Growth is the most important factor for leadership : Krishna Kumar

Krishna Kumar
Founder, Simplilearn


The brief I was given and what I did in the first 100 days at work
After graduating from NIT Suratkal in 1999, I joined Infosys as a software engineer. My role included providing services like software development and requirement engineering. At the time I joined the technology giant, IT services companies used to have 60% utilisation ratio with 40% of the employees on ‘bench’ and I was one amongst them, so I had a relatively slow start. Interestingly enough, it was during my bench days that I was bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. I started ideating on my first venture TechUnified — an enterprise software product company — and later moved on to launch it in a full-fledged way.

The worst mistake I made
Looking back, I feel if I could relive that time, I would not have waited for work to come my way and instead approached teams that had plenty of assignments. But this mistake became a blessing in disguise as I decided to move on to start my first venture.

The best leadership lessons I learnt
Infosys taught me that growth is the most important factor at the end of the day. I was amazed at the rate at which the company was growing, and I used to wonder how it was possible, in spite of a lot of employees who were unable to add value by being on the bench. Also, one other vital lesson that I did learn was the importance of macroeconomic factors’ impact on businesses, which is essentially to focus on areas that are poised for growth.

How I had fun at work
The best part of being at Infosys was that I had great company back then. I was lucky to have my friends from college join me in my first workplace. With less work pressure in the first year, it gave us ample time to bond and enjoy our professional lives.

How I managed my work-life balance
Back then, the work pressure was considerably low, as we were freshers and there were only a handful of assignments to work on. Balance was not really a factor that I considered back then, being in the first few days of my professional life with not too much work on my plate

My biggest innovation
I believe that my greatest innovation was that I was able to build a world-class training platform with a unique blended training model that helps working professionals get ahead in their careers. In this process, we set about putting India on the global education map by training professionals from over 150 countries, right out of India.