ABG - Bringing Sunshine Into Many Lives | Raj H. Rangnekar, IIM Visakhapatnam

There are numerous other brands of the Aditya Birla Group which I have used such as Van Heusen, Allen Solly, Hindalco Freshwrapp and Forever 21 but these two products are very special to me and I will forever cherish these moments.

Most of the 25 years of my life went by smoothly without any major challenges. However, there were 2 problems which proved to be very challenging and have been one of the best teachers in my journey. The first major problem arose during the planning of annual event Symbiot’14 in my university. I was the president then and had to overlook the entire event. My team had worked really hard to gather sponsors for the event but just a few days before the event, the main sponsor backed out and our budget was reduced by 50%. The stress levels of my team and I were off the charts. If we did not get any new sponsors then we would have to cancel the event and apologize to 25 colleges which were going to attend our event. Not only was this a huge setback for our club, but it was also tarnishing the name of my college. As a desperate measure, we decided to approach the DRDO for sponsorship. Within a span of 2 days, we managed to change the layout of the event to suit the needs of DRDO by adding more technical events and reducing the non-technical events and even managed to update our site while taking in account the budget constraints. We successfully conducted the event and it was the largest Symbiot event in the history of the club.

The other major problem arose when I was working at IBM India Pvt. Ltd. I was a new recruit and it was the first time I had taken part in a support activity. Usually, the support activities took place at night and didn’t have major backup issues. However that day one major backup issue arose and I had only a two-hour window to resolve it otherwise the data of thousands of customers would be lost resulting in a huge loss for the company. I contacted my teammates at 2 am and they helped me out to resolve the issue within the limited time frame and we were able to back up the entire data without any loss. Without the help, I wouldn’t have been able to complete the backup in time and I am very grateful to my teammates for the help.

These are the two cases where I have learned that panic and stress do not help to resolve any issue. Rather co-ordination with your teammates and staying calm helps to take better decisions to resolve the issues in times of crisis.