Plan with your people in mind

1. Plan with Your People in
Mind

2. The brief and what I did in the first 100 days
I joined Boston Consult ing Group (BCG) in the Mumbai office as a
senior associate. My first project was the module on risk management
within the larger project BCG was doing at the time for an engineering
conglomerate in India. I was required to study the various risks to the
business and to create a framework to assess and manage them on a
continuous basis. I also worked on recommendations for setting up the
risk management team and its mandate within the client organisation.

3. Contd..
The best leadership lesson I learnt
Organisations are made of real people with their idiosyncrasies, strengths and
weaknesses. No two people are alike. Any plan made in the abstract without due
regard to these specifics is of limited use in a real life set-up.
The worst mistake I made
Initially, I let my own strengths and weaknesses drive the priorities of my work
rather than the needs of the project. Being fresh out of business school, I preferred
making models to interviewing people. Hence, I focused more on the analytical
elements of the work and less on the people elements. My seniors corrected it over
time, but it would have yielded better results if I had done it sooner.
The best friend I made on the job
As it turned out, one of my best friends from campus (IIT-B as well as IIM-A),
RamganeshIyer, joined BCG with me. He continues to be a great friend. On the job,
I also met Ankur Maheshwari who became a very good friend and has remained so.

4. Contd..
How I managed my work-life balance
I did not do too well on that. Weekdays were mostly equated with work and weekends meant life.
However, it helped that my then-girlfriend Chhavi (now my wife) was an investment banker and had
a worse work-life balance.
How I had fun at work
BCG had an intellectually charged environment. Amongst colleagues we routinely discussed thorny
issues in each others' projects, not to mention a wide range of non-work topics very much like the
informal debates in campus. There were also a lot of team outings, offsite, practice area meets,
client engagement events and so on. At times, I even played Age of Empires with a colleague on the
network. As told to Brinda Dasgupta
The biggest innovation I did
I changed the narrow perception in the client organisation of risk as the only capital market
volatility to a wider spectrum of factors that affected business profitability and growth. These were
specific to each business line and had to be studied one business unit at a time. I created a
generalized process for this and also demonstrated it with actual implementation at a couple of
major business units.