Leadership Is About Continuous Evolution

Q. What is your mandate as the Chief Partnership Officer at KidZania?

Leverage and enhance partnerships across the spectrum not limited to companies who have an existing association with us thereby reaching out to a larger number of companies and creating additional value for existing ones. This involves exploring marketing tie-ups, additional reach out in terms of taking them along for our outreach programs and representing KidZania across multiple platforms.

Q. How does KidZania choose its partner brands in a way that would add value to its customers?

Brands who partner with us have to be aligned to our philosophy of giving back/ contributing to society, imparting ‘hands-on’ training to our future generation through realistic role play and inculcating right values thereby making them better citizens of tomorrow

Q. In terms of brand partnerships in the future, what are the major partnerships KidZania is looking at in FY19?

 In FY19 we hope to get a couple of more lead FMCG players joining hands with us, a leading two-wheeler company who’s high on CSR and development of children, airlines partnerships are a few key discussions which are underway

Q. In your role, how do you endeavor to ensure world-class experiential learning for the children?

This would be two-pronged whereby by ensuring good brands and designing an experience which our visitors cannot get anywhere else and secondly by taking the KidZania experience outside of the physical dimensions; into schools, societies, events and exhibitions.

Q. What is the most important factor you look at while taking partner brands on board?

Similar response to the one in Q. 2 wherein there has to be an alignment of the company mission as well as vision statement whereby the company is viewed as a responsible one and believes in giving back to society rather than just focusing on making profits/ earning revenue. Hence, we believe in giving ROO (return on long-term objectives) or ROE (Return on experience/ engagement) to our brand partners rather than using an ROI metric

Q. You have been at various leadership roles across the span of your professional experience. How has your understanding of leadership evolved from your first role to the current role?

Leadership is about continuous evolution, imbibing best practices, instilling and empowering teams to follow the path that he/ she believes in. What has changed/ evolved is that earlier it was typically a top-down approach but I strongly believe that great ideas are not proprietary to senior management and the best ideas are always bottom up so I depend on these insights and encourage my team to share this as often as possible

Q.What experiences do you enjoy, outside of work that adds value to your professional expertise?

The time I spend with my family, the holidays we take together and the insights I get from my 8 and 11-year-olds are best applied to the job and industry I am in. Cooking and eating out is something I enjoy too wherein there are continuous evolution and improvisation, presentation plays a critical role which I try and apply in my professional role as well.