The Story of my story ..
A warm and happy family man , a trusted and caring friend, an ethical and respected leader and a lifelong learner is how I perceive myself to be. The wonderful woman I am happily married to for 35 years, my two incredible sons and a doting daughter in law form the epicentre of my world. My fond hope and desire is to give back and contribute to the causes of continuous learning, learning as a culture and learning agility as a core success skill through various roles and forums.This website is the platform for my expression, sharing, listening and learning as I travel, meet people, visit places, learn something new all the time and capture life as it happens.Life is beautiful. A journey of purposeful impact to help others attain their own full potential by being a Learning Sherpa is what keeps me excited .. day after day after. day.. a n rao
A very satisfying Journey called life : There is so much to recall, share and celebrate ….. join me in my story.
Life comes broadly in 3 phases : Years of preparation, times of significant contribution and years of purposeful impact and the beautiful life beyond work years
Life, Phase 1 : Years of preparation, academics with a lot of hardwork, excellence and recognition and I was ready to start an incredibly eventful next of 35 years
Life, Phase 2 : years of meaningful contribution aka work years.
What an amazing spell of 35 years working with some great organisations, some amazing leaders who invested in building my career, while I reciprocated the grace working hard to build some high performing leadership teams. While at it, I am insanely proud of my own beautiful family that grew along the way.
There sure were a couple of career mistakes but would I do anything different if were to do it all over again? Absolutely not. Each mistake turned out to the launchpad for the best turn and the right step in my career path. So, thankful for the short bad patches I learnt from and grateful for the amazing journey in all. I had an opportunity to build robust P&Ls, created impactful functions, lead 5 solid platform transformations going all the way spanning EPR ( immersed into Toyota Production and Canon Production system), Service Management Platforms (with new age service management platforms like Service Now challenged incumbents), Enterprise Management (as cloud and SDN started redefining enterprise architectures), Cloud Operations and Learning Platforms (as world finally moved to learner centric and outcome oriented learning in the hands of the learner). The glide from the days of MS-DOS and Novel Netware and VAX VMS to the realm of software defined everything, cloud and server less and Digital Transformation was seamless till one looked back and said Oh My God! Lead the world’s first ITIL Certification covering Infra Ops, Application Ops and Service Desk at a time when we even spoke of these as separate tracks and went onto the world of continuous integration, Full Stack and devops and server less computing and natural language processing. Watched with delight as organizational operating systems went from hirearchical chains of command of the early industrial era to decentralised, networked forms like Holacracy. Watched the tectonic changes in ‘work’ as lifelong employments lead to free-lance and gig workers.
The journey from the baby boomer era I was born in to the Gen Z world I retired in happened with such unidirectional certainty and tsunamic velocity. Ever so thankful I loved change, worked to learn and rode the wave. If that’s not a great working years era, I wonder what is.
Very grateful for a unique career span of time which gave me so much and a undying fancy for work and an unending aptitude for play.
During these working years, I held senior leadership positions in the domains of Automobiles, Computer peripherals manufacturing, Enterprise IT, IT services, Enterprise Applications, Global Delivery, Delivery Excellence, Learning &Development etc., in Cognizant, HP, Wipro, Digital, Microland, TVS Electronics.
I travelled extensively meeting customers from around the world, met my globally distributed and multi cultural teams and worked with amazing mangers from 3 different continents. Fell in love with travel in the process and the love lingers in my veins and arteries. I met great leaders from the tech industry and some incredible people who stayed my friends for life. The leaders gave me the space to jump into completely new areas, learn rapidly and be successful. Feel thankful for the opportunities to build and transformationally scale functions and business spanning the 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions by putting people in the front and building strong and agile Leadership teams that could scale.
In my last and my most cherished role, I was the Global Head of Learning for Cognizant Technologies responsible for learning strategies for 280,000 employees across 53 countries. I was always a learner and this sting really prepped me for my next life as a life long learner with unquenchable curiosity and a committed traveller.
Life was kind and it was time to gracefully transition into the phase 3 of my life ..
Life, Phase 3 : My future now-on would be my years of filling up and emptying my bucket lists. It would be time to teach, learn, mentor and consult. It would be my time to contribute and give back and make a difference. It would be my travel for travel, hobbies and wellness. This phase of life is actually quite simple. Remember, I had 60 years to plan it.
