Be creative, get out of your comfort zone and try different organisational roles. This is the advice top executives from Indian industry had for MBA students at IIM Bangalore.
The discussion was moderated by Rishikesha T Krishnan, chairperson, Corporate Strategy and Policy Area at IIMB.
“We want young professionals to get out of their comfort zones. Gone are the days when you say that you managed a thousand people under you. Size doesn’t matter now,” said Sanjay Purohit, member-executive council, senior vice-president and global head of products, platforms and solutions at Infosys.
Sean Narayanan, chief delivery officer at iGate, urged professionals to stop being generalists.
“There are many opportunities to grab and young professionals should start taking on different roles and join teams on the edge of the domain. It is about smaller, deeper pockets of domain knowledge,” Narayanan said.
Addressing a large section of engineering graduates, who worked in the IT industry before joining the EPGP, Narayanan said graduates are given 3-4 months training on-the-job as their skills are ambiguous.
“We have to do this as educational institutions are teaching hardcore engineering. The skill requirement of the future of quite different from what our project managers and delivery officers possess and I’m afraid the industry is doing little to help the talent pool in colleges,” Narayanan added.
“So far, we have been fulfilling demands. But today, we need to create demand, so we need more people to create demand by taking risks in whatever functions they are performing,” said Jyotirmay Datta
, global head of medical devices at Wipro.“We had a scintillating decade of growth, which is behind us now. We need to think of what we can do to take our $100 billion Indian industry at 20 per cent growth by 2020,” Datta added.
Narayanan said the Indian IT industry is at “interesting crossroads” and added that the burgeoning mobile and cloud platforms could give companies the required leapfrog. “The strength of Indian service companies in the last two decades have been their ability to innovate with good sourcing, costing and delivery models. The challenge is that we have not been able to build the front-end models like the very large IT companies,” he said. Emphasising on the importance of creating intellectual property (IP), Purohit said cost-per-employee in the Indian industry is destined to go up. “The game is headed towards depth in competency.”
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The present society is infused with globalization and movement of MNCs and TNCs across cultures and societies - this presents a vibrant environment in each organization. There are certainly no watertight compartments when roles are perceived in this context. Organizational roles have multiplied in different work domains. Conforming to one organizational role nurtured during management studies provides comfort zone to an individual, however sticking only to comfort zone does not provide much veracity and vibrancy. Hence, to face new challenges and to perform new roles not only leads to individual development but also helps in realizing organizational goals in a more comprehensive and systematic way. Your contention is very timely and vital.