What I learned from Mr. Ajay Chitkara at Airtel

Switching tracks from last week, I will today be sharing a lesson from another leader from Airtel, Mr. Ajay Chitkara. When I was in airtel, he was the CEO of the B2B business, for the International Enterprise Business. One of my team members, Shailesh Gupta, was also the CTO for his function. As a leader of the technology team, I was intent on building stronger ties into the business verticals and that gave me a few opportunities to connect with Ajay, over coming weeks I will share a couple of lessons that I learned while working with him.

Power Point Presentations do not speak; You do!

As a business development leader at Nortel and then at Huawei, I had been presenting to customers for more than 10 years and have had a lot of opportunity to sharpen my skill. I had learned the art of making great presentations and built in story telling as well to make my presentations compelling. I took a lot of time building the charts creating the right messaging, the right combination of text and visuals, weaving my story into them. I could simplify, complex technological topics and make executives link the technology to their business.

I felt I was great, that is, until I got a chance to see Ajay present. It was an analyst meet organised by Ajay and it was also my first chance to see him present. His charts did not have text, in fact it was just the headings and one picture each, they were the cues for him. With nothing to read, the entire focus of the audience was on him. And he did a marvelous job of captivating the audience.

I realized then, that I had more to learn.

When you present make sure that the audience focus on you and not the content on the charts! Great presentations have little to do with carefully curated content.

Stay tuned for more next week.