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The last time we wrote about Neelam Dhawan, she was gearing up for her new job at Microsoft. Today, three months later, the MD of Microsoft India is all settled in her new role. This Stephenian (she graduated in 1980) is leading Microsoft's sales & marketing operations in India. At Microsoft India, she is responsible for growing Microsoft's products and services businesses and plays a key role in driving the company's partnerships and strategic alliances.

Incidentally, IT was not Dhawan's first choice. Post FMS (Delhi's Faculty of Management Studies) in 1982, like most B-school graduates, she was keen to join FMCG majors like Hindustan Lever and Asian Paints. But remember we are talking about the early 80s when the "weaker" gender was nearly non-existent in male-dominated functions like sales and marketing. Both companies rejected Dhawan (needless to say that in all possibility they lost out on an opportunity to give the industry its first woman CEO); they did not want to appoint women for marketing. She got an offer to get in to banking at ANZ Grindlays Bank. She declined. The rest as they say is history.

Dhawan's baptism into IT happened at the Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies (that's where she started her career) and spent 14 years learning the nuances of sales and marketing. The HCL stint in a way was also an eye-opener for her. She realized that her skills were more suited to selling solutions and desktops or other hardware. In 1995, she joined IBM as VP of sales and marketing and spent another four years before she moved to Compaq. Post the HP-Compaq merger, she moved to HP to head sales.

After over 22 years in the industry, Dhawan attributes her success largely to her parents who never differentiated between her and her brother, and then her immediate family (a doting mother-in-law who quit her job when her elder daughter Naina, now 16, was born, and a supporting husband Atul Dhawan, a partner at Deloitte Haskins).

Dhawan has her role cut out at Microsoft. There are challenges, of course. The dynamics of business in software are a little different from that of hardware. Says Dhawan, "The software part of the business is very different from the hardware part. My key challenge is to quickly learn the nuances of the business and at the same time continue to run it effectively." She needs to get familiar with her team quickly, know her customers and, of course, the channels and partners who play a key role in the business. Time management, she maintains, is the key to getting her job right. Given her track record, we have little doubt that she will get it all right. 

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