Tracking the journey of Ganesh Natarajan, Vice-Chairman and CEO, Zensar Technologies
News | 28 Mar 2014
EDUCATION Growing up 12 km outside Ranchi, I went to a Christian missionary school and the quality of education wasn't great. We were taught not to have ambitions beyond what you are trained for and we were trained to be very good in English. My confidence to communicate with people, my leadership, everything stems from this 1974-79: Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi This was at the peak of the Jayaprakash Narayan movement and during the first two years we hardly had any classes 1979-1981: NITIE Mumbai Post-graduation in Industrial Engineering 1999-2005: IIT-Mumbai PhD on Knowledge Management at Zensar 2006: Harvard Business School Advanced Management Programme EXTRA-CURRICULAR: Used to teach information management at Jamnalal Bajaj, Mumbai while working at DPS at age 27 Authored four business books and four non-business publications CRISIS MANTRA I'm very bad in a crisis, I get very stressed. When there's no crisis, you have to get people to bond so that when there is a crisis and there's stress, there's still an underlying environment of liking each other. THE LOVE CULTURE: There are strong bonds among the employees at Zensar and this has come to be known as the love culture. LIFE LESSONS:
People inherently want to be good, you have to believe in the good in people ROLE MODELS: My father, who would work ten hours a day, come home and then head off for some cultural or social commitment; he was an active member of society KK Nohria: He was MD, Crompton GreavesBSE 0.09 % and within three months knew my name and where I came from. He would hold workshops where he encouraged people to talk. WORK EXPERIENCE: 1981-85: Crompton Greaves, Nasik. 1981-83: Planning Officer:This was my first job as a management trainee and I was in charge of materials planning 1983-85: Planning and Systems Executive I got into IT by accident. The company got a computer and I was probably the only one who knew what to do with it and was tasked with building their first production planning system. This got me interested in computer applications