Amarnath Ananthanarayanan, 40, CEO & Managing Director, Bharti Axa General insurance

Bharti Axa General Insurance currently has a 3.6% market share among private companies and 1.7% overall.
Under Amarnath's stewardship, the company has grown from Rs 32 crore (gross written premium) in 2009 to Rs 550 crore in 2011.
Flexibility quotient is crucial
When I went to do my PhD in economics from Rutgers University in 1993 and took up teaching as an adjunct faculty of economics, entering the corporate world was far-fetched; more so, the idea of becoming a CEO. The only things I thought about then were research, teaching and publishing papers. That was between 1993 and 1998.
In 1998, the noise about Indian growth was getting louder. Everybody talked about how the country was the future hub of growth for almost every kind of business. And then came an opportunity to join GE Capital in India.
Professional and personal reasons drove me back to the country and I joined GE at 27 years. That was the beginning of a couple of years of learning. I worked across GE's financing business, including M&A, retail insurance, consumer finance, as well as collections operations at Genpact (erstwhile Gecis), spanning 10 countries. I worked towards setting up GE Money India's insurance distribution operations in 2002, which gave me the platform to create a strategic vision for the organisation as well as execute it.
For all that I did, I got the GE Capital India president's award for Outstanding Leadership & Demonstrating GE Values. That gave a huge boost to my confidence and I thought there was something good in store for me in the corporate world.
I took up another challenge and at 38, joined as the CEO and MD of Bharti Axa General Insurance in 2009. Through these years, some of the things I learnt as an academician and then as a corporate executive kept repeating themselves.
First, a good leader should be flexible and receptive to new ideas. Second, a CEO with strong physique and a domineering voice is respected and gets work done unlike in Thailand, where tall and dominating personalities are intimidating.
You have to change accordingly, and become a part of the environment that you are in, to be successful.