On 27
th August 2014, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, witnessed one of the most scintillating speeches ever thanks to the Ex-President & CEO, Industrial Solutions and Intelligent Platforms, GE India, Mr. Ajay Kumar.
Mr. Kumar earned his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Kanpur and a MBA from FMS, Delhi. Mr. Ajay comes with 37 years of corporate experience, both in India and international. He has worked and lived in UK, France, Hong Kong, Singapore for around 12 years and has travelled extensively in Asia Pacific region, US & Europe. He has recently retired as the President & CEO, Industrial Solutions & Intelligent Platforms, GE India and is in the process of starting his Independent Consulting & becoming a Certified Executive & Business Coach.
Initiating his lecture, he talked about his cross cultural experiences at various countries in Europe and US, their heavily client driven services. He spoke about the MNCs in US having clear vision, goals and objectives. He said that they have a very methodological way of doing things. Indian MNCs do have a methodological way of functioning but they need a lot of learning from the MNCs in US. He then talked about the effectiveness of the matrix system of organizational design by quoting very innovative and easily perceivable examples. He spoke on how important it was for any MNC to induct and retain their clients.
Mr. Ajay then pointed out that we need to recognize good employees but its best to recognize the employees who are not good at work. He emphasized that people management skill is one of the most critical of all skills that the workforce at MNCs need to possess. He said that it was important to effectively persuade our employers into assigning us the field we’re good at. He felt that value addition has always been the essence of customer attraction.
According to him, aligning our thought processes with industries is the most important thing to do when we hit the markets as fresh B-school grads. He also gave us an insight on what to expect in an MNC environment and the skills we need to develop before we get into one. He glorified various competitive scenarios in an MNC culture and received a lot of interactive feedback from the students.
In conclusion he then urged students to diversify their career by job rotation to reach at the highest level. He urged students to build a future roadmap of their career and he also gave a lot of his own experiences to help student build their own career roadmap. With this, a very insightful session organized at Vinod Gupta School of Management ended on a pleasant note.
