My last 3 weeks have been amazing. After my decision to return to a corporate job and in a completely unfamiliar domain, I have been having a ball. On my first day of work, I gathered every bit of 19 years of my work experience in the banking and financial services domain, locked it firmly in a box and walked into my new organization with butterflies in my stomach. I joined the Interglobe Group as their Group CIO. Interglobe is in the travel, aviation , hospitality and retail business with plans to enter the education domain. This is completely unrelated to the domain experience I have carried so far, or rather enriched myself with ( as per my resume - what crap!).
My last 3 weeks have been amazing. After my decision to return to a corporate job and in a completely unfamiliar domain, I have been having a ball. On my first day of work, I gathered every bit of 19 years of my work experience in the banking and financial services domain, locked it firmly in a box and walked into my new organization with butterflies in my stomach. I joined the Interglobe Group as their Group CIO. Interglobe is in the travel, aviation , hospitality and retail business with plans to enter the education domain. This is completely unrelated to the domain experience I have carried so far, or rather enriched myself with ( as per my resume - what crap!).
On the 1st day of work, my walk, to meet my peers and subsequently my boss reflected my excitement that comes with a new job, hopes and aspirations I carry of making it big in a new place and nervousness with a bit of fear of walking into a completely unfamiliar industry domain(s). I did a final check for the nth time to ensure that I was not carrying any baggage of my past from my umpteen years of BFSI experience! These things just creep in onto you if you are careful !
The lack of knowledge about the domain , and complete lack of knowledge on the non-BFSI office culture (it's so easy to anticipate attitudes and the culture bankers bring onto the table), makes one rather extremely humble, and pleasantly so. This humbleness and humility of not knowing the domain has been such a great asset in my management arsenal. I wish I had walked into every new job after my first one with the same empty head, absolutely no baggage of the past and with a great deal of humility and humbleness.
I was lucky that I made a few right choices on the approach to my new role. I decided to enroll as a trainee and understand the business operations of all the six businesses of the group. Its been three weeks now and I am barely thru 60% of one business and about 20% of the second and there is a great deal of learning yet to happen. The joy of learning truely rediscovered after almost 23 years!
My first job was at HDFC Ltd. I had joined as a Officer - IT (read programmer) having been picked up as a part of campus recruitment process. As part of my induction I spent 4 hours manning the reception desk at the Churchgate branch, managing customer inflow. I spent a full day as apprentice to credit appraisers whose job was to interview potential mortgage borrowers and assess their loan eligibility. I spent time as an apprentice to loan disbursement officer, who hands over the disbursement checks to delighted customers. I went on some very exciting loan recovery visits with the recovery officers assigned to 60dpd and 90dpd buckets! Spent time in the accounts dept helping them with their day-to-day accounting jobs. HDFC was a place where I went thru the branch and backoffice operations as a trainee for a month. I was recruited to program and hadn't touched a terminal to code for the first 30 days! That initial first month stood me in great stead right through the rest of my career. Thanks to this experience I was never an easy prey to ivory tower syndrome. Have always been rooted to the ground realities all through my career.
Now after 23 years, I am doing the same; learning a new domain. Spent some amazing time in the flight ops centre, the planning centre, with the engineering team and the commercial operations. Looking forward to hit the tarmac in blue overalls to check out the preventive maintenance, flight landing and take off ops. Looking forward to meeting the sales franchise, get my hands dirty with retail business ops and walkthru the hotel buss ops. So much to learn and so little time. I wondered again, why do I feel that I have very little time. I realize that its my conditioning of having to deliver a fantastic success in the first 90 days of my job. I decided to put myself off this misery. I walked upto my boss and told him that I need a 90 day window to learn every aspect of the business operation of the group and come back to him on the potential the group carries to leverage each others strengths and synergies - group IT themes that would contribute to both topline and bottomline.
This will be a very exciting journey. The group had decided to experiment by creating for the first time a Group CIO role. This is a new position and it is fascinating to hear the expectations various stakeholders have from a position such as this. It will take a great deal of influence to align perceptions to ensure realistic delivery, given my lack of familiarity of the domain and the current state of readiness of the group companies to work in a matrix structure, that they are so unused to. Its going to be a very harsh test of my influencing capabilities and I am excited to give it a go. In another two days, it will be 30 days gone and 60 more to go! For me it's really back to the school after 23 years of work experience! Wish me luck.
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