How was your life at ASB? Can you tell us more about the moments you cherished?

When I came here in early 2000 the campus was different, but even today, I feel that same vibe. We cherished the moments we had with our friends as you guys do. That time we were doing projects, studying, doing assignments at night, and going to the canteen all those are the moments that still stay with me.

What do you think are two important attributes that students should start thinking about at this stage of life?

If you want to choose two things, I would say this is the time when you get to know yourself, you do your Under graduation, and Post-graduation and you are ready to start your career. I think that’s the time you choose what you want to be, and what you want to do in your day-to-day life and absorb it as a career. You choose the subjects you study. Here you have the opportunity to choose a subject that you like. Second thing is to have fun, in the sense, these are times not to worry about jobs or life because when these things start piling up, they won’t do well. That’s the learning we have to do. In my experience, I was worried about my placements. Once I got placed, I started worrying about how I will perform the in the job, and will I be successful or not. This worry never ends, nobody told me this at the time. So, focus on the present and have fun, this is where you figure out who you are and what you want to do.

In life we take a lot of decisions, how do you take decisions or on what basis do you take decisions?

Decision-making is a core skill. It is true that the decisions that you take in your life, your career, and whom you want to be with, all these things decide your life. I remember Jeff Bezos’s decision-making, where he says to think of the impact of the decision-making, if it is reversible then it is quick decision-making. If it’s not reversible, then don’t take a quick decision. For Decision making, there are some models that you can apply but what I have seen is when you actually have to take a decision, one constraint is the criticality of time, how much time you have. In certain instances, you can’t say to people can I come back and make the decision tomorrow.

Secondly, reflect on your decisions. When you make a decision sometimes it is successful, and sometimes it totally fails. Are you reflecting on it.? Some people do it on weekly basis, and some people do it on a quarterly basis like business leaders, and apply the learning from those.

If you are hiring a person what are the three qualities you look for?

When we are hiring a person, we look for a certain set of skills. First is the mindset of the person. We don’t hire people just because they have already done that job in the past. So, the mindset to approach a problem is what we evaluate. The second thing is the fit to the culture, as organizations, we have certain cultural expectations from the person. The third and most important one is how that person will add more value to the team. What is that unique thing about that person? It is not that we hire a person and tell them to do these kinds of work, and just give them the problem. so, the uniqueness or unique skill set of that person matters. If you have basic qualifications and skills, we will be looking for these three things.