In our list of India's Best 50 - the 50 Most Employable Students from the Class of 2021-23, we feature MBA students who have walked that extra mile and done that little more to stand out! One of those featured in today's story, Himansu Rathi, has shown an incredible amount of passion to achieve his true potential. Read on and find out how his story!
The following are Himansu Rathi’s set of responses to a questionnaire floated amongst MBA graduates to determine the top 50 Most Employable MBA Graduates of the Class of 2023. Amongst the massive number of entries and responses being evaluated,Himansu's story and profile stood out. Here's his story in his own words.
Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.
After having worked for 5 years, I was in as a senior position at Goldman Sachs where I was already leading a team of 5 members and earning a decent 6 figure salary per month, when I got a call from IIM Bangalore for a 2 year MBA program. It was a tough decision for me especially when I was evaluating the opportunity cost of pursuing a 2 year program instead of 1 year executive one. Further coming back to full time academics course for 2 rigorous years after so long and not earning for 2 straight yeears was also another factor to be considered. But now looking back at that decision, it does seem worth as I met a diverse set of individuals and got exposure to various business concepts that I am looking forward to apply when I go back to working.
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act?
Due to attrition of senior members of the team, I became incharge of executing and delivering the project end to end within the next 6 months even though i had only 2 years of experience at that time. The challenge was the entire team except me was new to the product and the technology, and the amount of work was huge as were revamping an existing product and we had non-negotiable deadlines. The whole team looked upto me for help whenever they were stuck or did not know how the existing functionality worked. Even my manager was new and he relied on me for identifying the roadmap plan, delegating the features and troubleshooting any issues. With all the support of my team, I was able to deliver the project 2 weeks before the scheduled timeline and ensured our documentation of the learnings for future reference.
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
While developing a B2B product, I realized many customers found our product complex to understand and use, as a result it required lot of training to be done for the staff. Since the training for using the product was also given by our company there was an additional revenue for the firm and hence had no incentive to address this problem as a result we were making the product more complicated to use by loading it with more features to appease the new clients. I disagreed with this strategy, so as part of a side project, I developed a chat bot that was intuitive enough to use i.e. accepted plain english text to perform similar functionalites without going through the cumbersome user interface of the product in just a matter of 3 days. I showcased it to our product manager, but could not get it to sign off on it to be bundled in the product. However, to try out the idea I convinced him to allow me to send it across to the sales team, and one of them used this bot to convert a high revenue client who was reluctant to use our product till he realized this functionality. This is the moment when my team realized we would need to simplify the UI and commercialize this bot to get hold of new clients and gain market share. This would reduce our development cost as well, and the overall benefit would be higher than continuing with existing strategy.
What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative that has led you to do deep work in that field?
Doing extensive Market Research to identify gaps and develop strategies in any new industry in a short period of time is one of the forte that I have developed during my live projects with Ashirvad pipes and TDG Partners. Starting from doing on ground research, cold calling customers to get feedback, reaching out to experts without prior connections and leveraging industry reports to identify the upcoming trends that one could leverage for creating a competitive advantage - I have done it all for niche industries or those industries that I had no clue about in just a matter of days. And the best part is coming up with a 5 point outline plan on what can a company do to break in this industry using its exisitng core capabilities. The "desire to know" and "eye for observation" is what helps me excel in this skill.
If 10 Million Dollars (approximately INR 75 Crores) is given to you to use it any way you deem fit what would you do with this corpus?
10% of this amount will go towards donation for a cause which would be close to my heart. 20% of it will be invested to generate wealth at low risk which could be used for some future endeavour, just as a fails safe mechanism. And the rest 70% would be used to bootstrap my own startup to solve a problem that I am passionate about, help in generating employment and contributiong to the economy. Having acquired both technical and business knowledge during my undergraduation and postgraduation, I would put my skills to use and give back to the society in the best way I can by "being the change you want to see in the world".
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As per government tax payers' data and our assessment, only about 6,00,000 Indian taxpayers earn an annual 'salaried' income of INR 30 lacs or above. And only 11,00,000 Indian taxpayers earn a 'total' income of INR 30 lacs or more.
Have you ever considered how much time it would take for you to be amongst these top 0.5% earners in India?
Find out here!