Present Occupation: General Manager – Strategy & Business Development
Sector: IT
Work Experience: 16 years
Professional Interests: Watching and tracking macro-economic trends, emerging technologies and Strategy as a function
Personal Interests: Avid reader, Music lover, amateur tennis player!

Tell us about yourself – your profile, your professional life after ISB including your career progression.

An Instrumentation engineer by background, my first industry stint was with Hindustan Lever Held a variety of roles at HLL over a span of 8 years in the Frozen Foods Division covering Technical operations, Process engineering and Automation, Manufacturing & Supply chain. My motivation for joining ISB amongst other things was to increase my awareness and knowledge from an overall business operations standpoint & explore relevant business roles in the technology sector.

Can you describe your ISB experience?

At ISB, I went about trying to arrive at a balance between academics & external assignments with the end goal in mind. I picked relevant electives and majored in two areas - Strategic Marketing and Technology. Apart from academics, I did a consulting project (similar to ELP) with Sasken related to account management of key accounts. I was also a part of the team that secured the third place in the ISB-Emory consulting challenge, where the team devised a market entry strategy for a company in the utilities domain. Besides that, I was part of a small team from ISB that won the second position in the I2I inter-business school b-plan competition – the annual event held by IIMC.

What was your key takeaway from the ISB?

In retrospect, I could apply academic learning to real world situations by being a part of external assignments/projects. The assignments helped me assimilate concepts better and second, they helped articulate my intent. And they helped me better connect the dots with examples to potential recruiters on why they should look at me for business roles despite a different past in HLL.

What was your career path post ISB?

My goal of working in the IT industry was realised when I was offered a Business Development role responsible for Mergers and Acquisitions in a newly formed team at Wipro Infotech. I am in my fourth role (in the past eight years) with the IT major. After starting off with the M&A role, I moved to head Inside Sales for India and then became the Sales Head for the Construction and Transport Infrastructure vertical. A couple of interesting assignments that I was a part of in the latter role were forming a joint-venture with Delhi International Airport (Wipro Airport IT Services Ltd) and a joint-venture with Lavasa, to provide IT services for the whole township –both unique partnerships in the India market! Currently I work as General Manager Strategy & Business Development, part of the Corporate Strategy office for Wipro’s IT business from the past year responsible for Strategy Planning, Business development and key initiatives that cut across the IT business as a whole.

How is Wipro as an employer?

Wipro is a great place to work for. It offers a lot of flexibility to employees in terms of getting exposure across the breadth of roles and also it has an open, flexible and employee friendly culture. Approaching and discussing thoughts /ideas with people across functions and businesses is as easy and open as it can be. This helps it build an open, friendly and a ‘entrepreneurial’ environment

Potential roles for MBAs in Wipro vary from Specialist roles (Pre-sales/ Domain), Consulting, Sales & Business Development Delivery (Project/Program management) besides functional roles such as Finance, Marketing, Strategy, Quality & HR

© 2010 Indian School of Business, Disclaimer.