“I believe if you do your job properly, you will go up in life and in your career,” says Mr. Aditya Puri. The thoughts of Mr. Puri speak about his efforts and hard work while his career.
Aditya Puri, who is Business Today’s Best CEO 2013 in financial services, has been at the helm of HDFC Bank since its inception 20 years ago. Over this period, he has built from scratch a bank that is now the biggest in the country by market value and the seventh-largest by assets.
He assumed this position in September 1994, with a vision to create a “World Class Indian Bank.”
Mr. Puri is the longest-serving head of any private bank in the country. India Today magazine ranked him #24th in India’s 50 Most Powerful People of 2017 list.
Aditya Puri was born in Gurdaspur District (Punjab) and studied at Punjab University, Chandigarh, gaining a bachelor’s degree in Commerce. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.
Mr. Puri has achieved all his goals in the shortest possible time. He was always on the top of his job in terms of revenues and budget numbers.
That hasn’t changed in three decades. Mr. Puri, will always remain on the top of his job.
The tremendous success of Mr. Puri, has had may give the impression that he is a workaholic. Far from it. He does not believe in putting in long hours at work. He values his leisure time and has created a perfect work-life balance.
Mr. Puri’s Citi stint started with six months of training in Beirut. This training revealed to Puri the bank’s work-oriented culture, with its emphasis on meritocracy. By the end of the training, he had a good grasp of the theoretical aspects of banking. The training turned him from just a finance professional to a generalist with knowledge of several fields. “All I knew is that I had to work hard. If I continued and had a bit of luck, I would make it to the top,” he says.
“It was a phenomenal opportunity to test everything that I had learnt,” says Mr. Puri. It was also difficult, considering the tough competition. In India, state-owned banks had the distribution network and money power while foreign banks had the products and service capabilities. “We felt that if we could marry the two, we would have a winning combination,” he said.
Has the slowing Indian economy put any additional pressure on him? “What pressure?” he snaps back. Then he adds in a lighter vein: “Maybe I am passing the pressure on to my subordinates.”