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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 wanted a long runway. At 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 careers unfolded over time.
She studied economics and later completed an MBA. Outside formal education, she spent a lot of time talking to people. Academics, visiting faculty, alumni, 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.
In the late 1990s, marketing communications stood out. This was before the dot-com crash and before Y2K. Digital was emerging, but no one quite knew where it 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 J. Walter Thompson. She applied to the top firms and was selected quickly. 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 leaned in. She introduced herself widely, took on additional work, and spoke up — sometimes too quickly, as she later recognised.
One early experience stayed with her. Less than a year into her first job, she presented to senior executives at Tata Sons and opened the meeting casually. 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.
As WPP reorganised 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 clients such as Nestlé, later expanding into pharma. She was young, but she didn’t shy away from senior conversations.
After a couple of years, she felt the need to do more. She explored returning to academia and was accepted into PhD programmes in the US. Around the same time, another opportunity came up. At 25, she moved to Bangkok to set up an advanced analytics, AI, and data unit within Mindshare. Thailand was not an easy market then — culturally complex, relatively closed, and politically uncertain. She built the business from scratch, learned the language, made mistakes, and worked closely with regional teams. It was challenging, but it shaped how she thought about leadership.
Charu is practical about how she approaches her career. She makes it clear when she is ready for more, backs it up with results, and always knows when she can walk away.
After Bangkok, she wanted scale. Consulting offered that. She joined Accenture at a time when the firm was beginning to invest seriously in digital, before Accenture Interactive existed. She was among the early hires building marketing sciences, helping bring media and marketing conversations into the CEO’s office. Over time, she moved into Accenture’s Industry Group, working across consumer, retail, and aviation, and relocated to Singapore. This broadened her exposure beyond marketing into supply chain, technology, and transformation work.
By 2017, Accenture had grown significantly, and growth had become incremental. IBM offered a chance to build again. Charu took her time, met senior leaders repeatedly, and secured sponsorship early.
At IBM, she built and led the Consumer, Retail, Travel, Transportation, and Logistics portfolio across ASEAN. She later took on ecosystem partnerships, M&A, and the IBM Garage, working closely with CEOs to drive transformation at scale.
During a gardening leave, she also started a luxury e-commerce business. She wanted firsthand experience of logistics, supply chains, customer service, and funding — not as theory, but as practice.
Today, Charu leads senior teams across APAC, 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, 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 — and choosing challenges that keep her growing.
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