THE NO-NONSENSE CEO

PRUDENT GLEANINGS FROM SHIKHA SHARMA

As a young girl, Shikha Sharma was never treated as one at home. Maybe, this helped her succeed in a field which used to be a male bastion

Shubham Mukherjee & Shailesh Dobhal

SHE reached the venue of our meeting good 15 minutes ahead of the appointed hour, alone, without the customary corporate hangers-on, a rarity for a busy Indian CEO. But with a disciplined army kid upbringing and a father who would "be unhappy if I came second in the class," Shikha Sharma has never known pampering, at least not the sort that comes with being a first-born, a girl or a CEO now. "Being the first child, I bore all the expectations of my father. He never treated me as a girl. I was supposed to do as well as my (younger) brothers. The pressure was equal on all the three children," reminisces Sharma, MD & CEO, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, as we settled down for lunch at the trendy Indian eatery Masala Art in the capital's Taj Palace hotel.
    This was supposed to be a no-work, informal get-to-know the person behind the job kinda interaction, but then given the current context of the US-manufactured global financial crisis, we couldn't resist the temptation of asking how she read the scenario where such venerable names like AIG and Lehman Brothers are falling like ninepins. "Some very foolish things have been done, like throwing basic caution to the winds. A contagion spreads and you have a disaster all around. I think what should happen now is that some of that cowboy behaviour will have to stop. People have to go back to the basics of risk management and much tighter inter-regulator coordination."
    A ICICI lifer, Sharma joined when it was still just a development financial institution, back in 1980 straight out of IIM-Ahmedabad. "I was clear that I wanted to be in finance, as I was good at maths and quantitative (stuff). Actually, at school I was best at physics and wanted to be a physics researcher." As it turned out, a bureaucrat uncle of Sharma's guided her towards Economics at Lady Shriram College, as he said that physics wouldn't land her a job.
    "I hadn't even heard of IIM before I went into my BA. Somewhere in the middle I decided that I was either going to go to the IIMs or get married. I was not going to do anything else." It turned out, she also met her would-be husband, Sanjaya Sharma there as he's her batchmate at IIM-A class of 1980.
Three-year mindset
Being a soldier's daughter, Sharma changed seven schools in as many cities, finally finishing at Loreto Convent, Delhi. "Looking back, I realise I have this three-year mindset for everything." Though she has stuck to her first employer for 28 years now, Sharma says she's somehow had three-year stints in various ICICI departments — project finance, corporate planning, retail finance and securities. But she seems to have broken that three-year rule with life insurance, where she has been the head since inception in 2000. "Well yes, but even here, I have looked at the business in three-year cycles," she avers. "So probably a three-year cycle is (hardwired) in my brain."
    Sharma says that the two big things ICICI Pru's focusing on in the current three-year period are health and the rural market. "Rural is a little bit of an extension for business but it requires a different delivery so we are working on the technology and processes. Health is pretty much a white canvas. What is the right model for India? Is it advice? Is it wellness? That's the thing that consumes me and excites me (currently). The organisation needs to come up with something quickly,"says Sharma, almost in soliloquy.
    What's the secret of successful 'women of ICICI', once dubbed the 'petticoat brigade' by Mumbai's chauvinistic banking fraternity, as a two-year old article in the Fortune magazine put it? "One, ICICI never discriminated between men and women managers. And it always had an open culture," says Sharma, adding that even though the organisation was sensitive and accommodating of women managers' family priorities, the workload was the same for everyone. As a woman if you take a break, at ICICI "your job waits for you when you come back. I think women value that a lot. The guys valued that a lot less so they got attracted (out of ICICI) as the pay scales got higher (in the industry), but women stayed back."
    So this women-friendly culture explains her long innings at ICICI. But the moot point was if she knew she was going to go so far in a male-dominated financial world when she began as an ICICI trainee in 1980... "It was the background that I was from. It was like today you are in this school so you do your best, tomorrow you don't where you will be," says Sharma, coming back to her threeyear conditioning. "And honestly, the desire to be at the top existed at the time I joined. Lalita (Gupte, ICICI Bank's former joint MD) was the high profile lady in the projects department. And she was quite well established, well known, a kind of role model."
Letting go
Shikha and Sanjaya (currently CEO of Tata Interactive Systems) got married in 1982. "Five years after my marriage I conceived. But unfortunately, the doctor said (due to some complication) we had to abort it. Those two-three days were very traumatic. It was a big milestone in my life." It was the same when she left I-sec, a ICICI-JP Morgan joint venture she helped start in 1992. "Some of my best friends were made there. But once I left, for two years I never visited the I-Sec office. It was just like giving up the baby. It taught me the trauma of living life. It helped me (learn to) give up. Thereafter, giving up has been very easy," says Sharma. "That created a (sense of) detachment for me that while I am here I am fully committed, the moment I walk out, it's all over. Those two (events) were the defining things for me."
    Family remains Sharma's pivot in life. Whenever she travels within India for work, Sharma tries to keep it a day-trip, so that she can get back to be with the kids — a son, an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and daughter studying in class XII at Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai. "My daughter is really talented at singing. My husband's mother was an outstanding singer and she wanted the kids to learn too. After she died, I hunted for a music teacher. I knew they would not sit down and learn classical music so I decided to sit with them and learn classical music, but my primary motivation was to (help initiate) them into it."
    Sharma says that now classical music has become almost meditation for her, and her migraine attacks have reduced dramatically ever since she took up music seven years ago. A seafood freak, Sharma keeps in shape doing cardio and little bit of weight training at the gym three/four times a week. "Once a year family holidays, and specially driving and non-hotel stays excite me. Now we are planning to leave the kids and go to Angkor Vat in Cambodia."
    We wondered whether like her father, whether she also expects her children to top their class...There was nothing three-year about her reply, though. "The environment has changed a lot now. There are plenty of opportunities," she says. "So we genuinely want them to pursue whatever they want to so that they excel in that. They have to earn on their own. We'll fund their education, but they are not getting any inheritance from their parents!"