Seek out disruptions to grow on new S-curves
Stories of Role Models
In school, I was a sportsman, who had to study too.
Average in academics, I was passionate about athletics. By the time I was 12, I had already represented the district and the state, in events.
My marks did not invite engineering adventures so I went for hotel management. My father’s friend’s son was doing well there. It was good enough for me.
This took me out of Kerala. Across the state boundary, Malayalam was scarce. Alas! I did not know much else.
Learning English became my priority. I realised how easy it is to miss internship and training opportunities if you can not express yourself well enough.
I hung around with a classmate proficient in English. We spoke mostly in English. It helped.
After graduation, I got a job in a small resort hotel as an operational trainee.
We had a kitchen which closed promptly at 3:30 every afternoon, only to open for dinner service, later in the evening.
One afternoon, a guest drove in with his family, closer to 4 o’clock. Their children were hungry. I ran to the kitchen and persuaded the chef to rustle up some food, even though he had closed for the afternoon.
After lunch that late afternoon, Mr. Rakesh Mathur handed me his visiting card. He was the Executive Director of Holiday Inn for Asia Pacific. ‘Come join us’, he had said. ‘We are always on the lookout for people like you!’.
I got hired at Holiday Inn in Ooty. I worked there for 2 years and another 2 at the Royal Meridien in Chennai.
Hospitality industry taught me that the customer comes first and always can do with a smile, if you have one handy.
I wanted to do more with myself so I enrolled in an MBA program.
After MBA, I got hired by Naukri.com. Only 2 of us made the shortlist from the interviewing batch of 50.
Later, I found, both of us had hotel backgrounds. Naukri - I think - got it right when they figured that hospitality guys have an obsession for customers.
A Naukri @ Naukri, changed my life. It was the first step to my sales career.
The initial years were a pressure cooker as we chased growth with a hectic pace of work. Not many survive the tempo, but if you are resilient, you do.
Over the next 10 years, I grew in a career in sales. I reached a point where this became routine too.
This was the 2nd time in my career.
The first time - I had moved out of the hospitality roles after reaching a plateau - done my MBA - and found a new mountain to climb in sales.
It was now time to repeat the act.
I spent my own money to attend a senior management program in IIM Calcutta. I started reaching out to people I knew, sounding them for new opportunities.
Early in 2014 - the startup culture in India was just beginning to emerge. I joined a startup active in the Big Data Analytics space.
It was a new landscape. I had to sell across Asia-Pacific instead of Bangalore. For sale, was an analytics service, instead of recruitment candidates.
I jumped right in and began to figure things out. I got active on LinkedIn. It was a great way to reach to leads, check them out and begin new relationships.
A year later, I tried a new S-curve jump, which did not work out, as expected.
For 15 months, I pursued a startup idea, whose time had not yet come. This time, my strength lay in knowing when to back off. I cut my losses and got back into a job in the HR tech space.
I think, how you handle misadventures is as important as how you handle the jumps between adventures - to build an overall successful career for yourself.
I would advise you to -
Follow your gut on when to start a new adventure.
Work really hard, to make it successful
Know when it is better to retreat, to live to fight, another day.
I did not pick up any which job when I moved back. I moved back to the HR tech space because it was now my differentiator.
I have since worked in succession with 3 different companies in this space.
Today, I work for TCS and head corporate partnerships for their edTech division.
I think my success is a combination of good fortune that the Gods smiled on me and me taking decisions and risks to consciously further my career, at the discontinuities.
You could do the same too.