I have been an advocate of frequent change: K.V. Kamath

Q. Take us through your journey. What are the most significant experiences in your career and what were the key learnings from them?
A. For the most part of my journey, I have managed people and companies. Most of my career was with ICICI Ltd. In 1988, I went abroad for eight years and came back to ICICI as CEO in 1996. In the intervening time, I was managing small businesses within the companies I was working with.
In the 90s, we faced what I would call the “Challenge of Change”. The India that I had left and the India I came back to was vastly different, particularly in an economic sense. Post liberalization, we were facing many challenges as an organization. The biggest challenge for me was that we looked like a single business company and that was project finance. Now that we had global competition, it appeared to be too risky; our clients were very small in size, they didn’t have the required scale, quality or cost competitiveness. We needed to understand what we could do to