"Corporate World To Entrepreneurship" - Unforgettable Anecdotes From My Corporate Life

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).

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!”

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!