Mr. Rajeev Shroff, Board Member at Cupela Consulting is a renowned business leader who is known for sharp business acumen and diligence. Backed with significant experience in accelerating performance, transforming businesses, and working in high action situations, Rajeev has a vast exposure in building global software delivery organizations in India, China & Argentina. To get more details about Rajeev’s career journey, we have taken an interactive interview with him. Here are the excerpts of that interview.
- What is your current designation, company, roles and responsibilities? How you are assisting your current company to grow further?
A lot of people ask me, how do I slice time? My reply is how one can be satisfied doing just one thing throughout their lives. Currently, I manage Cupela – a platform for Transformational Coaching and Consulting that works with leading organizations in the country. I also run a Startup Investment Group – Ten Innovate. Also, manage to be a fractional CEO at SmartDrive India & a Leadership Advisor for a not for profit – Rangde.org. From advisory to sometimes handholding leaders across companies to run programs, am able to add value in some form or the other.
- What strength of yours makes you unique among peers?
I believe in bringing context to the consulting practice. I feel pure consultants bring a lot of structure, methodologies, and results focus, but there are gaps with respect to experience of having actually deep expertise of running a company and understanding of the perspective of the Board or the CXO’s who manage the company, CXO’s who will continue to do so after the consultants have come and gone. That’s the reason one of the big five consulting companies, when creating a proposal for offshoring work to India, reached out to empanel our company as an external consultant during the offer making process.
- How a business leader should be like?
A business leader simply needs to manage multiple priorities. The days of doing a couple of things well is gone. A contemporary leader should be able to scale up or down, present to the board and at the same time, know the pulse of the organization. Apart from this, an understanding of customers’ motivators along with current technology helps them in understanding the pulse of the organization. So qualities like being able to learn constantly assimilate, ask the right questions, being perceptive, with a constant focus on staying ahead in his game are things that are necessary.
- What are the current industry scenarios from your point of view? Where global businesses are marching?
There is a stark difference between where the world is going and where we are. As a leadership community in our country, there is too much of living in the success of the past and unwillingness to challenge status quo. Digital Transformation is changing our world faster than we can imagine. There is a lack of holistic thinking and driving change. If employees are not ready, there is simply no point in deploying Artificial intelligence, if anything, they will fear for their job, instead of understanding the true purpose of AI, which is to first take away what machines can do better, so we can focus on the tasks we are best equipped to handle.
- Tell a brief journey of yours since early childhood covering notable milestones that worth mentioning which include your educational background, different professional services and more.
I have completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics & Communication from Jawaharlal Nehru Engineering College. Besides this, there are several workshop certifications which I possess which include Cloud Computing Lean Leadership Workshop and Franklin Covey Focus Workshop which have been instrumental in shaping my professional life.
- Which is the one adjective which match closely with your personality? What are your passions?
Innovation is something I identify myself with. Besides that, the zeal to experiment something new challenges me each time.
- Who is your role model and why? What inspiration did you draw into your life from your role model’s life?
My role model is someone who is relatively unknown because he chooses to be that way. He is literally the humblest leader I have met, ever, and at the same time the best software programmer I have come across, the best head of a company, knows more about business strategy or marketing than heads of many large corporations. I have tried to learn to uphold integrity, always focus on growing people, and try not to allow success to mess with my head.
- What are the various accomplishments or any noteworthy mentions that you received in your career till date? Tell us something about that.
My coaching clients or people I try, and help are my best recognition. When I see them transform and grow into better people, and succeeded, I get a great sense of accomplishment.
- Tell us something about your company (Its inception year, headquarter, short journey and more).
I started off with TEN Innovate India Pvt Ltd in the year 2012. It’s primarily an Angel investment group focussing on Oracle Alumni, a Unique By-The-People-Of-The-People-For-The-People Model, investing in B2B Technology companies. It’s headquartered in Bangalore and in a short period of time, we have been able to grow TEN to a network of 60+ Investors, 600 Entrepreneurs and helped over 50 startups in transforming business strategy, driving business growth.
My main focus is to help create end to end transformation of companies including the leaders. No transformation is about one thing; it always involves People, Process, Technology and above all – leadership transformation. We aim at extending coaching expertise to leaders across sectors, help transit from manager to business leader and build leadership competencies.
- What are your future goals?
I hope to be continued driven by my passion, my desire to be the best in what I do, and create long lasting change in this lifetime for people I work with.
- What advice do you want to give to budding entrepreneurs?
One thing which I definitely believe helps in maintain consistency and continuity is by “Not copying others and creating your own journey. The previous generation does not understand you, just like you won’t understand the next, so let them be.”
