My name: Neha Gupta
My company: True Office Learning
My title: Chief ExecutiveOfficer
My location: New York City
Best business advice I ever received: There are two thatI received from mentors that I always remember and strongly live by.
The first: It’s always about people, and people neverforget how you make them feel. Motivating individuals, building trust within anorganization, and building deep relationships with your customers is paramountto being successful in business. Amidst the myriad of transactions,negotiations, and financial analysis, this advice has allowed me to focus onthe most important part of any interaction and decision—the people.
The second: If you wait for 100 percent of theinformation to make a decision or take action, you are alreadybehind. Making decisions in tough or ambiguous circumstances is critical forensuring success. In our ever-changing world, individuals and organizations cansuffer greatly from analysis paralysis if the focus shifts from taking actionsto attaining certainty—which, given the dynamic nature of the business world,is essentially false precision. This advice has always helped remind me tosteer clear of that and keep moving forward.
Most daring personal career move: My most daring personal career move was to leave aleadership role at Citigroup to join a startup and bring the True OfficeLearning vision to life. I went from overseeing functions for a 17,000-personorganization within Citi to being in an 11-person startup working to build thenext-generation enterprise education technology platform. I knew it would be abig culture shift that would require me to leverage not only existing skills,but develop new ones, as I would be working in a very close-knit environment.The passion for the mission of moving learning forward and the belief in thefounding team made it a lot easier to make this transition. I remember sayingto a friend that from a career perspective, this will either be the best move Imake, or the worst. Either way, the one thing I was sure of was that it would bea lot of fun.
WhatI’m most proud of: I am most proud of being able to share some of the basicprivileges of education and independence I received growing up in America with youngpeople around the world that are not as fortunate. In addition to supportingorganizations that run residential schools in rural areas and focus onchildren’s causes, I find the work of actively mentoring young women looking tomake their mark against all odds and social norms most gratifying. Giving youngpeople a fair opportunity to be their best selves as they grow and evolve, andknowing that I could contribute to that journey, is what I’m most proud of.
Currentworkplace challenge: Having a multi-generational workforce. With organizations increasinglybecoming globally distributed and the workforce being a mix of Baby Boomers,Gen X, and Gen Y (Millennial) individuals, it is becoming very challenging fororganizations to build a common value system and create tools that can cater toeach group effectively. The one-size-fits-all approach that has traditionally worked issimply no longer yielding results. This puts a much greater burden on theorganization to identify ways to adapt every business process to eachpopulation’s needs. Fortunately, technology can help create the right toolsthat personalize the experience to each user and help attain maximum effectiveness.
Something people don’t know about me: I’m classically trained in Kathak, an Indian dance formthat is the ballet equivalent in India. Expression through music and movementis something that gives me immense joy, and I am two years away from having amaster’s degree in the dance form.
