This blog is an excerpt from my book "Corporate World To Entrepreneurship: Becoming Your Own Boss", available on Amazon in Kindle and in paperback form. Here I talk about some memorable anecdotes from my days in Britannia Industries Ltd (where I worked from 1996 to 2006, across Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore) and in Nokia India Pvt Ltd (where I worked from 2006 to 2011 in Gurgaon).
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| The book cover of "Corporate World To Entrepreneurship" |
I miss the corporate lifestyle. Yes, I do miss the jet-setting routine, the perks, the complimentary invitations to big events, and the regular stays at five star hotels. Being in Sales and Marketing, I got to travel a lot, inside India and internationally. Whenever I could, I clubbed my work trips with a weekend, and I got to see a lot of the country and the world, which I otherwise would not have had an opportunity to see!
I miss the many fun experiences that corporate life offered.
There were so many landmark incidents and events that are permanently etched in
my memory. I got to meet some very famous personalities. I got to be a part of
some mega events. I shall share a few memorable stories from those days.
In 1996, shortly after joining Britannia, we Management
Trainees were on our factory stint, where we had to understand the
manufacturing process of biscuits, cakes and bread. It was a very useful stint,
as we learned about the ingredients used, the machinery employed, the baking
process, and the packaging process. The stint was spread over more than 2
months. It was very interesting, no doubt, but how long could we stare at the
oven? After a while, we got a bit restless. We were fresh into our jobs, and we
wanted to start contributing, instead of just doing our PHD in observing! One
day, I noticed that a worker in the cake plant was not wearing his gloves, and
that was supposed to be mandatory. I thought it was my moral duty to point it
out to him. It was also going to give me a sense of achievement and
accomplishment, because I was actually going to add value instead of staring at
the oven! So, I walked up to the worker to give him my feedback. Now my Hindi
was far from being fluent, thanks to my early years spent out of the country.
What I meant to ask him was why he hadn’t worn a “dastana” (that’s the Hindi
word for glove), but what I ended up asking him was why he hadn’t worn a
“guldasta” (a bouquet of flowers)! The moment he gave me a completely befuddled
look, I realized I must have said something wrong, and I wished I hadn’t opened
my mouth in the first place! Luckily, my sales stint in the interior markets of
Northern India over the next few months would force me to converse more and
more in Hindi, and I became much more comfortable with the language!
In 1996, as a Management Trainee in Britannia, I had to
travel extensively to the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan during my
sales stint. On one such occasion, I was in some interior markets of Rajasthan
travelling by bus. It was winter time, and travelling in the rickety Rajasthan
Roadways buses - many of which didn’t even have glass on their windows to block
out the chilly air - was far from being a comfortable experience. Still, it
needed to be done as part of the stint. We needed to understand what the sales
team had to endure, so that we could be more empathetic to their situation.
Halfway through my journey, a farmer boarded the bus, and along with him, came
aboard his herd of goats! I sat on that bus for the next several hours, with goats
as my travelling companions! I found the baby goats to be adorable. I had to be
constantly watchful, as they kept making a bee-line for my shoe laces, which
they seemed to enjoy biting. After spending those few hours with the goats, I
gave up on eating mutton, because how could I eat my cute fellow travelers? It
was 8 years before I ate mutton again!
In Britannia, I was a part of the team that flew several
dozen under-privileged children in Chennai on their first ever flight. It was
an activity that Britannia did jointly with Jet Airways in 1997. It was a part
of the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda of both companies, to bring some
joy into the lives of these children. It was an absolute delight to see the
smiles on the faces of these under-privileged children, as the plane took off
and they had their first experience in the skies! Their parents proudly came to
the airport to see them off and then receive them an hour later. It was a
matter of great joy and pride for the parents too, that these children had been
given such an exciting, novel experience!
In 1999, Britannia ran the successful “Britannia Khao World
Cup Jao” promotion. 100 lucky consumers, and several people from the company,
got to go to England on a three day trip to see the India vs England match in
the Cricket World Cup. I was in Chennai back then, and I was a regional
coordinator for the activity. The promotion was conceptualized by the company’s
CEO, who was well known in the industry for his marketing acumen and
exceptional communication skills. It generated a tremendous amount of buzz and
excitement in the company and in the market. As part of the organizing team, I
also got to travel to England on that memorable trip. It’s a different matter
that the trip had a bit of a set-back because several of the winners saw this
as an easy opportunity to slip into England, and they never came back to India
with the rest of the team! Still, I haven’t seen any other corporate activity
whipping up the kind of frenzy that this promotion did, and it was a matter of great
pride to have been a part of it!
Britannia invested a lot of marketing money into cricket
sponsorships. In 2000, the company’s then Senior Vice President of the Bakery
Division hosted a dinner at his residence in Bengaluru. The Indian cricket team
was invited for the dinner, and the company’s marketing team was also a part of
it. So, I had the opportunity of meeting legends of the game, like Sachin
Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, and V V S Laxman, and interacting with them. I also
got to spend one-on-one time with another member of the Indian cricket team,
Robin Singh, when he came to my territory in Bengaluru for an event sponsored
by Britannia.
In 2000 and 2001, I was put on the team that helped with the
organizing of a glamourous manhunt and megamodel contest, an event sponsored by
Britannia. The event was organized by a well known fashion magazine run by the
wife of our company’s chairman. The manhunt contest has produced winners like
Dino Moreo in 1995, and John Abraham in 1999, whereas the megamodel contest has
produced winners like Lara Dutta in 1995. Now these are household names in the
modeling industry of India, and some have taken the Bollywood film industry by
storm. So, we are talking serious stuff here! I was involved with the logistics
of organizing of the contest in Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata. It was great fun,
being a part of the mega event. I enjoyed my interactions with Mrs Chairman.
She was very good at what she did, and in her own way, she was a warm person
with a great sense of humour. She used to constantly forget my name, and she
would call me “Milkman”, because I was in Britannia’s dairy division back then,
and we had just launched the Milkman sub brand! During the swim-suite round of
the event in Bengaluru, she called me and said “Milkman, are you married?” I
said “No ma’am.” Her reply was “Then this must be a very educational experience
for you!” She said this in public, that
too, in front of a high powered panel of judges, consisting of CEOs and CXOs of
different companies! Being the shy, introverted person that I was, I got so
embarrassed that I didn’t know where to look! I was, however, tickled by her
terrific sense of humour! During the event in Delhi, Mrs Chairman called me and
handed over a measuring tape and weighing scale to me. She said she had a
suspicion that a few of the women participants were not being honest in
reporting their heights and weights, so I was given the task of verifying them!
Oh, the things one has to do in the line of duty!! I became the envy of every
man in Britannia!
Like Britannia, Nokia was also greatly involved in the
sponsorship of cricket. Nokia was a sponsor of the IPL team Kolkata Knight
Riders, owned by Bollywood superstar, Shahrukh Khan. In 2007, the entire
marketing team got to go to PVR Priya, a plush movie hall in Delhi’s Vasant
Vihar, and we got to see the final of the T-20 Cricket World Cup. It happened
to be between India and Pakistan. What could be more exciting than to see these
two arch rivals in the final? The icing on the cake was that India went on to
win the championship, after a nail-bitingly close match. The atmosphere was
electric, and it was great to witness the occasion along with friends and
colleagues. Wild celebrations followed!
Nokia also often got well known personalities who came and
addressed the marketing and sales teams, and shared their life experiences and
their learnings from their respective fields. So, we had big names like
cricketer Kris Srikanth and tennis star Vijay Amritraj who came and kept us
glued to our chairs with their brilliant talks. Both were tremendous orators,
and spoke eloquently about what it takes to get ahead in life and excel in
one’s chosen field. Being a huge tennis fan, at the end of Vijay Amritraj’s
talk, I went up to him and had a lengthy exchange with him about Federer and
Nadal, and the world of tennis. At the end of our talk, Vijay Amritraj walked
up to our Country Head, and said “Keep this guy away from Star TV, or I’ll lose
my job as a commentator!” Our Country Head laughed and replied, “He does
absolutely no work, so he has all the time in the world to keep track of
tennis!”
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| With tennis ace, Vijay Amritraj, at a Nokia event in 2009 |
Nokia once sent members of the marketing team to Bengaluru
for a talk conducted by the internationally renowned management guru, Stephen R
Covey, the author of “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”. Stephen Covey
was a great speaker, and it was a very engaging session, with a lot to learn.
At the end of his session, a colleague of mine, Dipti, and I went up to him to
introduce ourselves. Dipti was my age, but I guess I looked older than her,
because I started graying quite early in life. Stephen Covey greeted me, and
then jokingly said “This must be your lovely daughter!” I was momentarily
shocked by what he had said, but then I broke out into a laugh, in appreciation
of his fine sense of humour! Dipti and I still laugh about the hilarious
incident!
In 2008, on my first trip to Helsinki within Nokia, I spent a
fair amount of time with my European colleagues. The experience reminded me of
my growing up years, when I had gone to several international schools, and had
had classmates from many different countries from around the world. I was
chatting with a woman colleague from Sweden. She asked me if I had any kids. I
said “No. I am not married.” She looked surprised and said she didn’t quite
understand the correlation. She said “I have kids. I am not married. My sister
has kids. She is not married. What is the connection?” I had to patiently make
her understand that in Indian culture, it is very uncommon for people to have
kids without being married!
In 2010, Nokia had its marketing team outbound in Kochi. It
was shortly after the release of the Bollywood blockbuster, “3 Idiots”,
starring Aamir Khan, R Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Kareena Kapoor and Boman Irani
in key roles. The outbound was inspired by the movie, which went on to become
the most successful Bollywood movie to date back then. The theme of the movie
was that one should be pursuing excellence and not success; if one excelled,
success would follow automatically. All the presentations and all the props
were around this central theme, and the learnings from the movie were discussed
at length. We had a serious agenda for the outbound because the year’s
marketing plans had to be fleshed out, but it was done in an incredibly fun
manner. An added bonus at the outbound was that one of India’s best known
contemporary writers, Chetan Bhagat, the author of “Five Point Someone”, the
book that inspired “3 Idiots”, was called as a speaker. He addressed the entire
team, and spoke at length about himself and about his book. He had been a
management student, who had gone on to become a successful banker. He then gave
it all up to pursue his passion to become a full-time author. His journey was
quite in line with the story’s theme – follow your passion, excel in it, and
success will follow!
