This was the question asked of us recently by an extremely inspiring, highly admired and accomplished business leader of an Indian multi national conglomerate.

Canadian economists warn Canada about the upcoming economic issues. 2020 economic forecast was 2%, but there could be a real problem. Economists talk about the possible recession and warn Canadians about it. 2% growth may not be achievable because of the Coronavirus.

An extremely intriguing and interesting story about how a great technical design changed 5 hands over 3 decades yet survived and generated billions.

This was the start of the mobility era in India and specialized infrastructure was need of the hour for the telecom Industry. We were building a new practice for a large company from scratch practically and trying to bring all the promises of IT to the telecom industry.

Global Account Transformation opportunity - Got an opportunity to join a company known for its world leading sales and go to market strategies. Globally this company had identified 55 accounts which contributed 40% of it's annual revenues and each account was led by a "Global Client Director" (CD). My first assignment as CD was to transform one of these global accounts with whom they had a fraction of their fair wallet share and was right at the bottom of this list of 55 accounts. This customer is a very progressive organization which values partnership and has it's presence in India, SAARC & African nations.

This was the beginning of the internet era and I was working for a company as a pre-sales head.

Early 2000’s the company I was working for acquired a Unified Messaging System (UMS) company. This meant an operator could offer a mailbox to a subscriber which could store and process Voicemail, E-mail, Fax-mail all from the same mailbox.

Today I learnt about spatial programming which help build virtual reality games to run them on 5G networks. I also learned about machine learning techniques to develop speech recognition software for a personal assistant or a Bot. What I felt is that I am probably late by few quarters learning about it. But then I have to if I must stay relevant for the next ten years. I must keep updating myself.

It's been almost three decades I have been working in the telecom sector and throughout this period, I have lead a lot of complex projects, managed diverse teams, and had the privilege of working with professionals. It has been quite an exciting journey which taught me a few management lessons that most B Schools don’t.

I started my career working in a startup where I spent around five years. During that period, the company went public and did its IPO. I was a budding youngster looking towards a full-fledged career and needed a strong foundation. A lot of credit goes to those five years for whatever I am today. I was given a lot of responsibilities, got learning experiences to grow, to prove myself and to gain confidence. Here are the five valuable lessons I learned working at a startup in my initial years.