V S Parthasarathy

Group CFO and CIO, Mahindra and Mahindra Limited

Group CFO and CIO, Mahindra and Mahindra Limited, V S Parthasarathy, has won several accolades for taking the company to new heights, for inspiring excellence among people, and for innovating systems to put the company on the map. “One should trust one’s ability to design one’s own career,” ends Parthasarathy.

How do you implement visions and company strategies to further growth?

That’s a very interesting question. Having a vision is easy. The hardest thing is how your vision gets converted to strategy and then converted to implementation. So one of the key things to remember is keep the vision statement easy to understand for everybody. Second is, strategy which shows path. Think complexly… but make it simple for people to understand. What is the strategy.. Dominating… rapid export.. have products which delight. Make things not fuzzy but clear. Then the next step is implementation. The devil is in the details. Don’t be on the surface. Last but not the least, it is nowhere about vision, strategy and implementation, it’s about tenacity. That is the hallmark of a good conversion…

What tips would you share with up-and-coming business leaders as they try and build new companies and start-ups?

The new norms for new startups, is not Return On Investment in the traditional sense.

The new norm for the current generation is return on imagination. So your imagination should be big.. dream big, think big, talk big. However, like they say, “Aankh aasman par ho, kintu pav dharti par tike” - your feet should be firm on the ground, but don’t stop dreaming… and then take steps. Take steps, fail fast, and when you succeed, it should be bombastic.

What are three most important qualities a leader must possess?

Trust, trustworthiness, and showing vulnerability.

What goes into the building of a brand in the 21st century today across the world? A global brand…

Catching the imagination. Brands are all about story telling. How big is the story you can tell… That’s the hallmark of a global brand.

Can you narrate an experience that was inspirational and life changing for you and changed the way you approached work?

There are many not one… But one of the things that I also mentioned in my TEDx talk today is that when I joined Mahindra I was given a set of people who were not the best, as assumed by the earlier department. And I told them I trust you to be world leaders. I trust you to make Tractors a world number one company. They responded and what happened after that was history. The entire team made us world number one, naturally in tractors. But the key thing was that these team members actually helped me achieve something which I personally thought would challenge everything, and that we may come up short. That taught me about trusting people and telling them that they can achieve impossibles… Ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results if trust is placed in them.