Creating leaders of tomorrow is a passion that is very dear to my heart,” says Ashish Dhawan. “In fact, my most important professional achievement is having led very high performance teams successfully. I have managed to do so in all the organisations I have worked with and these teams have been considered the world’s best sales teams too.”

He hopes to continue this winning streak at Juniper as well. As country director of Juniper India and South Asia’s enterprise business, he is responsible for servicing large enterprises, BFSI, public sector and SMB customers.

To tackle everyday tasks, he relies on a coaching-oriented management style. He explains, “I spend a lot of time developing employees so that they give their best to their career.”

This approach, he says, has helped him throughout his career. A computer science graduate from the Bombay University, he has studied strategic management at the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata. Thereafter, he worked as a marketing executive at Wipro Infotech for a year and then shifted to Philips. A year later, he went back to Wipro Infotech before moving to Nortel Networks, where he served as vice-president and country manager for nine years. Subsequently, he joined Microsoft as regional director of its India operations and a year later, moved to Juniper.

The key challenge in his current role is to make sure that the company maintain its customer focus in today’s high- growth environment. “We also have to ensure that we position our organisation, our talent and our processes to provide our customers with the optimum experience. We need to make sure that we don’t sit on our past laurels but be honest about our primary responsibility, which is to serve our customers,” he says.

According to Dhawan, consumerisation of IT is a key developing market trend, one that would immensely benefit Juniper as well. “Technology at every level is being influenced by the consumer’s choices. Hand-held devices running on 3G and 4G networks present a huge opportunity for the IT and telecom industry. This can help the sector look at building next-generation data networks for operators and more robust mobile networks for enterprises,” he says. 

A self-proclaimed techie, his passion for IT and gadgetry finds place in his personal life too. “I enjoy reading consumer electronics and gadgets in my spare time,” he says. “Besides, camping with my sons is always fun, as is reading science fiction and learning new languages.” His family comprises his wife, who is a psychologist, and two sons aged five and three.