Be Curious, Be Brave, Enjoy the Journey

You spent over a decade at Tata Steel and today lead marketing for automotive steels in India. If you had to describe your professional journey in one theme or philosophy that has guided you through these years, what would it be?

Like a typical manager, I’ll break this into three parts: be curious, be brave, and enjoy the journey.

My biggest learning from the past 13-odd years at Tata Steel is that, especially early in your career but really throughout it, you should grab any opportunity that appears interesting when it’s placed in front of you, even if it comes out of turn, even if it’s not what you expected. I’ve stayed within marketing and sales more or less the whole time, but within that I started in automotive marketing, moved to automotive sales, then into an innovation role, then spent a period handling a retail brand, supply chain, digital marketing, and setting up the housing and commercial segment of that new brand. Then I came back to automotive for a while, made a pivot into supply chain planning for a new product segment, and I’ve now come back to automotive in a different role again. I’ll be honest, most of this wasn’t planned. Opportunities kept coming up, they looked interesting, and I went for it.

That ties into the second part, be brave, because we Indians tend to keep an eye on how a decision will look on paper. Most of these moves were, on paper, unconventional choices: switching tracks in quick succession rather than specialising in one area, which very few people do. But looking back, this made my profile multi-disciplinary within marketing and sales, and that’s actually given me an edge later in my career when I’ve gone for new responsibilities, simply because of how diverse the experience is.

And that leads to the third part, enjoy the journey. Engineers-turned-managers like me tend to believe we control our own destiny, that our 30-year career path is chalked out clearly. It doesn’t work like that, and maybe that’s exactly where the fun, the magic, is. You start doing one thing; something else comes up; you do that instead, and over time you realise you’ve built capabilities and discovered potential in yourself that you didn’t know were there. Enjoying that journey, rather than being fixated only on the end goal, has probably been the real source of satisfaction in my career so far; it’s a bit like that saying: the road less travelled often leads to the most profound experiences.

You started your career at XLRI and have grown through multiple roles across marketing, sales, innovation, and planning. Looking back, which role taught you the most about the steel industry and how it actually works?

My biggest learning has been that the steel industry, at least on the customer side, is nowhere close to being the monolithic, homogeneous thing people imagine. It can be as diverse as you can think of.

On one extreme, you have large B2B customers with very specific technical requirements — the role I currently handle, automotive steel, where Tata Steel services all the major automotive OEMs in India — involves large buyers and, as textbook B2B marketing would put it, almost entirely rational decision-making. On the other side, our company also makes branded products, TMT bars, roofing sheets, and newer products like Tata Pravesh steel doors and windows, which I was actually part of during its incubation and scale-up. That’s a completely different world, a retail, lifestyle product, where the decision-maker is the lady of the house, and her considerations are things like how a door will match the colour of the walls or the furniture, not purely cost versus output.

So that’s the spectrum my own company operates in, and most large steel companies globally operate somewhere on a similarly wide spectrum: SME customers, government customers, B2B, B2C, each with a completely different set of buying criteria. But the one constant through all of it is that the basics of marketing and sales don’t change. It always comes down to the four Ps: what does the customer need and what product am I offering; how do I reach them, my supply chain, my route to market; what’s my price point, which isn’t just about margin but about how I position myself in terms of premiumness, aspiration, and affordability; and finally, brand positioning, which part of the customer’s decision I consciously want to be part of, because I can’t be everything to everybody. On the sales side, it comes down to staying close to the customer and staying attentive to their stated and latent needs. Technology, digital tools, and now AI have augmented all of these processes over time, but the basics underneath have stayed the same; only the outward manifestation keeps changing.

The automotive steel industry itself is going through a period of rapid change, driven by EVs, the push towards lightweight materials, and ongoing supply chain disruption.

How is the automotive steel business evolving to support this transformation?

Lightweighting, alongside crash safety, has been the key focus area in automotive for a long time, and that pushes a continuous shift towards higher tensile grades, advanced high-strength steels, ultra-high-strength steels, gigapascal steels. That’s been happening since before I joined the industry and will keep happening. We’re now developing next-generation steels, complex phase, TRIP steel, and press-hardened steel with strength levels reaching 1,500, 1,800, even 2,000 megapascals.

EVs have actually fast-tracked this trend, because the battery adds a fixed amount of weight to the vehicle, and if you don’t offset that, your range suffers. That’s pushing a shift from traditional cold-forming steels towards hot-stamping and cold-stamping steels, press-hardened steel, essentially, which practically nobody in India has been making until now, though the European, American, Korean, and Japanese steel industries have been building towards exactly this for years, and we know it will be the mainstay over the next 5 to 10 years.

EVs have also brought entirely new components that didn’t exist in an ICE car — EV battery casings, for instance — where steel companies are actively working with automotive OEMs to figure out the right specification. Electrical steels are another area — until now, mostly supplied to transmission-type applications — but EVs need a higher grade, higher-silicon CRNO electrical steel, at close to 2 per cent silicon content, and we expect demand for that grade to grow 20 to 30 per cent year on year.

In an industry like steel, where production cycles are long and demand is volatile, how do you balance customer needs, operational constraints, and market opportunities?

I’ll answer this based on how I’ve seen my own company handle it. We’ve typically operated in an environment where customer demand exceeds what we can supply, in a sense, we’re lucky to have always operated in a supply-constrained scenario.

What the company aspires to do, and what I think any company should do, is take a portfolio view of the market: within your addressable product basket, try to have some presence across every market segment you can serve, however big or small. Alongside that, have very clear strategic clarity on which two or three segments are your intentional, chosen focus, based on margin, or strategic importance to future growth, and make sure you deliver superior service and hold a leadership position there. That’s your day-to-day mode of operation. When disruptions happen, having presence across the whole spectrum lets you pivot and reallocate volumes in the short term, so your own output and revenue don’t take the hit.

As for long lead times, that’s going to remain part of the steel industry’s landscape, but the push should always be to shorten it. We’re not going to be able to deliver steel in 10 minutes like a quick-commerce app, but one of our senior leaders put it well in the media a while back: if not steel in 10 minutes, why not steel in 72 hours? Getting there is about better planning, keeping the right stock in the right places, and using technology, digital tools, and analytics. Now AI adds another layer of both complexity and efficiency. You have to keep innovating and pushing that boundary to stay ahead of the competition.

Many people think marketing is mainly about branding and advertising, but in industrial sectors it looks very different. How would you explain the real meaning of B2B marketing in this industry?

Branding and advertising is the snazzy part of marketing, but it’s really just the fourth P: promotion. Even in industries where branding is heavily used, the other three Ps remain just as important and just as present. In B2B, advertising and branding do exist, just not in the traditional sense: we have B2B brands aimed at our SME customers, who buy our steel sheets to make fabricated items or appliances, and we still supply those through a branded route. In the automotive space, there’s a second kind of brand: specific, proprietary, high-end products, similar to how some European steelmakers have branded proprietary grades of their own.

But the basics, what I as a marketing manager spend most of my time on, come down to identifying who my customer is and developing a strategy to serve them, and identifying how my customer’s needs are evolving, or spotting new needs altogether. That’s really the crux of B2B marketing. And then it’s the same four Ps again: what does the customer want and what can I offer, how do I reach them, what’s my supply chain and route to market, and how do I price it, which in a B2B automotive setup is far more complex than retail pricing, though it still follows certain formulas and benchmarks. And even in a very technical field like automotive, promotion still matters: product brochures, thought leadership, conferences, seminars, and joint development workshops with customers.

How did working in supply chain planning shape the way you think about markets and customers today?

That experience, which, in my organisation, is technically still part of marketing and sales, just the planning side of it, made me far more aware of the sheer complexity of the back end: steel manufacturing, the operations around it, and the massive scale of steel logistics. When you’re in marketing or sales handling customers in a region, you’re vaguely aware of it, but once you get up close to a 20-million-tonne company and see how that production is planned across multiple sites, the interdependencies between them, and how the raw material side works too — 20 million tonnes of output essentially means 80 million tonnes of material moving, 40 million inbound and 40 million outbound — you get a real sense of the enormous scale of operations behind every 5-tonne or 10-tonne batch we eventually supply to a customer. That appreciation for the scale of what happens in the back end was my key takeaway from that stint.

You work closely with cross-functional teams across operations, logistics, and sales. What leadership lessons have you learned about aligning diverse teams toward a common business objective?

I have fairly strong views here. The conventional wisdom is that people in big organisations are comfortable working in silos, but what I’ve actually seen is that if management can lower ambiguity and raise clarity around business requirements and deliverables, that alone results in higher participation, higher enthusiasm, and far higher quality of output, even from a genuinely cross-functional, multi-disciplinary team.

Four things need to be in place for this to work. First, strategic clarity: what exactly this project should deliver, and how it fits into the broader strategy of the department or company. Second, how clearly management communicates the expected outcomes and deliverables, which flows into clear roles, objectives, and KPIs for individual team members. Third, periodic reviews and feedback, with course correction whenever needed. And underlying all of it, giving the team a sense that their work genuinely matters to the organisation: that’s why senior leaders are spending time reviewing progress and giving guidance. I’ve seen, very directly, that getting these basics right lets even a very diverse team deliver quickly and efficiently, and the reverse is just as true when you don’t.

If you were advising young professionals entering industries like manufacturing, automotive, or supply chain, what capabilities define the leaders of the next decade?

I’d frame this across three paradigms. The first is personal capability: what leaders should build within themselves. Comfort with new technologies, digital tools, analytics, and AI has to be paramount. I’ve watched, over the last ten years, digital tools and analytics go from being someone else’s department to being close to my second language. And AI has now put that into overdrive: analysis that used to take me real time now happens in seconds. Alongside that is comfort working within a globally interconnected supply chain — even domestic-only companies today have dependencies running through other countries — and leaders need a systems-level view to operate effectively in that.

The second paradigm is what the industry and other stakeholders will expect from leaders: the ability to work with agility and adaptability in an environment that is genuinely, constantly Vuca (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), not as a cliché, but as lived daily reality. We thought Covid was a black-swan event, and now the current Middle East conflict is having a comparable impact on supply chains to what we saw in late 2019 and 2020. Alongside that, an understanding of ESG and environmental regulation — Europe has already shown where this is headed, and it’s becoming mainstream fast across India and the rest of Asia too — and the ability to treat that not just as a compliance requirement but as a genuine lever for competitive advantage.

The third paradigm is people development. An innovation mindset, the courage and conviction to spot and back the next big shift as new technologies and business models disrupt incumbents faster than ever, will matter more, not less. And so will the ability to manage talent across genuinely diverse backgrounds and needs, because the span of generations a leader has to manage is only widening, from Boomers to Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha coming in, alongside an increasingly global, culturally mixed talent pool. The gap between generations that my own boss had to manage was smaller than what I’ll have to manage, and it’ll be wider again for the leaders who come after me.

Outside of work, what are some hobbies and activities that help you disconnect and recharge?

I’ve always dabbled in a lot of things, but a few have stuck as responsibilities have grown. First is live performances, I always prefer seeing something live over a recorded version. I’m a big stand-up comedy fan; I’ve been following the Indian stand-up scene for almost 10 to 12 years now, and if one of my favourites is performing in town, you can take it for granted I’ll be in that auditorium. I have a similar set of musicians whose shows I never miss; some of them I’ve followed for so long they’ve genuinely become friends, since they’ve kept seeing me across different concerts.

Like most Indian men, I follow sports fairly religiously, but unlike most, I don’t follow cricket much these days. One of my old loves that I’ve rediscovered since Covid is basketball; I watched a lot of NBA as a kid, and even though it’s not on TV here anymore, between the NBA app, Amazon Prime, and YouTube, I’ve gotten properly back into it over the last four or five years.

The third thing, which I don’t get as much time for these days, and I’m reminding myself as much as anyone that I need to get back to it, is making memes. A few friends and I actually set up one of the largest meme communities in Bengal, on Facebook, years ago. It’s still active; we’ve all gotten a little older and busier, but whenever we catch up, we always say we need to get back into meme-making, because there’s a particular joy in putting your own unique take on whatever’s happening, that I’ve genuinely missed.

If you could go back and give one piece of advice to your younger self just starting at XLRI, what would it be?

This is something my younger self wouldn’t want to hear, but I think it’s worth sharing anyway: don’t do an MBA as a fresher. I did mine straight out of college, and once I actually joined the industry, I realised how much I’d missed. Even during the MBA itself, I could see how classmates with three or four years of work experience, especially in a product-based setup, manufacturing, or FMCG sales, were able to absorb what was being taught, and bring their own perspective to it, in a way I simply couldn’t. I’d draw a blank, because I didn’t yet know what working in a corporate actually felt like. Once I started working, a lot of what had been taught suddenly clicked. If I had the choice again, the one thing I’d change about my XLRI journey is working for at least a couple of years before starting the MBA.