- Meet Manpreet Singh Ahuja, a chartered accountant (CA), audit partner, and chief digital officer (CDO) at PwC India.
- He joined PwC as a CA fresher, went through the ranks, and eventually became part of the leadership team of the firm.
- In his role he leads PwC India through the next wave of digital transformation by driving the firm’s bold ambition of disrupting its traditional business model, offering a differentiated experience to clients and teams, and building a digital culture to drive citizen-led innovation.
- Manpreet helps us understand his journey as CDO in this technology-driven world of business.
Can you go back in time and tell us why you decided to become a CA? Was it always a career plan?
My generation only had two real options – engineering and medicine. People frowned when a high performer would opt for Commerce.
Growing up, I used to read business magazines and I would get excited reading articles featuring CEOs, CFOs and always aspired to walk the corporate hallways and be amidst the boards.
When it was time to pursue a career path, I had an impression that engineering was not necessarily the fast and exciting route to get to a corporate boardroom and so I chose Commerce. (I was mistaken, the world has changed and engineering is a very solid foundation for practically anything under the sun in today’s day and age.)
When it was time to pursue a career path, I spoke to many people around me, and in my exploration, I figured out that CA was perfect for me because it offered a good blend of academics and practical work experience at a young age.
At the young age of 19 years, I was doing my articles and getting to work with large listed companies across different sectors learning how different businesses and functions operate with hands-on experience in various and commercial aspects.
How did you grow in your career at PwC, climbing the leadership ladder?
As a fresh CA, it was a dream come true to work with the Global Risk Management Solutions group at PwC in 2002. To work with the best of teams and clients was a humbling experience.
Soon I started enjoying the constant run on the treadmill. … moving from one project to another… one client to another.. re-skilling yourself to be relevant at all times. In about 10 years, I became a Risk Consulting Partner.
To be honest, I had this crazy ambition of becoming a fast-track partner and in 10 years I made it!
It was a very satisfying milestone to have become a Partner, but soon one realized that this was only a platform for unlimited opportunities that lie ahead.
It felt like the real journey of self-development, growth, and ambition and it felt like the beginning of a new journey in a new world.
As a Partner, I got an opportunity to run and manage my books of business, have my portfolio of clients, groom, and grow teams, and manage relationships, service delivery, operations, and markets.
In 6 to 7 years of becoming a partner, I was allowed to lead a business unit. I became the leader of the Risk Assurance Business Unit.
In 2021, the board appointed me as the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at PwC, India.
Dream, Believe, and Execute has been my secret recipe at PwC. When I look back at my career, I feel it is the ability to dream and bring lots of energy behind the dreams that made a big difference.
Never hesitate to share your dreams and seek help from seniors and peers and equally important to have diverse teams engaged, inspired, and excited.
How did you transition from Leader of the Risk Business to CDO at PwC India?
When I became a Leader for the Risk Business at PwC, I got my team of Partners and I was managing a 1000-person team – our team consisted of CAs, Engineers, Architects, MBAs, process experts, etc.
As always, my team was excited to make a difference, our ambition of shaping what this business could do, and how we could differentiate ourselves in the market.
As we got into the zone of differentiating ourselves in the market, I realized the importance of technology!
As risk consultants we give advice, we identify risks, and we monitor them but we don’t take ownership of managing them. As you get into that zone you can’t operate without technology.
We may be a bunch of CAs, engineers MBAs, or process experts but at the end of the day, these capabilities have to come together on a tech platform to deliver value to clients.
The focus needs to be not just on solving the problem, but on also ensuring that it never occurs again.
To name but a few, the media sector is facing piracy as the biggest issue. To think of processes that will not only minimize piracy but also fully eliminate it.
Similarly, how can the pharma sector solve the risk of counterfeit drugs, and how can food companies solve for traceability across the entire supply chain?
The more we got exposed to technology, the more we realized that there were opportunities to address, thus building a unique proposition for our business.
My 19 years at PwC helped me earn the trust and credibility as a leader and in 2021; the firm allowed me to become the Chief Digital Officer.
The mission was clear how do we democratize access to technology for the team and deliver improved digital experience to clients along with higher value at lower cost? The key is to enable this ambition at scale for the entire organization including all businesses and teams.
It was a humbling experience to have gotten this role and I am on a steep learning curve here. I’d say that I am quite lucky to have been given opportunities that push me to excel.
Why a CA in a Digital Transformation Role? Does it mean you are a technologist?
I must say I am not the best technologist; there are smarter ones available. Having said this, we do not need to be technologists to have a far-reaching vision in the role of CDO.
My role is disruption. If a CDO aims to take big and bold disruptive enablement, then disruption is a team sport. In the team sport, one has to have a handshake of two or three capabilities coming together.
Either we can have deep technologists run the base with critical support from a business / commercial mind or vice versa. In my case, I am a business mind who understands the market, with a knowledge of how technology works. However, I am not the best coder, but I can hire one.
I keep my team technologically updated by making them aware that yesterday’s dreams are today’s reality. Application of the use cases in the business world through digital acumen is vital.
It would be exciting to know what your role as a CDO is.
I lead the firm through the next wave of digital transformation by driving the firm’s bold ambition of disrupting its traditional business model, offering a differentiated experience to clients and teams, and building a digital culture to drive citizen-led innovation.
To give you a perspective, my role involves internal and external transformation – It calls for reimagining how we can disrupt through technology the way we deliver value both internally and externally. This requires digital upskilling of teams and a culture of micro innovation.
Goes without saying my day job includes a lot of strategy building, a fair amount of change management, and building many business cases backed technology.
I would say the role allows me to dream. Speaking I have to go back and think about what the firm is doing. Both internally and externally. In addition, how is it that technology can deliver quantum value for its clients and communities?
Is there a difference between the CTO, CIO, and CDO?
For companies that have an inherently strong engineering footprint with technology at the heart of everything they do, there will be a Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This role has elements of hardcore infrastructure and technology coming into play.
On the other hand, a Chief Information Officer (CIO) plays a strong operational role in leveraging those technologies and creating insights for the organization.
Lastly, a CDO is like the osmosis membrane between technological advancements that exist in the market and what the organization needs.
Essentially, a CDO is not a technologist, but a businessperson trying to make a business impact by leveraging technology and emerging a cloud ecosystem.
Some organizations can have all three of them, thus allowing the CDO to work with the CTO and CIO to deliver net business impact to the ground.
Technology is rapidly advancing; how do you stay up to date? Are you always upskilling yourself?
In a world of rapid change, technology, risks, and business models are also changing. Thus, people need to constantly upskill themselves to keep up with the rapid changes.
Having said that, I registered for MIT Sloan School of Management’s executive program a couple of years before I was appointed CDO. The program was around design thinking to reimagine other non-linear and unconventional problem-solving techniques.
As I got into the role of CDO, I did a curriculum around digital strategies for business from Columbia Business School. The certifications came in handy and they gave me time to reflect and adapt the learnings to my clients’ environment.
What sort of organizational cultural changes do you think are required to bring about digital transformation adoption?
In any digital transformation, one needs to dream and then enable. The real impact will come when the whole organization begins to start adopting that enablement.
To drive the adoption, we need to deliver a culture change where the organization at a large scale believes in what the CDO is doing.
The forefront of the culture change is through upskilling. This is because the organization cannot obtain quantum leaps without a certain level of digital IQ.
Climbing from CA fresher to partner and then CDO – what is your advice to CAs?
For CA or finance aspirants, there are two parts of our career:
- Don’t let depth and expertise be a bottleneck broadening your horizons. At some stage, convert depth into breadth. Keep learning.
- Never hesitate to dream, for even the greatest walls are from the ground.