Mandar Dixit AIR 1 in CA PE-I, PE-II and Final|HUL | Mondelez |Tata | Reliance

Chairman’s Office, RIL || CA (President’s Gold Medal) || CGMA (UK), CPA (Aus) || Jio, Cadbury, Tata, HUL || ETYL, 2017 || CA Achiever, 2018, ICAI 3 Times Gold Medalist Chartered Accountant (CA), Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA), London and Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Australia with consistent superlative academic and industry experience with couple of entrepreneurial ventures to credit.

Q1. AIR 1 in PE-I, PE-II, as well as in CA final. Is there any secret sauce to this? What is the magic mantra?

Ans: I think in hindsight if I look at it, this question has been asked number of times even back in 2008–2010 but more often thereafter somebody came across my profile. If I look at it, I don’t see there is any exceptional intellectual capability or efforts, but I would say it’s more about the consistency and focusing on one thing at a time. I did not get into doing multiple things while I was doing CA. I was kind of focused only on one exam at that point of time. I wasn’t doing my CS, CWA or something else which typically people do and it was sheer process of enjoying what I was doing rather than focusing on the result I want to get first rank or even for that matter any rank. It was more of an attempt to understand what all is there in that subject and enjoy the subject.

Q2. Are you the first-generation CA student in your family?

Ans: I am the first in the family to even have a professional qualification. Obviously, my father did have commerce background and holds a couple of degrees in commerce background but definitely not a professional background as such.

Q3. Did you get any coaching or were you into the self-study mode?

Ans: I had a coaching from my local area and it definitely helps, but at the same time self-study kind of helps the entire depth of knowledge in CA as expected, so I think self-study and discipline is more important even if coaching is there or not there.

Q4. After you completed CA, you also completed CIMA which is a difficult course to crack. Were you to apply the learnings on the practical front in an Indian context?

Ans: I would say the reason to apply was at that point of time the transition was happening very rapidly to the IFRS accounting standards and then I had a very keen interest on accounting standards so I wanted to explore what is that in terms of IFRS and there were no course available by ICI at that point in time. Dip IFRS was a very good course; as far as application is concerned, during my corporate journey I found a lot of usefulness of that particular course especially when one of my stints with Reliance in centre of excellence in accounting advisory, it helped me a lot when we navigated through different kind of IFRS, interpretation material and then potential applications even for the draft IFRS which were under discretion. So it gave a lot of insights in terms of application perspective.

For CIMA, if you look at it, ICIs costing at a subject which had a lot of leverage from CIMAs costing material so you will see a lot of CA final questions had a source from CIMA material. We did a lot of those things in our CA final days typically because my coaching professor had a lot of inclination towards material and the approach that CIMA has in terms of entire curriculum and then the exam pattern is completely different. Even though from my perspective I was in taxation and then moved on to the broader finance domain, CIMA did not have an alignment as far as my career trajectory is concerned, but then for me it was more about experiencing the foreign education, how it is structured and then going through the entire learning process. CIMA definitely has a lot of applications in corporate context, the entire business partnering roles which are there, it has a lot of applications there. I would say for the learning process one can look at this course but typically what happens is we want to immediately capitalize something that we learn. In CIMA, it does not happen because obviously we have a lot of competition in terms of chartered accountant as well. For somebody who is a CA doing CIMA, may not add any value in terms of CTC perspective, but from learning perspective definitely it will.

Q5. You recently got admitted in the University of Michigan, then opted out of professional reasons, so what made you defer it? Why did you choose international and not Indian ISB or IIMA?

Ans: People keep asking me why not pursue MBA, that has been in my radar for quite amount of time. I got admitted there but then an opportunity came to work with Chairman’s office with Reliance Industries, and I also thought that it’s better to work on that opportunity which is once in a lifetime and significant value adding one rather than pursuing an MBA which can be done later on as well. That’s when I opted out of admission which I could have completed by this June.

As far as plans for MBA and international vs Indian, I feel it’s very subjective and it has to be individually assessed by each and every one because career trajectories are you entire lifespan where you in terms of career, role, expectation for MBA, I think it depends a lot on that. For example, a CA with 8 years of experience with certain salary bracket and certain roles which we have already seen, for him it really depends whether PGPX or ISB really helps or whether they want to go out and pursue an international MBA. You need to assess what are the benefits you expect out of the MBA and how does it align with your own profile. For a CA to pursue an executive MBA, access will be more of a networking and some amount of learning, but then the peer to peer learning, campus setting, spend full 1 or 2 year and learn from your peer, the entire cultural diversity that comes into play which is typically the secret sauce for the MBA, I don’t think you will be able to get it in an executive modular program.

Q6. You started with this prestigious leadership training program at HUL which is kind of only for rankers, but then moved out of that role within 7 months. Was it your love for intellectual satisfaction which attracted the topper in you get into taxation?

Ans: There were some family and personal crisis for which I had to leave it in between. It was definitely one of the best programs one can be into and one of the best companies one can work with. As far as the call is concerned, which is why taxation as a career; for me tax is one of the best subject which I pay attention to and that is one subject I found out of all the subjects that interested me a lot, so basically I wanted to build a career in that and that’s why I started with taxation domain after HUL, it was a natural choice for me.

Q7. Then you also tested some sort of waters in the entrepreneurship field through your Acharya study circle and 10+ students of yours cracked CA final in the first attempt. Tell us more.

Ans: Having studied a lot, it is always over-bearing in terms of whether I can share it with my students; my professor always encouraged me to come to the teaching domain as it would help a lot of students, so I started doing certain things with existing coaching classes but I always found that the way things are done are not aligned with what I wanted to do, so along with few of my friends, I started my own coaching institute even though everyone was doing their own job and we used to meet in the weekends and strategically we thought we only want to do CA final, we don’t want to do B.Com. or all those things. Concentrating only on CA final helped us stay in touch with the subject because once you become a CA, you are no more a student, you become an employee only.

Q8. In terms of your stints in tax, how has been tax? Were you handling DT, IDT, international taxation, everything?

Ans: IDT was a part of the profile in Tata for some point of time. In representation thesis, in most of the cases, we did not have a consultant so I only used to go and represent, write to the DRP, so it was an excellent experience in terms of handling the things independently without the help of consultants and learning through the process.

Q9. Then you moved into general management again through Reliance ALP. Were you bored of tax or was the opportunity more exciting in terms of the role, money, etc.?

Ans: I would say both because typically corporate tax as a matter of fact the hierarchy in that way is very short and then venturing into another finance domain is equally difficult. I even enrolled myself in an ADIT taxation but then I thought in becoming two niche, two subject matter expert role, where another two years in the role I will be in the non-tax world. I thought it’s the right time that I reached a certain level where if I get out at this point of time, it would be good, thereby 15 years down the line, you can aim to become a CFO so ALP provided that platform and obviously with Reliance as a brand and conglomerate opportunities were significant. It was an excellent role that came across and hindsight I can only vouch that yes the decision was worth it.

Q10. Does Reliance regularly pick up people in ALP?

Ans: No, I think there were only two batches; one was 2011 and second was my batch 2013 and thereafter we kind of internalized the entire talent program hiding the lateral in the system. There were only two batches where the lateral were hired and specifically got into the mainstream over a period of time.

Q11. Then you got the Young Achiever Award from the CA institute. That must have been quite an experience. I think would have been a validation to all the work you have done in the last 10 years awarded by your alma mater.

Ans: Coming from ICI itself was a very proud feeling. There are so many awards which actually go out and get but when it comes to ICI, there is absolutely no question of the expertise, the validation process, the independence it carries, so I think it truly is a very different feeling. It was an honor to have that award and there’s more amount of responsibility to work on.

Q12. Have you worked directly with Mr. Mukesh Ambani in Reliance?

Ans: Yes as of now, that’s what every chairman working with and executive assistant do.

Q13. You were quite active on LinkedIn and write quite a lot of insightful articles covering the startup space, the broader economy, so the quest for it is generally the desire to share your learning because of having a rich heritage and now you want to pass that on to a lot of youngsters, is that the thinking?

Ans: Because of my current role and my affinity to read a lot of things, I keep going through a lot of materials across multiple courses so for me it’s quite helpful to connect thoughts wherein I can put across perspective and insight from particular topic so I always think it’s good to share on platform like LinkedIn or Twitter where you can always get if not worse, better insights on what you have been thinking of. It either gets validated or it gets improvised, nothing else.

Q14. What does Mandar do for fun?

Ans: As of now, I have my little bundle 3-year old daughter, so I have a lot of things to do with her. I really don’t have to find anything else. Once I am home, I am with her and enjoy the time. I think that is right now for me as far as fun is concerned.

Q15. Do you have any setbacks whatsoever in your life?

Ans: A lot of times; coming from such a background where you always have excessive self-expectation from your own or certain people expect you to do more. Whenever I join any organisation, people keep on telling me I could have done better. Why Michigan Ross, for example, you could have gotten in Stanford. There will always be certain perfection standard made around you by the society, or you have certain other expectations where you feel that you could have done more, I have felt a lot of times where I thought I could have done more but it’s okay. At the end of the day what matters is whether in long-term you are able to do significant things to your potential; that is more important.

Q16. What would be your advice to youngsters on this channel?

Ans: Don’t settle for something which is very mundane or very routine. Don’t go by the society’s expectations, find your own path and try to read a lot of things, just don’t stick to any newspaper or magazine. You will find a lot of qualitative material on the internet and you can understand different perspectives. I think what is important is to expose yourself to different world rather than just sticking to auditing, accounting, and law if it’s about chartered accountancy. For MBA people, I think the world is moving at a fact pace and if you don’t know certain things it’s okay but it has to be inquisitiveness which is alive and inquisitiveness will come when you keep exploring different things on a regular basis and then only you will have a habit of connecting a lot of things and then you can add value in the process.