Lessons From My First Job: Nikhil Arora, VP & MD, Intuit India

Nikhil Arora of Intuit India shares his first job experience…

My First Job was: At Miramax Films

My experience: With over 20 years of global experience in corporate strategy, international operations, marketing and finance – in India, Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the US, I bring an in-depth understanding of the Emerging Markets (BRICs) and particular challenges as faced by businesses in India. 

Before joining Intuit, I worked with Laureate Education, Microsoft’s business solutions group, Delphi Group, and General Motors among others. I have worked on M&A and joint ventures focused on new growth segments and international markets. 

Things I learnt: 

• Creating an environment of trust and allow people to take risks and overcome the fear of failure
• Get involved with your customer’s problem; not your own solution
• Think like a person of action; act like a person of thought

Skills I acquired: Forming sustainable strategies around customer and market trends, rigor to execute and dealing with ambiguity. The nature of doing business in emerging markets is like running a marathon. One needs to prepare, plan and practice for the long-term.

Secondly, in any business there will be moments of success and failure. However, it’s essential to have the ability to navigate through these moments and demonstrate personal excellence.

My manager’s teaching: Opportunities come unexpectedly and you have to trust your instincts and grab them. Go with your intuition and back it up by data. Celebrate failures as we learn from them and eventually get it right.

My journey so far: I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to work both in the public and private sectors across Entertainment, Education, Consulting, Automotive and Technology industries; learnt and applied some of the best practices from each industry.

Turning point in career: I have lived in five countries, worked in five different industries and worked in five different functions. All of these had a significant impact on my career.

My most crucial step/assignment: I would like to share two of my experiences: 

• Westinghouse CBS television: I used to work as a financial accountant with Westinghouse Broadcasting. When the company merged with CBS Television my role was impacted. My immediate manager taught me the importance of not getting overwhelmed (from a portfolio of 6 TV stations to over 30 TV stations), but rather embrace this opportunity to learn and expand beyond my present experience. Ever since then, I have had five different functional roles, and each of them brought along a new set of challenges.
• Working in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian Republics under conditions of extreme political, regulatory and market uncertainties taught me how to manage and work in a trust deficit environment.  In this assignment I realised that functional skills are important, but developing stakeholder trust is far more important to be successful. I was able to learn, unlearn and relearn about self-trust, relationship trust, stakeholder trust and finally inspiring trust.

My advice: Life is a process of discovery. So live to the fullest and explore the unknown. It’s not how good you are, but how great you can be. Always focus on inclusive growth and development.

Where I see myself 5 years from now: I am passionate about small businesses, running global marathons and doing charitable work in the field of education and children with disabilities. I aspire to make a positive impact across these three areas. 

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