Managers play a crucial role in the success and growth of an organization and all its ventures and

projects. A manager has to be a people person, an initiator, a negotiator, someone who leads from the
front, doesn’t give up in stressful situations and always has the bigger picture in mind. We have decided
to write about five Master Managers from Forbes India’s 100 great people managers list which was a
part of People Manager Study conducted by Great Manager Institute, the criteria for selecting managers
for this list was people with great managerial skills and also their organisations, which help in nurturing
great talent and potential. We have tried to understand what makes a manager a master in the world of
business by understanding their background and experiences and also their way of functioning in the
organisation.

1) Prarit Aggarwal, Cluster Manager, Uttarakhand, Andaman and

Nicobar and North East, Resort Operations, Mahindra Holidays &
Resorts India Limited

Mr Aggarwal is an alumnus from Institute of Hotel Management (1996-1999), he completed his

MBA-Hospitality from Kurukshetra University in the field of Sales and Marketing in the year
2008, He has also been associated with various globally renowned universities by means of their
management courses such as American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute (2011-2012),
and SMR School of Business (University of Michigan, 2018). This clearly shows that Mr Aggarwal
has continuously focused on upskilling himself and ensuring that he is always exposing himself
to new challenges and environments, he has clearly focussed on being able to learn from global
platforms.
He began his career with Fortune Park hotels as a Front Office Manager in 2003. Soon he joined
the Carlson group and was associated with them for 7 good years, there he was running the
revenue and accommodation operations. His real intrapreneurial journey began when he
joined Mahindra Holidays and Resorts, he joined as a resort manager where he pre-opened and
managed various resorts and ensured they were successfully generating profits. Within four
years he was promoted to General Manager, his performance was so effective that he was soon
promoted to Cluster Manager, for more than six years he has been responsible for successfully
running, developing and opening up of new resorts, training and developing teams, looking
after CSR activities, customer management and sales and also ensuring that the resorts are
profitable.
As part of his skillset, he is very capable in time management, inventory management,
corporate event organising, customer management, revenue analysis, yield management,
property management systems, MICROS and many more things. In short, he is an allrounder
who has understanding of all fields of management.
Mr Aggarwal has been a highly impactful and dynamic manager who has always functioned like
an intrapreneur in the organisation, starting and building new ventures within the organisation
has been his forte.

2)Alok Pratap Singh, Assistant General Manager, CORE

Diagnostics Pvt Ltd

Mr Singh is an alumnus of KLE University, Hubli (1999-2001) and IILM Greater Noida (2005-
2009) where he studied pharmacology, which is associated with the industry where he works
today. He started his career as Business Development Manager at Oncquest Laboratories Ltd
where he focussed on oncology diagnostics. In the year 2014 he joined CORE Diagnostics Pvt.
Ltd. He has worked as the assistant general manager in the organisation for seven years and has
been responsible for managing the sales team of Oncology Diagnostics in Delhi-NCR, Haryana
and Srinagar.
Mr singh is regarded as a person who focusses on results, knows how to stay motivated and
motivate others, he is a people person, a very important characteristic of a good manager, he is
known to be backing his team in all kinds of stressful situations, he doesn’t believe in just giving
orders, he believes in leading. Even though Mr. Singh is not a management graduate by
education, he has a great sense of managerial qualities one needs to possess. He works as a
marketer in a niche industry where competition can be tough and services that need to be
provided have to be of utmost precision and high quality. He has good technical understanding
of what his team is supposed to market, without such an understanding it is absolutely not
possible to promote a product or service on basis of technical superiority.

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 3) Gagan Jyot, Senior VP, HR, RMSI Private Limited

Gagan Jyot is among the most passionate women HR leaders of the country today. A strategic partner
and contributor to the business, vision and strategy of RMSI, she has been instrumental in setting up a
world-class environment in the organization, enabling RMSI to win a competitive edge in the IT Industry.
She is instrumental in building innovative HR processes and institutionalising a strong
performance driven culture, with an MBA in HR from Indian Institute of Planning & Management, a
Bachelors in English literature from Delhi University, and 19+ years of experience in Human Resources.
Gagan has played a key role in establishing a mentoring and coaching culture, as well as organisational
and leadership development, all of which have been recognised as world-class worldwide practises.
RMSI provides a mentally engaging work environment that encourages innovation and creativity. People
are praised and rewarded for breaking new ground and challenging the status quo. For three years in a
row, RMSI was voted No. 1 among all industries in the "Great Places to Work For" rating - 2007, 2008,
and 2009. Nasscom also ranked RMSI second on its list of "Exciting Companies to Work For."Gagan Jyot
has won the "CII Corporate Wellness Award" in 32 cities/towns across 581 firms for her major
contributions to creating new corporate wellness and corporate social responsibility initiatives under
community well-being, environmental awareness, and disaster mitigation.
Her achievements earned her the distinction of "Leading Woman in Human Resources" at the iGroup-
NDTV-organized "Women Leaders in India Conference and Awards 2010." Gagan was also honoured at
the World HRD Congress in Mumbai with the 'World Women Leadership' and 'HR Tech Leadership'
awards. Gagan Jyot exemplifies the impact that a single person may have on a company. She, on the
other hand, disagrees. As per her, it's always been a team effort

Gurjodhpal Singh, Senior VP & Business Head, PayU Payments Pvt Ltd
Mr. Singh is the alumni of IIM Ahmedabad and has devoted 13 years of his life to the fintech
and financial services industries. Some of his most recent roles have been leading the SME
merchant payments and credit businesses at PayU, the leading payment service provider in
India. He has also extensively worked towards providing superior services to SMEs. He is a
member of PayU's senior leadership team. He has overseen the SME merchant payments and
credit business sectors at PayU, creating well-known brands like PayUmoney, a solution for
SMEs to collect payments that can be live in minutes with 100 percent digital onboarding, and
PayUmonedo, a 100 percent digital and cardless consumer lending product.

He is the first player in the ecosystem to deliver 100% digital onboarding for SMEs, his
existence has enabled SMEs to start collecting digital payments within a few minutes. He
has enabled 300,000+ SMEs with digital payments acquiring solutions as a business
head (from 2013 to 2017).
He shows how industry expertise may be useful in people management by incorporating his
entrepreneurial tendencies into his people management techniques.

Prasad Guntupalli, Co-founder & Executive Deputy Chairman, Attra

Prasad Guntupalli As the Co-Founder of Attra, Mr. Prasad created the company from the ground
up, transforming it into a global technology services and solutions provider in the banking and
payments space with over 2,200 domain experts and revenue of $75 million. Under his
stewardship, Attra has grown to have offices in 13 countries across four continents, with a
compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30%. His successful track record of building numerous
businesses from scratch compelled him to leap into entrepreneurship to uncover his true
potential. In 2005, he associated with Attra, Melbourne Australia, founded by Anil Gammampila
that primarily served the Australian market. Despite a solid earning potential and a secure job at
the top of his career, Prasad invested his life savings in becoming a co-founder of Attra, with a
 mission to transform the company from a regional to a global player. During his tenure as CEO,
Attra has transformed from a niche IT consulting firm to an established payment-technology IT
services provider covering North America, EMEA and APAC. A Harvard alumnus with a commerce
background, he is a technology leader who designs policies that allows his technical leaders to
organically evolve and develop. Prasad believes that a positive and employee-centric workplace
culture significantly improves teamwork, increases productivity, and helps retain employees. He
has a well-deserved reputation for tenacity, endurance, and putting staff first. Creating a new
practice structure to ensure that teams remain market-aligned and customer-focused is one of
the notable initiatives taken by him for the development of his team. Simultaneously, he
promotes a culture of continuous learning and development to encourage and support in-house
talent. He was also named ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Payments and Cards Summit (5th
edition) in 2017. Under his leadership, Attra has earned numerous awards. In 2019, it was
honored with the ‘Best Payments Organization of the Year’ award at the 7th edition of the
Payments and Cards Summit. In the same year, Shri Nitin Gadkari, India’s Union Minister for
Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME), presented the company with the ‘SME 100 Award,
2019’ at the International MSME Convention in New Delhi. Mr. Prasad is truly a master manager
he managed company and its employees very efficiently by his unique approach of handling
things.

Conclusion:
A master manager can overcome challenges and become accomplish his tasks. The main
challenges they face include: Meeting the organizational goal, managing the human resources
and maintaining high performance. The manager can be effective and avoid being hyper
effective.
They can provide leadership, by using downsizing and the middle level managers as well as
by training and motivating the employees. The manager can employ strategy at work to face
difficulties. Since the environment and employees are changing, the master manager can be
flexible and change strategy so as to overcome the challenges.

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