Career Opportunities

Career Success

The three greatest traits that helped me excel in my career were integrity, logic and tireless dedication.

• I hold back none of my time and energy in completing the tasks with accuracy.
• I hold myself to a high standard and I hold everyone else who work with me to the same or above.
• I rarely make assumptions, and I prefer instead to analyze, check my facts and arrive at a logical course of action. This removes dogma and gives me space for clear unbiased thinking.

Secrets

• Once I heard my father say, “Don’t expect too much, if you are doing too little”. I’ve always believed that hard work and dedication will always pay off.
• I love what I do. I believe that it is unfair by the company if I take up responsibilities for which I wouldn’t give my 100%. I am genuinely interested in what I do and that helps me to focus.
• My weakness; the quickest way to get to my bad side would be laziness and dishonesty, to a point that their absence is far more important to me than emotional consideration. Sometimes this kind of ‘blunt’ approach by me have left people thinking that I am ‘cold’. 

Planning

• I prioritize my work not purely on the basis of the person who wanted it done but how urgent it is in driving the results of our business.
• I have visibility to a lot of operational issues that is happening in the business when analyzing data. Instead of choosing to ignore those issues until they become severe threats, I have always brought transparency and immediate visibility to them so they can be addressed by the decision makers and resolved promptly.

Staying updated

• In staying updated on the latest and greatest business strategies, I have got a great coach for a boss. I’ve learnt so much that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. The power of determination to never fail the person who believes that you can make a difference should never be underestimated. 
• In terms of being updated in other fronts; I get the local news alerts on my phone. I occasionally read relevant articles on Harvard Business Publishing, listen to TED talks, have some intellectual conversations under different topics on reddit, and talk to my family member living around the globe about their take on the world.

Work life balance

• I’ve got a great support system back at home. I’ve got a ‘killer’ bunch of siblings with a ‘sick’ sense for competition J . This keeps all of us in our family on our toes in everything we do both at work and at home.

At JKH

A bit about my early days at Elephant House; I was first interviewed by Mr. Ajit Gunawardana and was assigned to CCS as a management trainee. At the time, CCS stock was trading at around Rs. 70 and the economy was suffering severely with over 22% inflation. Most of our distributors were collapsing, some were holding bare minimum stock and some others were overstocked for having ‘big hearts’. Mr. Jit Gunaratne, our President at the time, had the task of turning around the company. He initiated an operations review meeting, what most of the veterans at CCS came to call the ‘Thursday meeting’ or the ‘@-home’. I was given the task, along with another management trainee, to bring visibility to the operational ‘issues’ in production, sales and distribution. Between the two of us, we discussed and agreed that the best way to approach the situation was to present the information as an opportunity rather than a threat. So instead of reporting operational ‘issues’, we started to report ‘efficiencies’, through the introduction of key KPIs. The concepts of order fill rate, pack fill rate, bull whip effect were fresh off the pages of my MBA text book named ‘designing and managing the supply chain by author Simchi Levi’. Initially there was much debate and confusion around the difference between order fill rate and pack fill rate! Getting the stock balance data on a weekly basis from over 80 distributors through a fax machine wasn’t a walk in the park, but I ensured that the data was complete and accurate by the time I had to present it to Mr. Gunaratne every Thursday. The technological limitations at that time was a big challenge, yet perseverance and the thrill of receiving the opportunity to apply theory in real world, helped overcome most of the barriers I faced. It was a great start for a successful and satisfying career.