AT THE HELM

Anish Shah, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mahindra and Mahindra

In early April, Anish Shah took over as managing director and chief executive officer of Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M). Mr Shah – who was earlier deputy managing director and chief financial officer of the Mahindra Group – has replaced M&M veteran Pawan Goenka, who retired from his post after an illustrious career at the Mumbai-headquartered diversified conglomerate.


Incidentally, Mr Shah’s new responsibility is quite a big one, as he will be the first professional MD and CEO in the history of the Mahindra Group to have complete oversight of the Mahindra Group businesses. In fact, Mr Shah will assume that big role in November this year after Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra will relinquish his executive responsibilities and take over as the business conglomerate’s non-executive chairman.


“One of the reasons we had succeeded and thrived over the past 75 years was that we were good at introducing change in the right measure at the right time. Anish is the right leader for the Mahindra Group,” said Mr Mahindra, speaking after the appointment of Mr Shah as the MD and CEO.


Mr Mahindra appears to be quite right in his judgement of Mr Shah’s calibre. With a post-graduate diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Mr Shah completed his master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon and also did his PhD from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.


Following his education, the new M&M chief started his career with Citibank in Mumbai. He later moved to Boston in the US and worked with Bain & Company as a strategy consultant. Later, he joined Bank of America and its US Debit Products business. At Bank of America, Mr Shah launched an innovative rewards programme, led numerous initiatives in payment technology and worked closely with various teams across the bank to enhance value for its customers.


Mr Shah then joined GE and had a flourishing career there spanning 14 years. He held several leadership positions at GE Capital’s US and global units. Returning to India, Mr Shah joined GE Capital India as its president and CEO. At GE Capital India, he led the transformation of the business, including a turnaround of its SBI Card joint venture.


In 2015, Mr Shah joined the Mahindra Group as the group president of strategy, where he led strategy development, built capabilities, such as digitisation and data sciences, enabled synergies across group companies and managed the risk and performance review of organisations.Later, as deputy MD and CFO and now as MD and CEO, Mr Shah has his tasks cut out for him. He will soon be in charge of the over Rs 1,42,000-crore  Mahindra Group with interest across automobile, auto components, defence, aerospace, logistics, renewable energy, information technology, agri-business and financial services, among other sectors. The viral pandemic has upended most of these sectors. The need of the hour to steer these Mahindra Group companies out of the pandemic is a hands-on, veteran leader. And Mr Shah seems to be the right man to fire-fight the crisis.

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