and what we think of it now. We did not have that comparison when we graduated. If it does make sense for someone who is finishing B-school or a professional course, especially in terms of what the future could hold for them, then it is doubly an effort worth taking.

Professional success or longevity is not a function of a particular business school education or even of professional education itself. There are enough and more examples of people doing exceptionally well with virtually no education. The reason we chose the B-school batch of 1999 is purely as a baselinefor tracking a set of professionals starting from a common platform and then moving in different directions as India opened up its economy to the world. It certainly helped that we knew the batchmates and could access their stories.

Above all, this is also a personal journey. This book is the closest we would get to a batch memoir half-way down the roadmeeting people we hadnt met for over a decade, having them open up with a candour that we didnt expect, sharing common stories after ages, and re-connecting a little more for the future. We wish we could have met the entire batchas it stands dispersed across the globe and heard all their storiesbut it is our constraints that prevented that, and the loss is ours. While the stories we recorded are revealing and highly interesting on their ownwe know there are many more stunning career journeys out there locked in small worlds of their own.

Nilesh Shrivastava

Pushp Deep Gupta

I ts a bright, sunny day in Kolkata (it was Calcutta then). Hundreds of black graduation caps (323 of them, to be precise) are flung high and the air rings with loud cries of elation. Another batch of the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata (IIMC) has just graduated. Two years of gruelling classes, the politics of RG (relative grading), the freedom of campus life, the undiluted pain of preparing for campus placements (twiceonce for Summers and then for final placement), running up huge credits at Mohans (the resident tuck shop), the annual high of crossing the state border to XLRI, Jamshedpur for the sports meet, the late nights and midnight canteensall merge into this one single moment. The one moment when yet another batch of young management graduates from a premier B-school pause for a photo flash moment before embarking on the next phase in their professional and personal lives.