Material is a global strategy, insights, design, and technology partner to companies striving for true customer centricity and ongoing relevance in a digital first, customer-led world. By leveraging proprietary, science-based tools that enable human understanding, we inform and create customer-centric business models and experiences + deploy measurement systems – to build transformational relationships between businesses and the people they serve.After being an advisor to Material for ~6 months, I decided to come on board for two reasons: a) I really liked the people (which has always been for me one of the top two reasons to work anywhere) and b) the opportunity for impact as a company is massive (which is the other reason).

I currently advise some of the world's leading private equity firms on their digital investment and value creation strategies.

An Advent portfolio company, Ansira is an independent marketing product and services firm with a focus on enabling customer experience for distributed ecosystems. I was hired by Advent as Ansira's first Chief Delivery & Innovation Officer, with a remit of driving scale and transformation in offerings and capabilities. We redefined the offerings, restructured the organization for better specialization, integrated an acquisition, started modernizing our capability, brought in top-tier external talent, and set up new practices to drive better integration and management of client work. This was a challenging but extremely enriching experience, adapting to a new context and team, rapidly driving transformation, while collectively dealing with the impact of Covid-19 on our clients, our business and our lives.

Publicis.Sapient is the digital business transformation arm of the EUR 9.7B Publicis Groupe. During this period, I managed our business and teams across our Asia Pacific markets - Australia, China, South East Asia, Hong Kong and India. At a time when Publicis was undertaking large scale changes in structure, proposition and brand, my challenge was to shift our capability footprint in the region to go after the emerging digital business transformation opportunity across these markets. This helped me develop a deeper understanding of critical client challenges across the region and figure out how we could best help them in their journey.

My key challenge during this period was to establish SapientNitro's business presence in the India market. Over a 2 year period, we managed to attract some of the best strategy, creative and servicing talent in the country, and built one of the most admired agency teams in India. This established the SapientNitro brand as a force to reckon with in the space of digital transformation, experience design and branded content.Over a short period, we achieved significant P&L growth, acquired several new clients, and delivered award winning work for blue-chip companies such as British Airways, Nestle, Philips, and William Grant & Sons, and helped iconic brands like Taj Hotels start their digital transformation journey by designing and implementing a best-in-class customer experience. This was possible because of a team of hand-picked professionals, each of whom brought industry-leading capabilities, thought leadership and deep passion for creating impact on our clients' businesses.

I was at the forefront of SapientNitro's massive organizational transformation leading both our largest geography (where we have 65% of our people) as well as co-leading our delivery function globally. Within the delivery function, this meant rapidly building and integrating new capabilities in mobile, digital production, social, analytics, omni-channel commerce, devops as well as revamping our delivery methodology and tools around agile and distributed collaboration. I also personally mentored a large set of leaders, all of whom today play significant leadership roles in the industry, both inside and outside of Sapient. During this period, SapientNitro became the 3rd largest digital agency in the world, and easily one of the most admired.In India, we drove a subtle but significant shift in our culture as we encouraged our people to embrace more risk taking and innovation, and changed our talent strategy to attract and reward people who could collaborate and create impact within diverse teams. I was also successful in creating an environment of thought leadership within India. We collaborated with Nasscom to come up with the first ever research on the opportunities for the Indian IT industry from the disruption in marketing. During this period, Sapient was recognized for the first time among Fortune’s Top Ten Most Admired IT Companies in India.

Taking on the newly established role of Sapient's Global Delivery Lead, I was responsible for the execution of Sapient's services across the globe. I led a very large organizational transformation which involved recruiting my team from across the globe, leading the change across the company, establishing the governance processes, and building the capabilities of both the organization as well as the people on my team. I worked out of my comfort zone, made a few mistakes, learnt from them, and identified and drove large scale changes in capabilities, quality and methodology to effect a 35% improvement in operating profit over 3 years and a 100% growth in revenue over 5 years. I joined the company's leadership team and got a lot of exposure to handling global issues of a fast growing public company.

Post my startup experience, a friend referred me to Sapient. I was attracted to Sapient for its culture and the great work it was doing out of India. Over these seven years, I played different delivery leadership and general management roles. I got a chance to work and learn from terrific professionals across the globe, evolve my own leadership beliefs and style, and got consistent exposure to business management in a global setup. I was the India General Manager of Sapient's North American Business Unit, then around 60% of the company. Also was a member of the North American Leadership Team.

Co-founder of IT strategy and systems integration start-up. Warburg Pincus put in $10M as their first services startup investment in India, and we managed to scale the business to 120+ consultants across 4 offices in North America and India. We pivoted on our strategy twice in 18 months, but our timing was terrible and the market just shut on us.Although we couldn't execute on our ambition, we had an amazing time. One key learning from this experience: if you've to choose between culture and strategy, always go with the former.

Cut my teeth on distributed delivery engagements. My first experience of living abroad, and working in multi cultural teams. Managed a large financial services client in the Netherlands, and was part of the team that created CTP's Application Management Services methodology. Unforgettable.

Wrote telecom software in C and Unix. Long nights, telecom protocols, Unix system commands, "bus error core dumped", Netscape Navigator, newsgroups, ftp and bulletin boards. Also made beautiful documents in Adobe Framemaker.