Uncornered

by Luis Moniz

There is increased uncertainty about careers in this ‘VUCA’ (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world, especially at senior and middle-management levels. As is now commonly known, the traditional themes of loyalty, hard work, dedication and dependence on our employers for career progression are no longer effective for our success. We need to take charge of our careers to achieve superior success compared to our peers.

Many professionals face career turbulence every few months, often for reasons that are beyond their control. They look for role models to emulate and seek practical guidelines/pointers on how to better manage their careers. They would be keen to learn how super achievers have adopted a very different mind-set and approach to remain agile or uncornered in order to overcome turbulence and challenges and attain outstanding success in their careers.

Luis Moniz identified several career strategies that super achievers have deployed to overcome career turbulence. He interviewed over 40 professionals from diverse sectors and job functions who have a unique career journey and/or have overcome turbulence and then captured their interesting experiences, perspectives, learnings and practical advice in the book. The career strategies have been categorised under three pillars – Mindset; Enablers and Performance.

240 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2016

About the author

Luis Moniz is a career and executive coach focussed on developing senior and middle- management executives across sectors and job functions since 2010. He has coached hundreds of mid-career professionals where the focus is on establishing themselves as top performers by stretching their professional aspirations, changing their self-beliefs, expanding their sphere of influence and inculcating more effective behaviours. Luis is able to bring to bear his strong track-record of corporate experience for over two decades and deep understanding of the talent acquisition space gained as a C-Suite executive search professional for six years into his coaching engagements. Apart from coaching, Luis also conducts specialised workshops and has been involved in assessment of culture and high-potential talent in corporate organisations.

Over the last decade, as a headhunter and coach, Luis has interacted with a large number of super achievers who have made rapid strides in their respective careers at a relatively young age despite turbulent times. This has enabled him to obtain an in-depth understanding of the strategies that these super achievers have adopted to get ahead in their careers and which he is presenting in his book.

Luis is the President of the Association of Mumbai Coaches (since 2012) and devotes a lot of pro-bono time in the not-for-profit social sector, where he is actively involved with Whiteboard, an NGO governance initiative and has coached senior management executives at various NGOs. He is a key member of Take Charge, a pro-bono initiative to mentor teenaged youth in Mumbai. He was Vice President of the Mumbai Chapter of IIM
Ahmedabad Alumni Association from 2013 to 2016.

Prior to setting up FrontRunner Career Advisors in 2010, Luis was heading Russell Reynolds’ Mumbai office and before that spent five years at Heidrick & Struggles, where he was responsible for building their financial services and private equity practices in India and then maintaining a strong presence in the Indian market. Luis spent six years in the GCC region between 1998 and 2004 where he was in senior management roles with regional/ local banks. He was earlier with Banque Nationale de Paris (heading their investment bank in India) and Standard Chartered Bank (managing the India M&A advisory team). Luis spent the early part of his career in the finance function of manufacturing companies in India and moved into the financial services sector in the mid-1980s.

Luis is a certified coach and holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad (1978) & an M.S. in Finance from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1981).