Bharat Kaushal of Hitachi India speaks about his first year at work

Bharat Kaushal, managing director, Hitachi India on his first year at work.

The brief I was given and what I did in the first 100 days at work
My first assignment at ANZ Grindlays was rather unexpected and dramatic. My joining coincided with an enquiry being conducted for a major scam in the Indian capital market in 1991 and I was part of the core team carrying out this scrutiny. At that time, data was stored through primitive style automation, so we had to manually find suspicious trail by scanning hordes of documents. The scrutiny team would spend endless hours, working from morning to night, studying a lot of boring data and applying our minds to identify links and connections to scam transactions. By conducting this exhaustive exercise, I was quickly able to comprehend the complex architecture of the banking industry within the first year of work.

The worst mistake I made
The worst mistake I made was avoiding training conducted on migrating operating systems from MS-DOS to Windows. All banks were adapting to the newly introduced software, but somehow I evaded these training sessions and prioritised the capital market scam scrutiny and investment banking related projects. The result was that I was always conscious and felt tech-handicapped for a long time at work.

The best leadership lesson I learnt
I am an inherent believer of creating an environment of trust in all relationships. Once you trust people working with you, you can delegate work and responsibility but taking that first step is crucial. Trust begets trust. I experienced this first hand in my career. Two major Japanese conglomerates – first SMBC and now Hitachi – trusted me as the first Indian to head their country operations in India.

How I managed my work-life balance
As a student, I was a serious sportsman and won laurels at national level swimming championships. In my formative years, it was ingrained in me that physical fitness is key to mental fitness. Therefore, even while working, I always ensure that I take the time out for exercise in some form.

The biggest innovation I did
I joined Grindlays as a ‘relationship manager’ – this designation had just been introduced by the bank. I was one of the first few people who got a job in this profile. As part of this role, instead of offering individual services, a portfolio of services was offered to clients. In this role, I was instrumental in building the concept of ‘Investment Portfolio Management’ for large institutions who were our clients. Depending on the risk appetite of clients, we would advocate the right mix of investments between banks, markets and other financial instruments.