Stirfry MBA

What is Anand Kumar as a person, as a professional and as an award-winning blogger?

As a person, I am sincere, balanced and not so complicated. I believe that being associated with creative activities keeps the brain alert and functioning all the time. I am a keen follower of current affairs and am passionate about current affairs, music and films. I am liberal-minded with no dogma. As a professional, I am pragmatic and switch between being a task-oriented person and relationship-oriented person. So, I believe strongly in situational leadership. Similarly, I like to switch between being a left-brain person to a right- brain person as the situation demands. Keeping the “Award Winning” tag aside, as a blogger, I enjoy expressing myself through my writing and so far, it’s been a great journey hearing feedback from a cross-section of people who have read my posts.

How has the printing industry changed over the years? With everything online– do you see the industry dying out?

Experts have been sounding the death knell for the printing industry for more than a decade now. However, as much as the world is migrating to a digital age, printing has not died. Certainly, the form of printing has changed and evolving all the time.

Some of these changes we saw in the last 2 decades include –

• Print/Copy/Distribute to Distribute and Print
• Printing for just commercial/office use to Printing at home, Printing for fun,
• Printing for nostalgia and so on
• Printing on paper to Printing on all kinds of media (On CDs, on Mugs, Directly on packaging , on Pen drives, on Plastic cards and so on)
• From just plain Monochrome to colour including colour labels

In short, there has been an evolution from plain vanilla printing documents on paper in offices to printing in other forms.

How has your journey been — from an Engineer MBA to an Industry Specialist in the printing domain?

The journey has been extremely rewarding and fruitful. I consider myself lucky to have started my career in the year 1991, which turned out to be an eventful year for India as a country in many ways than one. We were in the thick of action when the country transformed from being just a protectionist, inward looking, technology deficient country over night to a more open country which was welcoming foreign companies, technology and therefore brands. And my experience in handling exports for few years’ right in the beginning of my career immensely widened my exposure, changed my world view in many ways and helped me to have a much broader perspective. This and the initial years of experience being in the thick of action when the country was rapidly changing helped in grooming myself as a battle hardened professional.

You have worked in large brands — Indian, Japanese and American — How would you compare the different management styles?

There are pluses and minuses in all these different management styles. Having spent reasonable time with these companies, I could get a ringside view (not just an outsider’s perspective) of the different management styles. I had written a blog (Read here) on this and have spoken in management institutes as well about these different styles. As a professional, working in a Japanese company taught me self-discipline, objective decision making and not to take professional short cuts.

When did you start blogging– how was it to be awarded for your blogging? What is your blog about?

Blogging for me started as one of those New Year resolutions way back on 2012. I made a nervous beginning on the night of 31 st Dec, 2011!!! Unlike the usual New Year Resolutions, I am happy that I have stuck to it till now. My blog is about my take on current affairs, my travel experiences, slice of life anecdotes and at times about interesting Marketing/Advertising stuff which I come across. I was delighted to be nominated first and then to win the award for Blogging that too for the category of Advertising and Marketing. That the jury included eminent people like Dr. Bibek Debroy and others who you look upon, added to the happiness.

What is your take on life?

I don’t have too many philosophical takes on life. I take life as it comes without thinking too much far into the future. I do believe that everything around you happens for a purpose. More importantly one credo which I believe is “To be sincere and work hard and results do come”

Your advice to young aspirants who want to join the Corporate world?

The formative years of any professional is important and that what shapes one beliefs, one’s confidence and eventually one’s career. In this phase, it is important to be relentless in being sincere, work hard and demonstrate one’s capabilities to the organisation one is associated with. In this phase, it is also important to have less distractions, focus on work and demonstrate that you are Mr. Dependable. Success and everything else follow. This is also the phase one makes a choice in terms of going on your own or working in a company. So, the experience, successes and failures of this period all matter.

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