CORPORATE LEADERSHIP
Aarti Nihalani : PGP 2009 (Partner and Co-head of India, Oliver Wyman)
Aarti Nihalani is a Partner and Co-head of Oliver Wyman, India. With a tenure of 15 years, her exceptional leadership has been instrumental in driving Oliver Wyman’s success in India. Under her guidance, the firm has successfully grown the local consulting team to more than five times since 2021 and expanded its business across multiple industries. She is also a part of the Marsh McLennan India leadership team which drives the strategy for market across businesses and brings together expertise across the group for greater client impact.
Aarti has led a number transformational initiatives with deep impact – helping a bank with 100,000+ employees establish guiding principles for the bank’s culture, helping a USD 12+ BN consumer goods company shape their India market strategy, defining the roadmap for end-to-end turnaround for a large airline, helping one of the leading automotive players in India define a strategy to realise USD 90 million in cost savings and defining the vision and strategy for a leading capital markets regulator. Aarti is the one of the youngest and most influential Partners in the strategy consulting industry in India.
Aart is a part of the SEBI committee on strengthening governance of market infrastructures. She is also an executive sponsor for Women at Oliver Wynman (WOW) responsible for framing their strategy in gender diversity, equity and inclusion. During the first wave of Covid, she volunteered with Ghar Bhejo, an initiative to support migrant workers travelling back to their homes from Mumbai– making calls to 100s of families and coordinating their travel. Aarti has led a number of engagements with leading non-profits in India bringing her strategy design and problem-solving skills.
Congratulations on winning the Young Alumni Achiever’s Award, how does it feel to be back on the campus?
It’s always a lovely feeling to be back. I must say, the campus brings back so many memories, so many fond memories. I met my husband, Prateek, also on the campus. He’s a batchmate. I’ve made friends for life, and of course, the learning that I’ve taken from the campus, which has helped me in good stead all these years. For me, the campus has always been a very awe inspiring place, and I come back here almost every year for recruitment, but the feeling of awe hasn’t gone away, and that’s something that I find really fascinating, and I think I’ve been able to distill also that, you know, the reason I feel this all because this campus, for me, stands for all round excellence. You have got the best students, you’ve got the best faculty that you know inspires us. But everything else about the campus is also at the same level, whether you talk about the architecture, my first memory also is of these perfectly manicured lawns and the perfectly kind of spic and span LKP steps. So those are the visuals that I kind of hold of IIMA and that’s like the standard of excellence that the Institute inspires. So it’s always great to be back. You know, it brings back memories, but also recharges me for the next leg of the journey.
You joined your company, Oliver Wyman, as a consultant and now as a Partner and the Co-head. So can you talk about your journey in the company?
I joined Oliver Wyman as one of the first consultants in India. I think consulting and Oliver Wyman, in specific, for me, has been like an extension of, you know, my MBA or my school. It’s just been one of constant learning. The first years in consulting are all about the toolkit: how do you research, how do you analyse, how do you distill a problem that is posed to you, and then how do you go about solving it in a very structured way? But for me also, the most fulfilling aspect has been the last few years, where it’s so much more about the one to one relationships that you build, the trust that you’re able to build. It’s some of these moments that stay with you. I can just recount for example, there’s a very senior client who I had been having discussions with for over a year hoping to be able to work with them on a very strategic project. It’s something to be proud of to be associated with a project like that and it took over a year, many discussions, and then the client was sitting across the table like this, and he said, “Why don’t you help me on this problem?” And in that instant, I realised that that’s probably not the right problem statement, and even if we were to work, it’s probably not the best outcome. And I just admitted that saying, “I appreciate the trust you are placing, this would be fantastic, but I don’t think this is what we should work on right now.” There was like a twinkle in his eye saying, “Okay, I like the fact that you are thinking about me before thinking about what a project could be”. So I think it’s those moments that matter, that twinkle in the eye that kind of stays with you, that moment,you built a relationship for life. So I think it’s transitioned from the initial years, from being very core problem solving skills to now, in the more recent years, about just how you can be a trusted relationship for the people that you work with.
As one of the youngest leaders and one of the few female partners in strategy consulting, can you talk about challenges if you faced any?
I’ll talk about strategy consulting, first as an overall field, and then I’ll come to the gender challenges. Consulting when I joined, I wasn’t sure if I would stay on for as long as I did, but it’s one where I feel like the learning just doesn’t stop, and the growth in terms of your own capabilities, skill sets, your awareness about topics, just continues. So every time I felt that okay, and I take stock saying, “Okay, is this still keeping me happy? Am I learning? Am I enjoying myself?”Of course, it’s not always smooth sailing. There are times when you know you feel low but on the whole as long as the answers to those questions come back positive, that’s a sign that there’s a lot more to be done. The learning in consulting comes from the fact that not only are you working on the most advanced topics with the best brains in the industry, which is the clients we work with but for me, it’s been fascinating to be able to connect the dots. So I work in financial services, I work in automotive, I work in consumer goods retail, I work in industrial transportation, so many different practices. For me, it’s fascinating to be able to connect the dots saying, “Okay, we think this industry has this challenge, but maybe it’s been solved elsewhere.”
For me, when I started out, there weren’t as many examples of women in strategy consulting, but increasingly, there are more. I was very fortunate that when I was kind of, you know, in my early years in consulting, I had a few very close mentors who were women who were partners or principals in the firm. I was also part of the ‘Women of Oliver Wyman’. And I remember, there’s a beautiful initiative called sharing stories, where you just see more examples of people who you know traverse the journey before you. For me, it was a great source of inspiration. There’s also a fantastic book, in which I still remember a few key lines from the book by Sheryl Sandberg called Lean in. The one thing that stayed with me was, “Don’t leave before you need to leave”. And I I thought the same way, saying, “Okay, how will I manage a family? And how will I kind of continue on my consulting journey? “I just decided, taking inspiration from the book that I won’t leave before I need to, at any point. The fabulous thing about having a degree from IIMA and then, you know, the consulting experience, is that I will have options at any point. And it’s always been a wonderful experience. Whenever I’ve come to a point where I needed something, it was just about me asking for it, and I got the support that I needed.
What advice would you give to somebody who wants to work in strategy consulting in India?
I think three things that come to mind: One, the pursuit of excellence, like everything, attention to the smallest detail and making sure you’re pushing your own boundaries and pushing your own thinking towards what you’re proud of. Second, it’s all about the people. Not just the clients, but also the entire team you work with, your mentors, your peers. It’s all about learning from each other. Third, having a great support system. The support system for me is not just mentors and people who guide my teams, but also my family at home. As I said, my husband, who is a batch mate from IIMA, we have two lovely daughters, Nandini and Ishani, and, of course, our family.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future, professionally and personally?
For me, I hope that there’s a lot more to come in the coming years. This is, for me, a great pit-stop. It’s a point to recharge yourself and think about what next. So I do want to continue on the same learning journey that I have been on. You come to a point also where you realise that there are a number of things that worked for you so far, but now you need to build certain new skills. So I think that the learning journey has to grow. I want to also make sure that the relationships that I have built both with my teams. You know, some alumni of Oliver Wyman who are great friends and some of my clients. So how can I continue to, you know, be true and committed and still, you know, giving in those relationships. Of course, it’s also about how one continues to be at peace and happy on the whole so pursuing my hobbies, pursuing whatever else that I need to and keeping the family together and energized as always.
