Road To Professionalism

Subroto Bagchi is the co-founder of the Indian IT major Mind Tree Consulting. In his first best-selling book, The High Performance Entrepreneur, shared his story of building a company. His second best-seller, Go Kiss the World, was the story of his life, motivating young people to achieve what they want in their life. In The Professional he gives us his knowledge, based on his life long experience.

Ramachandra Guha the author of ‘India after Gandhi’, has stated the book as “Moving and deeply empathetic…From richly varied experiences, Bagchi explains how to conduct one’s career with both intelligence and integrity. This fine book will command a deservedly wide readership.”

Subroto Bagchi defines the term professional as the ability to work unsupervised and the ability to certify the completion of one’s work differentiating a professional from someone who is simply professionally qualified. Becoming a professional is a journey of a person who observes his own behaviour and actively guides it as he is exposed to different opportunities during his entire career. It’s the difference between obtaining a degree and living the education.

His first chapter, ‘Burial of the dead’ is a deeply moving and inspiring story of the most abominable profession of dealing with dead bodies. He introduces the idea, of who a professional is through a man Mahadeva whose life is dealing with dead bodies; unclaimed dead bodies. He is not someone who is conventionally associated with the term ‘Professional’.

The book is divided into parts that discuss among others, integrity, self awareness, professional qualities, managing volume and managing complexity.

His presentation of the book in parts is well articulated. In first part, he presents the idea of integrity and describes how it is the keystone of the arch of professionalism. For second part, he moves to the concept of self-awareness and discusses the key attributes of a self-aware man and how others can acquire it.

Third part of his book relates to the basic professional qualities of an individual. He describes these three sections as the foundation pillar, on which an individual can build his entire career.

In his book’s fourth part, he focuses on the people who have achieved or are on their way to mid- management positions. He talks of ideas through which one can manage volume of work.

In his fifth part, he discusses the professional qualities of the higher management, which they require to handle various and complex situations.

In his second last section, he discusses about the forthcoming changes in the global market. He discusses five important concepts of which professionals should be aware of. Under this section, he discusses inclusion and gender, cross-culture sensitivity, governance, intellectual property and sustainability. In the last section, he discusses what it means to be a professional’s professional.

In a world where the global economic meltdown has affected the livelihoods of millions of people and where companies and individuals routinely face the condition to make uncomfortable and unprofessional choices, The Professional provides the expressed and unexpressed code of conduct which separates a skilled individual from a
professional.

By Nilabh Krishna