Arundhati Bhattacharya
Arundhati Bhattacharya (born 18 March 1956) is the chairperson and chief executive officer for Salesforce, India. She is also retired Indian banker and former Chairperson of the State Bank of India. She is the first woman to be the Chairperson of State Bank of India. In 2016, she was listed as the 25th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. She is the only Indian corporate leader listed on Fortune's world's greatest leaders list ranked at 26.
Quotes
[edit]- Women having it tougher than men in their careers isn’t anything new globally. Female professionals, especially in India, rarely experience smooth linear progress
- There are three times when a woman decides to leave (her career), the most common of them being the childbearing years
- It is expected out of the mother to take the child around for various coaching classes and to wake him (or her) up in the morning with a hot cup of Complan (milk)
- Given this assumption, a woman has to divert her attention from her career to the children
- The third reason we found that women are leaving is to take care of their parents or parents-in-law, because geriatric care in India is quite costly. And then at that point, female workers feel absolutely guilt-ridden and…give up jobs
- I made two-year sabbatical for child and elderly care that could be taken by the employee in three slots. And about two years after we did a survey to see the success of the initiative, we found about 676 women had availed it and one of them even told me that due to this change my entire career has been saved
- it’s not going to be the same as mine... you’ll have multiple careers and you need to be able to unlearn, relearn, keep learning all the time. So, when I got the Salesforce opportunity, I told myself that I’ve been giving a lot of gyaan, a lot of advice. Here was a chance to do it myself, to have multiple careers
- And in many cases, where I have to file, for instance, reports, etc., the statute has to come up to show that I have the powers to do this... They said either you go for a change of the Act, but till the change comes through you will be known as Chairman. So I scrapped the cards thinking I had far larger battles to fight at that point. I accepted the term Chairman and went on with it
- So, you have to really go out of your way to determine what other than monetary incentive you can hand out, what are the right buttons [to push] in order to motivate and inspire people. In the private sector, the simple solution is to throw more money at the problem. Now, that is not always fruitful as you are not really ensuring that the person is developing in the right way
- You have to be very nimble and agile on your feet to acquire the latest technology, which the private sector could do much more easily than the public sector
- At the end of the day, you have to realise one thing—that these directors meet the company once in a quarter, or if it’s a big company like Reliance we meet twice a quarter; so in this much time, there is only so much that you can review. Given that is the case, one has to understand that even by looking at what is being presented to you, you are at a disadvantage because the management will only show you what they want to show you
- So I think the merit of a director lies in being able to ask the right questions and being satisfied that the questions are being answered in as complete a manner as possible. Developing that can take a little time, can actually take up quite a bit of your time, especially in the beginning as you get to know the company
- Every function earlier used to report to Marc (Marc Benioff, founder & CEO of Salesforce). There was no India head. Going forward, the functional reporting will remain, but there will also be an India-reporting structure. India’s scale is unprecedented; if you have solved for the scale in India, you’ve solved a lot of problems globally.These are the synergies we want to bring about
- Everyone I talk to say there is now a different way of doing business. And that cannot really be done unless you are empowered with data, empowered with digital platforms and applications. Depending upon how we are in that journey, what are the resources required, the organisation will decide. But we did want to destress our people by saying that in this entire crisis period, you don’t have to keep worrying about that (layoffs). Just worry about keeping yourself and your family safe.
- I have done a few things with Fortune 500 firms, and those have gone well. I have led the digital initiatives in SBI and I realise the value of digital. By bringing me in, they want to display the fact that they are serious about India. It indicates a commitment from the Salesforce management that we are here for good and we want to scale this
- I used to tell them that in your time, you will have many careers. And one of the things you should be passionate about is learning, unlearning and relearning, and that’s what the new world is going to be like. When this position was offered to me, I thought of walking the talk
- They have the philanthropic model of 1-1-1, which is giving away 1% of your time, 1% of your products and 1% of your profit or equity to philanthropic initiatives
- I’m always a little bit of a sucker for a challenge
External Links
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