Submitted by I Putu Mahendra Wijaya, Co-Chair of the Management Consulting Club
The Nanyang Business School has been fortunate once again to host a talk and networking session with two industry leaders in Singapore. Last Monday, 15 December 2014, the Management Consulting Club (MCC) and the Women in Business Club (WBC) welcomed two great speakers to share with the students about the many different aspects in the world of business.
Our first speaker, Ms. Anu Sahai, was from ASEAN Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, and she was a former CEO & Director of Aditya Birla Sun Life Asset Management Pte Ltd. Her session was about her career journey and decisions. She spoke about the road blocks she faced as a woman as she went up the career ladder, the dos and don’ts of the corporate world, the road blocks and struggles that all of us will face and how to deal with them. She gave numerous practical real life examples to make the session more personable and relatable for everyone. Indeed, one of the most interesting insight she shared during the corporate talk was the oft-neglected link between work-life balance, workplace success, and personal happiness. To this end, The Economist magazines recently has run several articles which show practically that longer working hours do not mean better productivity (it may even harm productivity, thanks to overburden). Hence, Ms Sahai’s insight on work-life balance was indeed one of the most important takeaways from the talk.
Next, we were also very fortunate to host Mr Dion Groeneweg, a Partner in Mercer Consulting. During his session, he instilled passion and curiosity among the participants about how the practice of human resource consulting is about to be revolutionized thanks to the development of technology. Particularly, he shared with us the interesting evolution that has happened in the sphere of human resource consulting: how some aspects of the human resource are now on the convergence path with IT consulting, and paradoxically, how human resource will result in more specialization in the future – a trend which will bring more transparency and efficiency to the world of human resource management. Indeed, these dynamics in the industry are exactly examples that you would not find in textbooks.
Some day in the future, perhaps, we will find these topics in textbooks. But for now, at least, the students at the Nanyang MBA program have the privilege to have a sneak peek at all these exciting development before everyone else, right from the leaders themselves. It was indeed an exciting experience to go through.
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