Mr. Biswapriya Bhattacharjee
Director – B2B Technology & Head Centre of Excellence Kantar, Bengaluru PGDM, Class of 2000, ABS, Noida

Describe your career journey and your current role.

I had a wonderful career journey facilitated by Amity Business School. From campus, I was placed in a dot com that was looking to revolutionize education. Though the idea was possibly a little ahead of its time and had to be closed within a year, I learnt a lot in that one-year stint. Being a small team, I also got exposed to all aspects of the business –sales, marketing, technology, content, or HR. This one year truly shaped my career. I was also fortunate to work with some of the greatest leaders then.

After this stint, I worked for a year in a marketing services company helping technology clients shape their channel marketing programs. I joined them to set up their back-end operations and by the end of the year, I was leading the relationship with one of their key clients.

My true calling came in the most unpredictable way. While on the way back from a business travel in Gujarat, I met a friend of mine from my engineering college in Mumbai. His roommate introduced me to his organization and spoke about the amazing work that he was doing in helping marketers take critical business decisions. The organization was then called IMRB International (now Kantar). The entire interaction got me so excited that I applied for an opportunity in that organization that night itself. Fortunately, after 4 rounds of stringent recruitment process, I got through and was placed in their office in Bangalore.

From the time I got into this organization, I have never looked back. I have spent more than 20 years in this organization now and I love every minute of what I do.

What are some of your key achievements in your illustrious career journey?

Professionally, I have ensured that I have helped my organization grow and take up newer opportunities and challenges. I have built newer business lines and have resurrected some of the failing businesses too. Along the way, I have built some great client relationships too. However, more importantly, I have had the opportunity to work with some great young minds and I have had the fortune to guide some of them too. Many of them have built successful careers of their own.

On a personal front, I have a contended family life with all my family members (parents, siblings, spouse, children, spouse’s family) staying close to each other, always looking out for each other. It is important to have a right balance of work and relaxation and I have been able to build that despite a lot of travel. For me, work life balance is not about working 8 hours a day but having enough time to do what I like to do.

Describe your AMITY journey. What made you choose the University, and how did it fulfill your learning aspirations?

A lot of my life’s decisions have not really been planned. Amity was also one such decision. I happened to apply to Amity because one of my seniors from my engineering college had got through Amity.

Once I joined Amity, I was exposed to aspects of life that I had never experienced in a Govt. Engineering college. Apart from the core education, Amity gave me the following:

- Helped develop 21 st Century skills– whether it is through the various seminars, assignments, or the work through CRC, I was able to develop the 21 st century skills of communication, creativity, collaboration while hone many others like leadership, critical thinking, flexibility etc which helped me throughout the career journey.

- Helped build relationships – Amity helped build strong connect with my peers, visiting professors, corporates too.

Overall, Amity helped me realize my true potential.

A message or a success mantra that you would like to give to your current Amitians.

Amity is the start of a fabulous journey of your life. Acquire all the skills that you can, both technical & attitudinal, while you have the opportunity. In college, you learn everywhere, in class and outside class. So do engage in all kinds of activities to ensure that your learning & development is a well-rounded one.

To close, I would like to share something that the CEO of my first organization told me then – In work life, you will always see yourself doing boring and mundane work. That is because you may not understand the implication of the work that you are doing to the larger organization. So, while you do the mundane job, focus on understanding the larger implication. If you can make 5% of the mundane and boring work to be exciting by understanding it better, you would have done yourself a lot of good. You will realize your true calling when you hit the 10% mark!

I hope and wish all of you hit the 10% mark and do better than that too.