Keep Learning and Absorbing to Grow in Your Career: Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager, IBM

Mr. Goyal’s talk was refreshing not only for its practical life advice, but also because it was peppered with personal anecdotes and experiences. Laying down three simple rules that has helped him succeed professionally (see graphic below), Mr. Goyal emphasized the importance of cultivating an open mind and a willingness to learn at every stage of one’s career. Despite being in IBM for over 9 years, Mr. Goyal still feels he can learn more about the organization and each day is a new learning.

Mr. Goyal revealed that he often tells new recruits to keep the curiosity and wonder like Alice in Wonderland, in their first year in the company and learn and absorb as much as they can. “Stop browsing and start reading. People will always look for content within you. You will have to validate what you are claiming and for that deep knowledge is crucial.” He suggested that students use the two years they have as PGDBM students to read and enhance their knowledge as much as possible.

Mr. Goyal also spoke briefly about his role as Country Manager of IBM Social Business & Collaboration Solutions. Social business refers to IBM’s efforts to help companies use social technologies to grow their business. Giving the example of a large public sector bank, Mr. Goyal talked about how they were able to bridge the generation and knowledge gap by getting senior managers to blog about their experience so that younger employees could learn from this tacit knowledge and interact with their seniors over online comments.

Mr. Goyal’s friendliness and candor helped the students warm up to him and made the session extremely interactive and interesting for students to take a leaf out of his experiences. We hope to see Mr. Goyal back at the campus for many more sessions!