CEO Insights India

Once a goal is set, our zeal to achieve it decides our course of action. Aligning our body and mind to function accordingly, it’s our passion that does the paddling until we achieve what we aspire. After attending an induction and sales training program at the onset of his professional career, Anand Dewan was so impressed by the transformation of latent talent into explicit skills that he swiftly yet sturdily decided to forge his career path towards the same. Irrespective of the significantly perceptible absence of training institutes in the country back in those days, Anand’s journey with some of the front running brands such as Xerox, Vintron Motorola, for the next eight to nine years sharpened his skillsets and fashioned his base to succeed in the sophisticated world of learning architecture. With a notion to give his
dreams a physical manifestation, Anand got an opportunity to be part of the founding team to lay the foundation of BYLD Group, the largest firm in the South Asian region, offering value added services in L&D. Apart from supervising a team of trainers to set up India's largest pool of Telecom Trainers, Anand has also headed Reality Learning Business Learning through Business Simulations targeted towards Leadership Teams in Large Corporates.

Anand engages in an exclusive interaction with CEO Insights.

What major hurdles have you encountered in your journey so far?
Since I was so certain about my goals, I envisaged every hurdle as an opportunity to prove myself. According to me, the biggest challenge in this profession was to continuously unlearn and relearn the strategies across businesses. For example, one day I was with CocaCola, to understand their distribution mechanism, the next day, with Indigo, keenly comprehending their passengers' movement and flight turnaround time, and so on and so forth but

with diverse businesses from tractors to aircrafts. So, you learn one day and unlearn the next day, and then have to relearn the third day. This is a huge challenge, and one should be equipped with a robust mindset to learn and survive.

What driving force is motivating you to keep going?
At a personal level, I owe my success to my mother for inspiration,my wife for aspiration and my children for execution to make family dreams a reality. However professionally, I think I'm blessed to get up in the morning every day with an opportunity to make a difference to an individual oran organization and I draw inspiration from this huge responsibility. Starting with an opportunity to be a part of a transformation project for the Indian Railways, on customer orientation to reorient the customer interface of the nationwide oil distribution segment and being part of enabling the rapidly mushrooming Back office Industry of the country I have closely seen the transformation journey of this country, through the L&OD lenses. Now ready for the next big opportunity, so at the age of 50, utilizing my ideal time during lock down, I went back to school & graduated from MIT-Columbia University with a master's degree in ‘Digital Strategy' and now my aspiration is to create a consulting ecosystem for the MSMEs to be able to leverage the unparalleled opportunity that comes with going Digital.

According to you, what are the key elements that a leader should focus on to scale and lead the organization on the right path?
When I came into L&D from sales, I always saw leaders looking at L&D as a cost center which in my view sets the wrong foundation for the function. Firstly, businesses need to understand at a broader level that L&D is the conjoining path between the strategies they plan and the success they achieve through execution. As leaders, you need to not only ensure that you are continuously developing & nurturing talent but also ensure you use a metric to hold the responsible functions accountable for the deliverables. When HR comes with a

training request, the leaders need to ask three critical questions, which are as follows. What capacity/ potential of our talent pool are we utilizing and how can we improve that? Are the proposed initiatives aligned to organizational strategy from a talent requirement point of view? What are the measurable outcomes of the proposed learning initiative? Last but not the least, leaders must hold the custodian of all resources accountable for ensuring sustenance of all the learning initiatives, in my experience "if the last mile doesn't own it, you have not sown it."

What are the major changes in market behavior that you anticipate? Do tell us about your future goals as an entrepreneur?
Winston Churchill once said that the & empires of the future will be empires of the mind. We clearly see that as the biggest differentiator, in fact, fast becoming the key differentiator and this is not changing soon. While government initiatives have and are addressing the front line skills challenge, organizations have also been able to successfully solve individual contributor skilling, the top talent (CXO LEVEL) can still be bought or imported, however the biggest challenge remains the middle management & leadership, which also is the future of the organization. This is the space we at BYLD are fully committed to and have complete integration of world class solutions to support organizations in this domain. Additionally, in lieu of Gen Z consisting 1/3 of the workforce and going up in the hierarchy, I see the future essentially being led largely by tech, therefore one has to focus very heavily on technology enabled learning. We are working on complete integration of the learning-management system by leveraging our technological knowledge and experience.

Anand Dewan, Group CEO, BYLD Group
A leading L&D stalwart, Anand Dewan holds a prolific expertise across Experiential Training, Performance Enhancement Solutions for Trackable and Tangible Business Results, and Leadership Transformation Programs. He proved himself to be a phenomenal L&D trainer across all the major platforms he has been associated in his illustrative professional career including NIS Sparta India's Leading Performance Enhancement Solution Provider, Star News, India Today, ZEE TV, XEROX India, Reliance, Kotak life, Centum, Vintron-Motorola, Comex India and so on.