India Inc. is getting younger. The basis for that sweeping statement is the fact that the panel Business Today put together to identify India's hottest young executive talent, a panel that comprised some of the best-known executive search firms in the country, had no difficulty identifying 25 people under the age of 40. The last time this publication embarked on a similar exercise (See India's Hottest Young Executives, September 29, 2002), the panel was hard-pressed to meet the age constraint, and eventually extended the bar to 42. The times are responsible for the sudden profusion of young executive talent-including reserves, our list numbered almost 40-and, to flip the argument on its head, surely, an economy that presents so many young people with an opportunity to prove themselves cannot be anything but booming?

RAJAGOPALAN 'BALKI' BALAKRISHNAN
40/Executive Creative Director, Lowe
Movies Make The World Go Round

Lowe (previously Lintas) India was supposed to be the advertising agency that attracted the best suits and the best strategy-minds, not the finest creative pros. Until, a bearded bear of a man who was expelled from Chennai's Guindy Engineering College for playing cricket (an obsession with the gent) when he should have been attending classes for the Master of Computer Applications course in which he was enrolled. Soon, R. Balakrishnan was in Ahmedabad, watching some 180 motion pics (another obsession) and participating in some mind-exercises, all part of a six-month training programme at Mudra Communications. Then came a seven-year stint at Mudra, Bangalore, followed by a short stint at Lintas' Bangalore office. Soon, he was asked to shift to a city he didn't really fancy, Mumbai, and take over as Executive Creative Director. Ideas, not awards, are all that matter for this son of a teacher and an insurance exec. "Nothing can match the feeling (you get) when you know you have got it right," he says. "You must be able to tell in an instant what will work and what's junk." A creative animal himself, Balki is focusing his energies at Lowe at (apart from writing great copy), creating an environment that helps other creative pros deliver their best. Leadership suits the man who loves spicy vegetarian food. In the four-plus years he has headed creative at Lowe, he claims, he has done some of his best work ever. And work is where you are likely to find him. Unless a game of cricket is on.

-Abir Pal

MUKESH BUTANI
National Director, Global Tax Practice, Ernst & Young
The Taxman Cometh

The man who was picked by international tax Review as India's leading tax adviser (in September 2003, and it is a Euromoney publication) could have so easily ended up a cricketer. A smashed knee-cap cost Mukesh Butani a chance to play competitive cricket, much to the relief of his parents-dad wanted him to join the IAS and mom wanted him to be a lawyer. And so, the man who once trained under the legendary Ramakant Achrekar (Sachin Tendulkar's coach), and who, by his own admission "was never good in academics in school" ended up with a commerce degree before coming in 24th in the national ca exams. By 31, he was a partner at Andersen. The desire to become a tax expert was logical the way Butani sees it. "There are two vital things in the world: life for which you need a doctor, and money for which you need a taxman." And so what if he couldn't play competitive cricket: the sport is part of the very fabric of Butani's life. "I am biased towards people who have played competitive sport," he says, referring to his approach to hiring. "They are resilient, can work in teams, and accept defeat."

-Amanpreet Singh

MADHABI PURI-BUCH
38/Country Head, Operations & Service Delivery, ICICI Bank
Seven in Seven

Seven key assignments in seven years: that's Madhabi Puri-Buch's track record at ICICI Bank. And it all began innocuously enough in 1997 when, as the head of research firm ORG MARG's financial research division, she called on ICICI's Nachiket Mor (now Executive Director) with a presentation on financial intermediaries. Mor was impressed enough to call her the next day with a job-offer. Since then, the gold medalist from Delhi's hoary St. Stephen's college and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad alum has done it all: head of corporate brand management, CEO of ICICI Capital Services (under her, it became the largest distributor of mutual funds, sold a record Rs 4,000-crore worth of ICICI bonds), CEO of ICICI Web Trade (again, it became the leader with a 65 per cent share of the market), and CEO of ICICI Home Finance (she grew the home loanbusiness seven times in a year). Most of these achievements owe something to Puri-Buch's mantra of ''zooming in'' to understand the business and ''zooming out'' to get the big picture. When ICICI and ICICI Bank merged in 2002, the lady realised she knew little about banking; so, in keeping with her ''zooming in'' philosophy she decided to learn all about it by getting her hands dirty with operations. Another mantra followed-this one says that people multiplied by processes raised to the power technology equals customer value. Today, apart from operations and service delivery, Puri-Buch heads transaction banking and technology (corporate banking) and the brand management group. That's a bit, and the high-flying mother of a 13-year-old boy is still zooming in, zooming out.

-Roshni Jayakar

MEENA GANESH
40/CEO, Tesco's Hindustan Service Centre
The Same All Over

Four times lucky. That is how Meena Ganesh describes her work life. Then, the lady has always been different (and not just in terms of appearance; she is 5'8" tall, a few inches above the average for men of her generation). A peripatetic entrepreneur-within organisations or while running her own start-up, Customer Asset-Ganesh has played multiple roles that range from coding to marketing to consulting to grooming a team. And she has helped three companies, NIIT, Microsoft and Tesco, find their feet in the Indian market and successfully started-up and sold a company of her own apart from picking up some helpful consulting experience during a three-year stint at PricewaterhouseCoopers. ''Start-up DNA seems to be in my genes. I like the freedom and the challenges,'' says Ganesh. Not surprisingly then, the IIM Calcutta alum-she is married to K. Ganesh, a batchmate and an entrepreneur in his own right; he started up and sold one of India's first third party it maintenance and networking services firm, IT&T-has always been open to challenges, whether it be new jobs, or small things that have little to do with her work life. ''I once challenged myself to learn to play the keyboard,'' laughs Ganesh, who actually did so in four months. ''Right now, my challenge is to learn Kannada.''

-Venkatesha Babu

MANISHA GIROTRA
34/managing Director, UBS Securities India
The Joy Of Winning

Competition begins at home for Manisha Girotra. The Delhi School of Economics topper is a rainmaker for her investment bank, just as husband Sanjay Agarwal is for his, Deutsche Bank. These days, the self-confessed deal junkie who says she is happiest "when winning deals" and her team of 50 are busy with armloads of cross-border deals of the type that has become UBS' speciality. Before she signed on with UBS, Girotra worked at ANZ Grindlays and BZW Investment Banking (she led the team that won the GAIL privatisation deal and spent 11 months at BZW, London), but it is at UBS that the lady has come into her own. That leaves the avid golfer-five years ago, she won a prize for the longest drive at a Pro Am golf tournament organised by this magazine-little time to indulge her pastime. Result? Her handicap has slipped to 16; still, Girotra finds the time on Saturdays to don an apron and attend RapidX cooking classes so that she can bake a signature dish for her year-old daughter. That's not the only thing cooking. Several deals are, and two ADR (American Depository Receipts) issues are already on the stove.

-Roshni Jayakar

NARESH GUPTA
37/Managing Director, Adobe India
Thriving On Discontinuity

Anyone who believes the truly-nerdy cannot lead companies need only look as far as Naresh Gupta. Let's prove the nerdy bit first: Gupta, who routinely turns up for work in jeans and sneakers (and sometimes, a blazer), is a gold medallist from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a M.S. and Ph D from the University of Maryland. His paper on Process Planning addressed problems researchers had been grappling with for years and received a honourable mention at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Conference and his doctoral dissertation on Motion Vision was nominated for the Association of Computing Machinery Distinguished Dissertation Award. "I worked on the foundation and then disappeared instead of reaching for the obvious low-hanging fruit, so people must be wondering who this obscure writer is," laughs Gupta. Adobe India was born over a few days in 1998 when Gupta quit Adobe to return to India (He was asked what it would take for him to continue working for Adobe and famously answered "Adobe India"). In six years, the organisation has grown to a 300-person operation, and Adobe PageMaker 7.0 was developed almost exclusively in India. That's something.

-Amanpreet Singh

SAUGATA GUPTA
35/Head, Marketing, Marico Industries
Pushing The Right Lever(s)

Failure is a great motivator. Saugata Gupta had everything going for him: a chemical engineering degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a post-graduate diploma from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Yet, Gupta failed to land a job with a company that is still hot on B-school campuses, Hindustan Lever Limited. That hurt. "I think that spurred in me a desire to prove myself, a feeling that lasted for five, six years," says Gupta. Hindustan Lever's loss was Cadbury's gain. In the nine years he spent with the chocolate maker, including a one-year stint at its famed Bourneville plant, Gupta proved his mettle over and over again. The launch of Perk wafer chocolates in 1995 is something he still remembers with great pride. "I not only got my hands dirty, but learnt how to effectively galvanise all the corporate resources.'' Soon "category fatigue" set in and when he got a chance to head marketing at ICICI Prudential in 2000, Gupta grabbed it. "Insurance was just opening up; it was a chance to do something different.'' At first the going was tough; financial services was a completely different ball game . But over the three years Gupta spent at ICICI Prudential, he did the rounds working in functions as varied as marketing, product development, customer service and business intelligence. The big chance came when Marico approached him late last year. Now, four months into his new job, Gupta's brief is to create a buzz around the company's products and take them to the "next level". "Despite being a family-owned concern the degree professionalism is amazing," says Gupta. And for the record, fulfilling his brief may just help this avowed fan of India's cricket captain Sourav Ganguly a chance to put one past Lever.

-Abir Pal

PRASOON JOSHI
34/National Creative Director, Mccann Erickson
The Meaning of Matlab

That this magazine, an avowed proponent of eschewing the Vern in English-language publications should choose to feature a headline with a Hindi word (Matlab, and it means er...means) is testimony to the movement pioneered by Prasoon Joshi, an MBA who has set the country's imagination afire with advertising incorporating street-speak. "I think I am successful when my work becomes part of people's lives and conversations," says Joshi who pens Hindi poetry when not cracking out an ad or two. And so Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola has become an ad anthem of sorts, and Joshi, a star. Not that the last helps him at work. "Creative people do not look up to anyone unless they deliver," he says. "You have to lead by example." That he has done, restoring the flagging creative sheen of McCann Erickson, and helping the agency bag accounts such as LG, Pears, NDTV, and Dabur. And for all those struggling to manage creative teams, the son of a civil servant and classical music teacher has this advice: "With creative people the lines between personal and professional space is blurred; we can't be compartmentalised. Don't brush issues and problems under the carpet." Joshi never does.

-Abir Pal

ZUBIN KARKARIA
36/Deupty CEO & Head, Business Development, Kuoni Travel Group
The Traveller's Religion

When he was 12, Zubin Karkaria spent 45 days in a Parsi fire temple training to be a priest. Even today the Bombay boy makes it a point to visit the temple everyday on the way to work. Given the way his career is progressing, the Gods are definitely smiling on Karkaria. Growing up in Dadar's Parsi colony, Karkaria's first brush with what would become his future profession came when in college. "My friend had a travel agency, Orbit Travels, and before and after college I used to hang around there." After joining SOTC, he was sent by the company for an executive management programme, conducted by the National University of Singapore in association with Stanford University, and cut his teeth in the Trade Fairs unit taking delegations across Europe. This was followed by stints in the then fledgling Incentives & Conferences division, which organised large corporate- and dealer- trips, and in the cash-cow packaged tours business. Along the way SOTC was acquired by global travel major Kuoni. It was in the packaged tours business that Karkaria really came into his own. He came up with a buy-now-pay-later concept for holidays. "A detailed survey of the market told us that while many people were eager to travel abroad, the upfront cash required put them off," elaborates Karkaria. Today a tenth of Kuoni's 30,000 package tour customers opt for this scheme. Once upon a time, Karkaria used to polish vintage motorbikes to unwind; these days he prefers to unearth un-spoilt wildlife reserves. We can spot a logical extension of his business there.

-Abir Pal

RAVI KRISHNAN
36/Managing Director, IMG TWI India & South Asia and
Senior International Vice President, IMG
Tennis, Anyone

He's played cricket with Shane Warne and competed in the Australian Open. It seems only apt that Ravi Krishnan, a Tamil from Australia heads the world's best-known sports marketing agency, IMG, in India. In 1995, Krishnan was the youngest of a four-man team sent by IMG to set up its Indian operations. Starting off selling hospitality ( think boxes) for cricket series, Krishnan quickly rose up the ranks, his eye for opportunity helping IMG create several firsts. "In our business, timing is critical," he says. Over the past nine years IMG has organised some high-profile sporting (the Tata Open tennis tournament) and fashion (Lakmé India Fashion Week) events, and facilitated some of the biggest deals in Indian sporting history (like Samsung's over Rs 20-crore bid to be the title sponsor of the recently concluded India-Pakistan cricket series). No other agency comes close.

-Roshni Jayakar

SHUBHA KULKARNI
37/Director, Human Resources, HP, India Software Operation (ISO)
Bring on the next crisis

In 1989, when Shubha Kulkarni, a trained Carnatic musician and a masters in social work from Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia signed on with HCL-hp (the two companies had a hardware manufacturing joint venture in those days), she wasn't prepared for what she would face: appearances on behalf of the company in labour courts, managing unionised workers, and surviving the HCL culture that, as the lady recollects "expects everyone to hit the ground running". Kulkarni enjoyed every bit of it. In 1992, she moved to IBM as its fifth employee in India. Her brief was to grow the company's (it then had a joint venture with the Tata Group) software operations. "IBM had terrific brand equity, but aligning compensation structures (to India), and evolving best practices in hr for a multinational was a real upside." In 1995, when IBM was a 1,000-person organisation, Shubha left and signed on with hp. However, her life continued to be as filled with key-events and challenges, including the hp-Compaq merger and the synergisation of Digital Globalsoft with hp. Today, hp's software operations is reported to be a 7,000-strong operation and Kulkarni is looking to hire laterally (read: people with work experience). And to keep an eye out for the next crisis.

-Venkatesha Babu

ASHISH KUMAR
40/Country Manager, IBM Global Services
Blue-blooded Lineage

Blue doesn't get any bigger than IBM. picture this: in early 2004, hp bags an it services (read: outsourcing of entire it requirements) contract from Bank of India for $150 million (Rs 675 crore). The deal is touted as the biggest-ever domestic outsourcing contract and analysts wonder whether IBM has lost its touch. The answer is measured and slightly slow in coming, but it does. In April, IBM India announces that it has won a 10-year $750 million (Rs 3,375 crore) outsourcing contract from Bharti Tele-Ventures.

Scrupulously absent from the photo op when the deal was finally inked was the quiet man responsible for the 18-month negotiation process, Ashish Kumar, the Country Manager for IBM Global Services. Kumar and IBM refused to speak to Business Today for this story, but it is evident that the electrical engineer from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the management graduate from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, is marked for bigger things within IBM India. After all, the man and his team have ensured that IBM India starts each of the next 10 years with revenues of $125 million (Rs 562.5 crore, and that's the value of the multi-year contracts it has signed). Speaking to Business Today earlier, Kumar had said, "These are large, annuity based long-term deals which involve everything from consulting to system integration to application development to deployment to routine maintenance. IBM has done this internationally. We understand the entire generation of technologies." Indeed, thanks to this deal and the acquisition of Daksh e-Services, a business process outsourcing firm (this was acquired not by IBM India or IBM Global Services, but the parent), Big Blue has been the biggest tech story of the year thus far. And Kumar has scripted at least part of that. part of that.

-Venkatesha Babu

PRATIK KUMAR
39/Corporate Vice President, HR, Wipro
Strength In Numbers

As unflattering as this may be to the subject of this piece, it was only when Wipro became the first company in the world to be assessed at Level 5 of the People Capability Maturity Model (it is a model developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and it really is a big deal, a very big deal) that people sat up and noticed Wipro's hr, and the man behind it, Pratik Kumar. If things had worked out differently, Kumar, who hails from a family of doctors and engineers, would have been just another successful example of the great Bihari dream, making it to the Indian Administrative Service. While majoring in economics from Delhi University he saw "people mindlessly cramming to become another nameless, faceless bureaucrat". He hated it. Gradually, he drifted to hr and ended up at XLRI, Jamshedpur for a two-year diploma. When he graduated, he had the option of choosing between working for a multinational he doesn't wish to name and HMT. He chose the latter. He spent a year there and insists he learnt all about managing scale (HMT then employed around 40,000). He spent the next two years at TVS Electronics. The job was great, but it was based in Tumkur, a three-hour commute from Bangalore. So, in 1992, when Wipro approached him, commuting-weary Kumar had no hesitation in signing on. From 200 employees (Wipro Systems) then, Kumar now oversees a workforce of 35,000 spanning 22 nationalities. ''Cross-cultural issues are something we work on continuously," says Kumar. ''Excellence is a moving target and we want to be the best.'' The man considers it ''a honour'' a run the hr function in an organisation that employs 35,000, but wants to find out whether he has it in him to do other things as well. "I would love to have cross-functional expertise," he says.

-Venkatesha Babu

ROHIT KUMAR
36/COO, Energy & Utilities, Wipro Technologies
Rainmaking, The Old-fashioned Way

Get a job you love and you will never have to work a day. Thus Spake Confucius. Rohit Kumar has clearly taken that to heart. The man's zest is writ large on his face and, fortunately for Wipro, it has translated into success of the greenback variety: in two years, Kumar has more than doubled the size of the company's Energy & Utilities practice to $120 million from $50 million. Like most young professionals, Kumar is quick to attribute the success to the entire team (which again, has doubled in size to 1600 in the same period). Still, it is a well-known fact in tech circles that it was Kumar who identified the global energy management practice of American Management Systems as an ideal acquisition target for Wipro, sold the story within the organisation, and steered the integration process. Today it research firm Gartner reckons Wipro is among the top 10 global it service providers in the energy and utilities domain. Well, Wipro's gain is Infosys' loss in this case. In early 2002, when Kumar, a University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee and Kumar hates the place) and Wharton School alumnus wished to leave the Valley-he set up the internet products group for Oracle; earlier, he worked with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and Boston Consulting Group-he was juggling offers from Bangalore's glimmer twins. "I was attracted to Wipro's vision of an Indian company becoming a global heavyweight," says Kumar. The avid squash player is sure helping that cause.

-Venkatesha Babu

SANJIV LAMBA
39/Managing Director, BOC India
The Four-Year Itch

One day in 1989, Sanjiv Lamba, a young socially aware-he founded Motivation, an anti-drug movement while still at college-chartered accountant and a commercial assistant at Lipton India interviewed with two companies ITC, and Indian Oxygen (BOC's precursor). The first promised to get back to him; the second offered him a job on the spot. And so it was that Lamba found himself doing "all the things no one wanted to do, including photocopying documents and fetching coffee for the bosses." Still, the company's work-group orientation meant the young accountant got to work with senior managers.

Over the next three-and-a-half years Lamba impressed the senior management enough to earn a two-year stint at the UK parent of the company, and off to London he went, wife (college-sweetheart Usha) and one-month-old son in tow. He spent the first year in internal audit and the second in corporate finance, backpacked across Europe with his family, and filled up on theatre. "I learnt a lot about gases and developed a world view that went beyond the accounts department of the company," says Lamba. BOC Plc was pleased enough with his efforts to extend his stint by two years, When he returned to BOC India as General Manager, Finance in 1997, the company's finances were in a mess. He was named Director, Finance, in January 2000. "In March that year, we announced an annual loss of Rs 40 crore and wrote off Rs 79 crore... hardly a good omen," he grins. He worked on overhauling the systems and "embedding new control mechanisms in processes". BOC India clawed its way back into the black. Late in 2001 came an offer from BOC Plc to shift to Japan as Director, Finance; then, BOC India decided to appoint him MD. Lamba was the 36-year old CEO of a company where the average age of the employees was 43. He went out and bought a book, How To Act Like A CEO, but realised that it made no sense. And so he decided to follow his instinct, creating "an organisational vision, establishing goals, and measuring performance" at the macro level and "drilling the importance of cash" at the micro. Today, the company is again regarded as a blue chip. So where does he go from here? There's a buzz about a bigger role for Lamba in BOC's global operations. But the man himself is not saying anything. "If you look at my career, I've typically had four-year stints. I'll have spent four years on this job next year. Let's see what happens then..."

-Arnab Mitra

ASHOK MITTAL
35/Director & Co-Head, Investment Banking, HSBC
Urge to Merge

If it's difficult to find investment bankers with hobbies is it because:
A: They don't have too much of time?
B: They get their jollies on the job itself?
C: They'd rather not talk about their hobbies because they'd make readers blush?

You wish the answer was c but, rather disappointingly, it's A. And perhaps a bit of B, as Ashok Mittal will testify. Whenever he isn't travelling-three days a week-he's doing 12-13 hour stretches. "There's plenty of excitement and glamour, but it's also hard work," quips Mittal, who's been doing mergers and acquisitions along with equity-raising for 12 years now, six of those at Lazard Capital. Mittal was at the forefront of India's "first real disinvestment," of IBP. If he's disappointed with the new government's policy of not meddling with profitable psus-hsbc after all has (or should that be 'had') the mandate for the disinvestment of Hindustan Petroleum-Mittal isn't showing it. He'd rather look forward to the privatisation that's on the anvil, of, for instance, airports: HSBC is the financial advisor for the 50:50 JV formed between Sunil Mittal's Bharti group and Changi Airport of Singapore to bid for the modernisation of the Delhi and Mumbai airports.

Mittal, whose team is at any given time working on 10-12 "fairly active" transactions, also expects M&As to pick up in cement, telecom and pharma. And he's hopeful of foreign investment picking up in industries like power. If that happens, 12 hours at the office would provide Mittal with the kind of buzz that even bungee jumping or para-gliding can't.

-Brian Carvalho

PANKAJ MITTAL
37/Director, Human Resources, Asia Pacific, DELPHI
Crossing The Ts

The very fact that Pankaj Mittal is now trying to staff Delphi's China operations with the right people is a measure of the man's success. So, the "strict vegetarian" travels 25 days a month all over Asia, works 15 hour days and smiles-he should-about the fact that he has "an extremely understanding family." Mittal believes in details, a trait he picked up at the Usha Shriram Group-he signed on as a trainee and worked with it for seven years on a hotel project, doing everything from buying the land to recruiting people-before he took a sabbatical for a degree in law, a certification in cost accounting, and a MBA (from Delhi's Faculty of Management Studies). True to form, he started as plant human resources manager at Delphi eight years ago and worked his way up. Today, 80 per cent of the firm's 1,300-strong workforce has been hired by him. Not too many hr managers can make that kind of claim.
-Amanpreet Singh

PANKAJ RAZDAN
35/Managing Director, Prudential ICICI AMC
All Fun(ds) and Games

When he isn't deciding how and where to deploy some Rs 15,000 crore of investor wealth Pankaj Razdan is either working out (45 minutes post 10 p.m.) or learning Hindi classical music, or partying (on weekends) at Mumbai hotspots like Enigma and Rock Bottom. But as Managing Director of Prudential ICICI-an asset management company that's a 55:45 JV between Prudential Plc, a UK insurance company, and ICICI Bank-Razdan is of course most busy leading the charge of his mutual fund's 17-odd schemes in a highly-competitive market that involves managing a total of some Rs 160,000 crore (the total market size) of cash.

If that appears an awfully-huge stash, Razdan for his part isn't exactly impressed. "That's peanuts. Penetration of MFs is still just 0.03 per cent. We have barely scratched the surface." To appeal to more consumers, a better understanding of their needs is necessary, he adds.

Razdan is perhaps best placed to develop that insight, not because he's a veteran of sorts in the fledgling mf sector but because of the wealth of experience he's collected in Indian markets. And how! In the early nineties, he chucked up a cosy engineering job at Tata company Nelco, and plunged headlong into the stockmarkets. His timing wasn't the best. A certain Harshad Mehta was running riot, and by the time that artificial boom turned to bust, Razdan had "lost a lot, but learnt even more."

If investors in Razdan's funds are getting a bit edgy by the first half of that statement, a quick run through what he's been up to since the Mehta-triggered bourses scandal should put them at ease: He set up the Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Delhi offices of Kale consultants (today a major software products and services player), moved to Pru ICICI in 1998 at inception time, took charge of sales and distribution for the western region, in a couple of years moved on to head that function nationally, took charge as deputy MD in 2003 and early this year assumed charge as MD. Barely months into the hot seat, and the fund was slammed for switching pf funds into equity. Razdan acknowledges there was a fraud, but assures he's taken adequate steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. If investors aren't impressed by the action taken, they should for sure be by Razdan's transparency: It's not often you find CEOs admitting frauds do happen at their companies.

-Brian Carvalho

ARNAB SEN
31/Vice President & Business Head, Services & Solutions/Apollo Health Street Ltd
Sangfroid in spades

There must be something different about a young man who walks away from McKinsey & Company after an all-too-brief stint to be an entrepreneur. There is and there isn't. The career of Arnab Sen, a "poet at heart" and a "high risk taker", both by his own admission, is typical up to a point: a degree in electrical engineering from IIT, Delhi, followed by a diploma in business management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a campus placement with McKinsey & Company (Sen came in second in a batch of 200). The atypical part comes from his role models, people who have made their mark in the world starting virtually from scratch and preferably against all odds. That could explain why the consultant left the Firm in early 2000 when he spotted an opportunity in the technology side of the hospital services business. The result was Emedlife Health Services, a company he co-founded with two colleagues and with the Burman family that runs Dabur.

In 2001, Apollo Hospitals acquired Emedlife and Sen became the company's point man for initiatives in telemedicine, web solutions, and other such technology services. "He inspires an element of trust, faith and fairness," says Namit Agarwal, Vice President and Head, Operations (BPO), Apollo Health Street. Agarwal should know: he was Sen's batchmate at IIM-C and left a fast-track career at Citibank to sign on with Emedlife. "He is cool at work, yet has the ability to transform even a normal team into an aggressive one." Sen, the son of a psychology-professor couple has already worked on key healthcare informatics assignments for the Ministry of it, World Health Organisation, the Government of Kerala. And he lists engineer-MBA wife Swati Karkun Sen- "she probably believes more in me than I myself do"-as a big help. Significant other, significant support system.

-E. Kumar Sharma

SUDIPTA SEN
32/Head, Marketing, Café Coffee Day
A Passion For Java

Growing up in Kolkata, all Sudipta Sen Gupta wanted to be was an astrophysicist. She nearly became one: after completing her bachelors degree in physics at the city's Presidency College, she enrolled for the masters. Then came a year of what she calls "soul-searching". She learnt German, dabbled in theatre, and read anything she could lay her hands on. It did not take long for Sen Gupta to realise that she wasn't cut out for a career in research. So, she packed her bags and fled to distant Delhi for a management degree from the Faculty of Management Studies. Two years later, she was working for Coca-Cola India. "I wanted to work for the biggest possible brand and it didn't get any better than Coke," she recalls. For four years she cut her teeth selling sugared water; then, in 2001, she quit to sign on with Café Coffee Day, a retail chain promoted by a then-unknown Bangalore firm, Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company. "I knew retail had great potential," says Sen Gupta simply, explaining the rationale behind her move. Then, the company had 14 outlets in five cities; today, it boasts 153 across 37. Much of the growth has come from innovations introduced by Sen Gupta and her nine-member team: merchandising, loyalty programmes, an in-café magazine, and specialised formats such as book- and music-cafes. "A lot can happen over coffee," say the business cards of all Café Coffee Day employees. Sen Gupta, who likes to travel or whip up Bengali delicacies for her husband, Marut, the Head of Confederation of Indian Industry's Western India Operations, believes it can.

-Abir Pal

SANGITA SINGH
34/Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Wipro Technologies
Sold on selling

Married at 22, saleswoman for Borland, Adobe, and Microsoft products, sales manager for Kerala and Karnataka, youngest vice president at Wipro (and arguably, the first woman to hold down a senior position in the still-slightly-old-fashioned company), chief marketing officer, custodian of the global Wipro brand, mother.... phew! That's Sangita Singh for you: dimunitive, almost frail in person, fast in speech, and a bundle of energy in action. Not surprisingly, her stated goal is to position Wipro among the top 10 it services brands in the world. "There is no magic bullet," she says. "It needs a series of small, incremental, yet very important things." Well, if Wipro's now-ubiquitous appearance in the global press is any measure the company is getting there, and Singh's hand is beginning to show.

-Venkatesha Babu

PRANEET SINGH
37/Director, Sales & marketing, Nicholas Piramal
Far From Mechanical

If there was more happening in the auto sector when I graduated, I wouldn't have ever left my core area of mechanical engineering," laughs Praneet Singh, a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and an auto- and aeroplane-enthusiast. Well, he did, and the results have been nothing short of the spectacular: A post-graduate diploma from IIM C, stints at Godrej Soaps and P&G, and seven years at McKinsey & Company (where, among other things, he gained insights into the US, Latin American and South African markets). In late 2003, Singh moved to Nicholas Piramal, and is likely to be there (or at least in the industry) for the next five years. "You need to last at least five years in an industry to have any kind of impact," he says, interjecting that his choice of companies is driven by "the people there". Well, the man himself is said to have some skills in the 'people' domain. "(He is) an outstanding leader of people," says Rajat Gupta, Principal, McKinsey & Co. He will have enough opportunities to prove that at Nicholas Piramal.

-Priya Srinivasan

SUMANT SINHA
37/President (Corporate Finance), A.V. Birla Group
In-house Banker

For someone armed with a masters in international banking and finance from Columbia University, and who's done stints with Citigroup and ING Barings in New York before taking on the mantle of Corporate Finance Head Honcho at the Rs 27,000-crore A.V. Birla Group, it can't be very flattering to be known as son of a Finance Minister. Or rather, as things stand today, the son of a former fm. A big reason for that phenomenon could be that Sumant Sinha is still young (37, in fact) . "And that (the fact that he is under 40) may (also) be the biggest and only reason for me featuring in your list," chuckles Sinha, who maintains that he doesn't "carry it-that he is Yashwant Sinha's lad-on my shoulders."

What he does carry with oodles of responsibility and élan is the corporate finance function at Kumar Mangalam Birla's companies-which involves both external-facing functions like M&A and investor relations as well as more inward-focused roles such as planning and budgeting. Typically, the November-March period is when Sinha has his hands full with the internal-facing oriented tasks thanks to the fiscal year-end deadline. During the rest of the year, Sinha's team pretty much functions as an in-house investment bank, sniffing for acquisition opportunities, keeping in mind the mandates handed out by the various business heads. "We assist if there is inorganic growth to be done," (under)states Sinha.

Such "assistance" has been in ample display over the two years Sinha has spent with the A.V. Birla Group. For one, Hindalco has been transformed into a much larger company with a diversified metals portfolio. For another, the acquisition of Larsen & Toubro has propelled group company Grasim to leadership position in the cement industry. Sinha clarifies he is always a part of a larger team when working on such deals, which typically also includes the head and the CFO of that particular business and the Chairman.

Sinha acknowledges the difference between working for an investment bank and a corporation. "As a banker implementation doesn't matter. Today, I have to live with the consequences of what I dictate." He's doing that pretty well so far.

-Brian Carvalho

MURALI SUBRAMANYAN
40/Vice President, e-business Development, India Operations, Oracle
Business As Usual

My job is not stressful," smiles Murali Subramanian, confessing that he manages to steak an extended 40-minute luncheon break in a workday that is just a tad short of 12 hours. Still, there's no denying the fact that the graying-at-the-fringes six footer who holds masters degrees in statistics and computer science from Madras Christian College and the University of Texas, El Paso, is key to Oracle's Indian and global strategy. Subramanian, a table tennis enthusiast who loves a game with his colleagues-he is ensuring that the company's new campus in Hyderabad, where he is based, "will have plenty of table tennis tables" cricket nets, and a state-of-the-art gymnasium- heads the Hyderabad centre that employs a sizeable portion of the total 5,000-plus staff of Oracle India and is completely responsible for the company's e-business development group. He deserves that 40-minute break.

-E. Kumar Sharma

ARUN TADANKI
33/CEO, Monster India
A Circle Sealed Thus

Not too long ago, Arun Tadanki was the head of sales and marketing at Jobs Ahead, a jobs portal (yup, it's a dotcom), the IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad alum's second job after Nestle, where, among other things, the built the Polo brand (he still nurses a Nestle hangover and names former CEO Darius Ardeshir as a role model). He admits he took too long to "figure out the market". He got a second chance when he signed on with Monster India as its head. There the movie-buff-he sometimes watches four movies back to back and insists that he has no "flashy hobbies" like golf-learnt all about growing profitably and managing by instincts. "I am not interested in research; by the time it is done, the market has already moved on," he says. Now that Monster has acquired Jobs Ahead, the man who insists he has to learn to delegate more has an opportunity to set the record right. He probably will.

-Amanpreet Singh