Pawan Goenka nearly missed the job at M&M ⁠— today he is the MD & CEO

There has been no stopping Pawan Goenka, the young boy whose family moved to Kolkata from Harpalpur in Madhya Pradesh. He studied at a Hindi medium school and did engineering from IIT Kanpur and went for a PhD at Cornell University in the UK.

After over two decades in Mahindra & Mahindra, Goenka has risen through the ranks and has been appointed as the MD and CEO, as the company’s billionaire promoter Anand Mahindra himself became a non-executive chairman.

Ever since, he has been headhunted by the best of the best like AT&T – was hired by General Motors. But Goenka had spotted an ad in a newspaper by Mahindra & Mahindra in Detroit who called auto professionals back home. An interview was fixed.