Careers@SOM

Just thought of posting the following assignment from the careers course being taught here at SOM. To give you a brief background, this assignment reflects some of our thoughts on how we would model our careers. The motive is to give it a sense of direction. Some food for thought for me. I hope it is a good read:
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There ran the following line in one of the careers section in a newspaper in India some three years back. This is roughly when I started my career too.

“I met him for the first time at this famous pub. At first sight, he seemed to be no different from any other guy in late twenties in the room except for he was different from every other guy in late twenties in the room”

The person being described above was the Puma India head back then. As far as I can recollect he was twenty nine years old then. Puma had decided to venture into the Indian market and kick off its Indian operations and it hired him to head their strategy group. And I thought back then, this is how I would like to come across to people at some point during my career (hopefully when I am still in my twenties!).

As I look back at my career and life thus far, I would say it has been pretty consistent. I got into one of the top engineering colleges of India- IIT. I got into a good firm out of campus giving me exposure in the Indian outsourcing industry. The quality of work experience was awesome as I interacted with some of the top shots in the Indian software industry. And now I am at Yale.
It isn’t that I am exceptional of any kind. I don’t consider myself a store house of intellect power. I am just one of the many who have toiled hard to accomplish milestones in their lives. A lot of this has to do with the aspiration level that is configured in our minds when we are growing up. The aspiration level or the reference bar that we set for ourselves, since then, has been constantly rising. It is an inseparable part of human nature to want more. The human spirit is never satisfied. I strongly feel I am one of those people who always want more and more from life. I am one of those who would keep flipping the radio channel to find out the best song instead of just hanging onto a decent song playing right now.

And the exact seem philosophy is reflected on my life and career. Progressively, as time has passed, I have started believing strongly on the qualitative aspects of things. And this deeply relates to the intellectual perspective involved in viewing things. My main focus has, over the years, shifted to intellect maximization. I get attracted to opportunities where I see more learning. I get excited by areas unknown to me. The sheer possibility of some scope for learning excites me and something in me wants to be a part of it.

Introspectively, I try to reason out why it is so. Why is it that I am particularly excited by learning? It dawned upon me while seeing those videos in our class that all the individuals showcased were self driven without exceptions. One of the core indications of this is the knowledge that an individual possesses. Successful people share this common trend among themselves- thirst for knowledge. And I was delighted that I experience the same yearning for knowledge too. Learning is a never ending process and no amount of learning ever goes waste. It is knowledge that makes one self competent and I guess this is how originality and individuality becomes an integral part of one’s personality.

So, roughly, the above ‘theories’ have been the fundamental guiding principles of my life and career. The following would describe how I see myself, say, ten years from now.
‘CEO, XYZ Consulting, India- specializing across industry group and functions- on the lines of Mckinsey maybe. (This maybe a bit ambitious!)

Typical projects- Telecom Strategy, government, corporate governance, regulations, public sector consulting.

Impact- touching lives, touching people!

What I envision to do through my career is create an impact on the community and the people. I truly believe that there could be nothing more rewarding than, for example, to see a farmer residing in deep rural India being able to negotiate the prices of his produce through high speed internet on a smart phone. Imagine when if we have a network of such farmers. The possibilities are limitless. We could have a futures trading market for fruits and vegetables. The efficiency of the market could reach new levels. The standard of living would get better. And this would happen across the 70% rural population of 1.2 billion strong India!

This is Impact.

This is what I want to achieve in my career. There might be different approaches to this but the above is the gist of my final destination. I came to SOM thinking about my final goal and I expect SOM to stretch myself and make me deliver. During my two months here at SOM, I have been a part of multiple student clubs and academic courses. I will summarize what I have learnt from this and will try and relate this back to the modeling of my career.

Firstly, I learnt about the dynamics of careers of successful individuals and how as they progressed in life they constantly adapted themselves to new strategies while always keeping in mind the final goal they wanted to achieve. Well, their goals did change at times, but the satisfaction coefficient from these goals remained at the same level. (They were on the same indifference curve! – Dean Oster). And they all employed various short term and long term career tactics to inch towards what gave them more satisfaction. Here came my learning point no 1:

It is okay to experiment as long as I can learn and find it useful in the larger scheme of things.

How does this transform into my career decision?

I came into SOM thinking I wanted to get into consulting. The primary driver for this was the gamut of quality client and industry exposure one receives in a short span of time in this industry. The various case studies and alumni profiles during our course made me realize that this is one time in my life where I can experiment and reach out to new things.

I am starting to like finance. Having attended Finance corporate presentations, I found out that the investment banking role specifically relates well to the industry exposure and impact that I envision in my career. Working across industry groups and functions would give me a good grip of the skill set required to launch my own firm in the long term. The consulting industry of course runs on a parallel track and gives me the required pre-requisites to my long term vision as well. Another area of my interest is strategy. It is thrilling to learn about how strategists turn around companies and organizations. It requires a great amount of skill to accomplish these tasks. Thus, broadly speaking, I would like to get into one of the three above mentioned areas. I have opened up different roads that could lead to my destination.

Secondly, I learnt about the work-life balance. I learnt how I important it is to value the relationships that we have and might develop in future. As one gets older, these relationships become more and more important. The exercise in class that took us back to childhood forcing us to imagine what values our parents have imbibed in us was an eye opener. All these things had quietly shifted to the background in wake of the fast paced life in job and changing situations over the years. Intrigued by this, I got into a similar conversation with JP Morgan Managing Director and he said, ‘in the next ten years, if you ask me my most cherishing moment of my career, it will not be a big deal or a big Merger or a big IPO that I had facilitated but it would be all those important relationships that I have made with people till now. The deals, IPOs etc won’t make way into my life when I am done with my professional career but my relationships will.’

Thus came my learning point no 2:
Work life balance is very important to keep us ticking. Our relationships infuse the much needed fuel in us in the present fast paced world.

This learning is critical as I foresee undergoing personal transition when I marry in few years. It is important to realize that we have reached this position in life because of our parents and all those people who had supported us when we were growing and were ignorant of the many challenges and facets of life. Ultimately, these are the people we live for. I might have to shift locations to take care of my parents or to be with my wife but I am sure that with this mindset, I would be able to adapt myself well to these changes and transitions. After all, there are always different tracks leading to the same goal.

As I commit myself to a particular career path described above, I am also working on a specific value proposition that would help me differentiate myself and make me unique. This value proposition would summarize my experiences, my values as a human being and my goals. I am specifically looking to get into Investment Banking or consulting as these are the tracks that will help me in the realization of impact that I envision to bring to the community. I mean to branch out in another five to six years after gaining relevant experience across multiple domains. This is also when I expect to go back to India to learn more about the local business dynamics. In the mean time, I would want to develop a double and triple bottom line model that might outline, on a very broad level, the objectives of my firm. All this combined with my SOM experience, the Yale brand and the relevant industry experience will help me put together a sound and strong foundation of a firm whose value proposition would be to make an impact on the community, enrich lives and make the world a better place to live.

I have put a tentative time frame of ten years to be on the above spring board!
I might not be known as the ‘different’ guy in early twenties but I would be equally content if I could achieve all of the above in my early thirties as well!!