What I Learned

Chanda Kochhar
Deputy managing director, India ' s ICICI Bank

My parents migrated from Karachi to India as refugees during partition and started rebuilding life from scratch. My father was a civil engineer who later became principal of an engineering college in Rajasthan, where I grew up. There was an academic atmosphere at home and strong and equal emphasis on education for all of us—two sisters and a brother.

One of the most sobering lessons I learned early on when my father passed away after a heart attack at 51. I realized life could change any time. And you have to adapt to a totally different situation. As a teenager in a small town where everybody knew me as the principal's daughter, I was a little celebrity. After my father's death, when I shifted to Bombay, nobody knew me. I was taking the crowded local trains to college, whereas in Rajasthan I had not stepped out of the house without a chauffeur and a car.

I always thought that I would join the civil service. But when I came to Bombay I saw the commercial world, and nobody seemed to give so much importance to the civil service as a career. So I got an M.B.A. and joined the world of finance. In 1984, I joined the ICICI Bank at age 22 and climbed through the ranks to my current position: looking after corporate and international banking at India's largest private-sector bank.

I have not stopped learning lessons. First, don't have fixed notions. Bankers are always typed as corporate or investment, but I have grown with the bank and helped set up every new business: infrastructure financing, commercial banking, retail credit. When I was offered retail credit, it was a totally unknown area in India. I knew as long as I was willing to learn I would be able to do it. Accept challenges; don't run away from them.

There is no substitute for hard work. You can't think that things will work out of some brilliant, fantastic analysis or some lucky break. My work required long hours: so be it. It has required that I travel so much: so be it. It has meant less sleep: so be it. You can't say "I want to be successful" yet "I will work only five days a week because the other two days I will have to be with my family." For women especially, if they really want to prosper, they have to prosper on a level playing field, not by asking for special treatment. At this level I don't think I am working for ICICI. I am ICICI, and ICICI is me. It is an immense sense of responsibility that I bring to my work.