To juggling ambitions and reinventing – Woman’s guide to business

Enter Ms. Tanushree Bagrodia. CFO of NRB Bearings, a listed manufacturing concern with revenue of over $166bn & Nominee Director of a huge specialty hospital in India.

Hustler. Role-shifter. Game-changer. Believer.

Tanushree believes in free interactions and wanted the brief for the event to be as limited as possible. We requested her to talk about the banking and finance world in the changing face of technology and how she has managed to navigate through various roles as a woman while also wonderfully managing her profession.

From the year 2003 to 2018 there has been a 335% increase in women in leadership roles in S&P 500. This appalling fact that Tanushree began her talk with doesn’t excite her.

“The only thing it does is express bias.”

Being born and raised in a country like India at a time of extreme gender biasness she was never raised like a daughter she states. She was raised as a prankster and a curious child. Her strong upbringing contributed a lot to her ambitious drive. Raised without a bias herself, she put into perspective how the first step towards removing biasness can be to not celebrate it.

This resonated with a few and puzzled a few, but stuck as something to think about with us all MBA students.

Having graduated from INSEAD MBA at a fairly young age and seeing her share of struggles trying to make it in the banking sector in London at a tumultuous time for finance, she understood the important of being at it. You need to be well researched, persevered, thought out of the box in life are the exact words about the first most important thing she’s learnt in her life.

A very important point put across by her to our investment banking enthusiasts was the importance of understanding different aspects of the sector. Back, middle and front office are as important to know about and understand as they can be, because the decision of where you want to be decides your career ahead.

Till you don’t. Because it is always important to reinvent yourself. The second important learning. She was part of one of the only deals for partially convertible bonds issued in the world at a time when she was balancing another Asian convertible bond deal in Taiwan. Going without sleep for 52 hours, managing the time differences, to succeed in both. She was pushing the limits and teaching us to do the same. She reinvented herself once again when she moved to the India to test the growing financials market there. Accepted defeat when she couldn’t navigate through the bureaucracy and then reinvented to become a CFO.

Life will never stop throwing hard balls at you. You need to move on and most importantly as B school students and business enthusiasts keep yourself very updated about, well, everything. This was what we gathered from a powerhouse woman who left us inspired and very curious.