One Lucid Moment

Sometimes you get thrust into positions and situations you least expect to happen. 2.5 years into an engineering and coding career (my first job) at WIPRO, a large Indian IT services company; I had a chance to undergo a training program in Japanese. This resulted in a short stint in Japan on a 3 month tech project at a Japanese bank. I wanted out! I wanted out real bad.

I had enough ability to converse fluently and felt I could move into a techno-fictional or a sales enablement role within the organisation. This is normally a difficult switch since its demand is based on politics, seniority and a lot of folks in those positions were MBAs.

Those are the times, when I think back to my knights in shining armour. Yeah, I had two of them. Murali san guided me about pre-sales + selling into engineering organisations. In addition, he gave me the confidence boost to move across different industry groups. “HRV” as he is fondly called was my second knight in shining armour. He used to manage the entire Japan business in the embedded and product engineering division which used to a big chunk of Wipro’s Japan business. HRV felt that I could do an effective job and roped me into pre-sales for the business unit thus supporting the front line sales organisation.

This included a move from my home town to Bangalore and getting settled in. That was quick. But the learning curve was steep. I had emails flying all over the place without really knowing the exact services offer, pricing, context, etc. Guess I took most of it in my stride and down an occasional beer or two over the weekend. When you are 23~24 years old and thrown into the deep end - new business unit, new people, new technology stacks, co-ordinations, conference calls in Japanese, etc you gain a lot of confidence of who you are and a moment later “really wonder” what you are doing in the first place :)

One of the things I used to really look forward to back in those days was the client visits. And this was for a couple of reasons. First, I could speak Japanese to actual Japanese people and understand more about life, business and their thoughts of outsourcing and India. Secondly these were the closes! You put a customer or prospect on a plane to Bangalore plus one visit to the sprawling Electronics City campus was enough to close. And close them big we did! And finally, I get to be chaperone and take them to places like Nandi Hills, Mysore, etc. So pretty much my social calendar was sorted during a weekend when we had customer visits.

A lot of the visits included a sprawling lunch in the executive dining rooms that overlooked the campus. These rooms were demarcated based on the seniority of the person requesting the same as well as the size of the company visiting on that particular day. I had gotten very pally with the administration staff in several of the executive rooms. Another coordinator HRV’s boss was a person called VRV, also a veteran at WIPRO and in-charge of a lot of revenue and a lot of people. He had a group of clients slated to come in on a particular day and they were from a big company. He was allocated a different dining and meeting area. We also had a Japanese delegation the same day including a person from the government, and hence I was busy coordinating most of those activities for the two days prior. Quite randomly VRV happened to see me at the stairwell and ask me if there is anything that can be done to host his clients in the best executive dining room.

A lot of traits you grew up do actually stay with you for a long period of time. In this moment I realised that I did not have anything to lose. Yes, I am busy with my own work, but can I pull this off? It’s probably an extreme test of influence, working against a deadline and co-ordination. And let me tell you today, 17 years later, that one moment, I felt I could take on challenges, do what one has to do to get the job done with underlying traits that defined my streak of entrepreneurship. I didn’t know it then. But yeah, it involved me toggling with three delegations, sweet talking the administration guys, being firm and persistent till I got it all ordered the way I wanted. It was not your 30 or 48 hour code monkey or hacks days, like you do in today’s enterprises. Influence, Credibility and willing to go the extra yard to execute don’t come naturally. I learnt that I was made of some stern stuff.

Embrace the uncomfortable challenges. Accept them. You never know where the ‘rabbit hole’ leads. I am willing to bet that you will be pleasantly surprised most times. ?