K. V. Kamath on learning everything from scratch
The biggest contribution that a mentor can make is to provide the incumbent full authority and space to do what s/he desires
I had two mentors. One was the head of project finance group of ICICI who provided me with the entire grounding to become a project finance banker. He taught me the ability to look at things in a multi-dimensional and a multi-disciplinary way and very hard engineering skills. Mr Vaghul came in the mid-80s. He taught me to be broad-minded in the way I did business and to build a workplace with huge human talent. The biggest contribution that he made was to cut the chord completely and I had to learn everything from scratch. It is important for the mentor to provide the incumbent full authority and space to do what s/he desires.