India's biggest e-commerce company, Flipkart's CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy stepped aside from the top job just for one day today. Yeah, it sounds filmy and unbelievable.
It has nothing to do with the stiff competition Flipkart is facing from Amazon. As part of its 10th anniversary celebration "Big10," Flipkart held a competition where its employees could take part and become the CEO of the company for one day.
34-year-old Padmini Pagadala who is associate director of designs at the e-commerce giant pipped her 'flipsters' to win the competion to take over as the CEO for the day on Tuesday. Soon after taking over she took stock of business strategies, attending meetings with the every other day CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy accompanying her.
The company started in 2007 by friends Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal is completing a decade this year, and several such events are lined up for the year. On the ground though, big challenges remain- the e-commerce sector is in flux and Amazon is pulling out all stops to dominate India. After a rough of almost 2 years, Flipkart has seen fresh funding of 1.4 billion dollar recently and there's much talk of big acquisitions in the pipeline
Pagadala is credited with designing over 17 fulfilment centres and 20 transport centres for Flipkart. “When I go to any of these FCs, I cannot help but think that it was once a tiny AutoCAD file on my computer,” she said. She has been part of Flipkart’s business unit launches and is currently part of larger teams that are working on grocery and furniture verticals at the company.
As 'CEO of the Day', she will take stock of the business, attend key stakeholder meetings and hand out action points, with CEO Krishnamurthy accompanying him. The CEO’s day will start with Krishnamurthy personally greeting the winner over breakfast and introducing him to his immediate team, followed by some power packed meetings where the new ‘CEO’ and Kalyan will confer action items, and discuss the approach towards issues at hand.
BW Reporters
Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
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