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Charu Mahajan
Charu is a well-established leader in the technology and consulting industry. After coming across her posts on LinkedIn, I invited her to join me for the Jobhunting interview. She generously shared her career story that spans multiple countries and industries.
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You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
Charu's Story
Charu Mahajan knew early on that she was thinking in long arcs. After school, she was already clear about what didn’t suit her. Hard sciences were never appealing. Economics and business made more sense to her — not just as subjects, but as tools to understand how organisations worked and how leadership and careers unfolded over time.
She studied Economics and later completed a Master’s in Strategic Marketing and Communications. Outside formal education, she spent a lot of time talking to people — academics, visiting faculty, alumni, and professionals at different stages of their careers. After campus sessions, she stayed back to ask questions. She wanted to understand what people actually did, how they grew, and how long they could see themselves staying in the same field. She was thinking ahead.
That instinct to think in long arcs would later define a career spanning multiple industries and geographies, with responsibility for large, complex businesses across Asia Pacific – and eventually, influence at the level of CxOs, boards, and institutions.
In the late 1990s, marketing communications stood out. This was before the dot-com crash and before Y2K. Digital technologies were emerging, but no one quite knew where they would land. Marketing sat close to business, creativity, and technology, and it felt like a sensible place to begin.
Charu joined WPP, and started at its top advertising holding company, J. Walter Thompson. Advertising looked glamorous from the outside, but the work itself was demanding. Margins were thin, expectations were high, and junior staff had to learn fast. Charu engaged fully. She introduced herself widely, took on additional work, and spoke up — sometimes too quickly at first, as she later recognized.
One early experience stayed with her. Less than a year into her first role, she presented to senior executives at Tata Sons and opened the meeting with a casual hello. Even though she presented confidently, she was corrected afterwards on how to address the room. It was a simple lesson, but an important one: competence matters, but so does judgement. It was her first exposure to the expectations of senior leadership — expectations she would later be responsible for shaping herself.
As WPP reorganized its media operations, the media teams from J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather were brought together to form Mindshare. Charu moved into this new setup and took on large global consumer goods clients such as Nestlé, later expanding into life sciences. Early in her career, she didn’t shy away from senior conversations. She was learning how decisions were made, and how leaders thought about risk and opportunity.
After a couple of years, she felt the need for more challenge. She explored returning to academia and was accepted into PhD programs in the US. Around the same time, another opportunity came up. At 26, she moved to Bangkok to set up an advanced analytics, AI, and data unit within Mindshare. Thailand was not an easy market then — culturally and linguistically complex, relatively closed, and politically uncertain. She built the business from scratch, learnt the language, made mistakes, and worked closely with regional teams. It was challenging, but it shaped how she thought about leadership, scale, and accountability.
Charu is practical in her approach to leadership. She makes it clear when she is ready for more, backs it up with results, and is clear about when to commit — and when to step back.
After Bangkok, she was looking for scale. Consulting provided the platform. She joined Accenture at a time when the firm was beginning to invest seriously in digital, long before Accenture Interactive even existed. She was among the early hires building marketing sciences, helping bring media and marketing conversations into the CEO’s office. She relocated to Singapore and, over time, moved into Accenture’s Industry Group, working across consumer goods, retail, and travel services. This broadened her exposure beyond marketing into supply chain, distribution, technology, and enterprise transformation — the building blocks of institutional leadership.
By this stage, she was operating as a senior leader — accountable not only for client outcomes, but for building teams, shaping portfolios, and delivering commercial performance across markets.
By 2017, Charu was leading the Consumer Goods and Retail business across ASEAN. Accenture had grown significantly, but personal growth had become incremental. IBM Consulting came knocking and offered her a chance to build again. Charu took her time, met senior leaders repeatedly, and secured sponsorship early — a sign of how she thinks about long-term alignment.
During her gardening leave from Accenture, Charu also founded a luxury e-commerce business. She wanted first-hand experience of logistics, supply chains, customer service, and funding — not as theory, but as practice. It gave her a founder’s perspective, which later shaped how she informed CxOs and F100 companies.
At IBM Consulting, she built and led the Consumer, Retail, Travel, and Logistics portfolio across ASEAN. She later took on IBM Garage and Corporate Venture building, working closely with C-levels to drive transformation at scale. She was then tapped to build and lead Strategic Partnerships for IBM Consulting across Asia Pacific, alongside leading IBM’s HR and Talent Transformation advisory practice.
These roles placed her at the centre of IBM’s regional growth agenda, with responsibility for strategy, partnerships, and performance across multiple countries, and regular engagement with senior leadership teams and boards.
Today, Charu operates at the most senior levels of enterprise leadership. She leads multi-market teams across APAC, advises CEOs and boards, and shapes strategy, talent, and transformation agendas at scale. She supports diversity and inclusion, mentors founders, volunteers regularly, and sits on boards. She doesn’t draw a hard line between work and life. For her, her career is one part of a broader purpose.
Looking ahead, the next decade is about scale, contribution, and possibly public service. Charu’s career hasn’t been about moving fast. It has been about staying restless — deliberately — while building the judgement, credibility, and scale of experience required to lead institutions, not just organisations or roles.
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