Redefining Success in Tech, Skilling & Leadership | Kirti Seth | TEDxIBS Pune Women
- Aisha Washington
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
A successful career is often portrayed as a steady climb: acquire expertise, accept larger responsibilities, and keep moving upward. In her TEDxIBS Pune Women talk, Kirti Seth challenges that tidy model. Looking back on 35 years of work, she describes a professional life shaped by relocation, reinvention, difficult leadership assignments, illness, and deliberate decisions to step away.
Her story connects personal choice with a larger question facing the technology sector: how can people remain capable and grounded when jobs, skills, and business models keep changing? Seth’s answer is not a single formula. It is a way of thinking built around self-defined success, continuous learning, principled leadership, and the courage to recognize when enough is enough.
A Career Does Not Have to Follow a Straight Line
Seth’s journey illustrates how easily conventional career narratives leave out the circumstances surrounding professional decisions. At one point, she resigned from her role and moved to London after her husband received an opportunity there. Seen only through the language of résumés, that choice might appear to be an interruption. In the context of a life, it was one decision among many involving family, work, ambition, and partnership.
Over the following years, she worked and traveled across the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka before returning to India. That international experience might reasonably have been expected to strengthen her prospects. Instead, a friend in recruitment warned that her varied background could make employers view her as difficult to place.
The episode reveals a recurring weakness in rigid hiring systems. Organizations often say they value adaptability, yet screening processes may favor candidates whose careers fit familiar categories. A person who has moved between countries, industries, or functions can be treated as an uncertain match even when those transitions demonstrate resourcefulness.
Seth did not present this judgment as the final verdict on her abilities. Her subsequent career became evidence that an unconventional path can produce valuable breadth. The experience also supports a practical lesson for professionals: employability is not the same as capability, and a temporary failure to fit the market’s preferred template does not determine the worth of one’s experience.
Defining Success Before Someone Else Defines It for You
One of Seth’s central arguments is that success must be personally defined. Titles, compensation, prestige, and public recognition can all be meaningful, but they are incomplete measures when borrowed from somebody else’s expectations.
This question can be especially complicated for women, who may face overlapping pressures about career advancement, caregiving, marriage, mobility, and availability. Seth acknowledges that these choices do not always resolve into a perfect balance. At certain moments, stepping back may be the most honest decision—not because ambition has disappeared, but because priorities have changed.
Her invitation to decide what is “enough” is not an argument against achievement. It is a safeguard against pursuing an endlessly moving target. Without an internal definition of success, every accomplishment can become merely the qualification for the next demand.
A useful personal definition might account for several dimensions:
The kind of work worth doing
The relationships that should not be continually postponed
The degree of responsibility one genuinely wants
The learning and contribution that make effort meaningful
The health, time, and autonomy required for a sustainable life
These measures may change across different stages. Seth’s story suggests that revising them is not inconsistency; it is a form of awareness.
Continuous Learning Is Now Part of Every Job
Seth places skilling and upskilling at the center of professional resilience. Rapid advances in digital technology are changing roles, organizational structures, and the capabilities employers need. Under these conditions, an education completed at the beginning of a career cannot support an entire working life.
Continuous learning does not mean chasing every fashionable tool. It means developing enough understanding to respond intelligently as work evolves. Employees need opportunities to refresh their abilities, while organizations must treat learning as operational infrastructure rather than an occasional benefit.
This responsibility also belongs to leaders. Seth argues that executives do not necessarily need to become programmers, but they do need to understand the principles behind the technologies affecting their organizations. Otherwise, they cannot evaluate proposals, recognize risks, challenge assumptions, or ask teams the questions that lead to sound decisions.
That distinction matters. Technical leadership is not identical to technical execution. A leader’s task is to connect technology with customers, strategy, workforce implications, ethics, and long-term value. Surface-level familiarity may be enough for conversation, but it is rarely enough for governance.
Leadership Becomes Visible When the Situation Is Difficult
Seth recounts taking charge as CEO of a joint venture burdened by accumulated losses and a weak business strategy. The assignment required more than improving financial performance. She had to reshape the organization, correct its direction, and work with employees experiencing the emotional consequences of major change.
Turnarounds expose the limits of leadership based solely on authority. A revised strategy may look persuasive in a presentation, but it will not execute itself. People need clarity about why the current approach cannot continue, what the new direction demands, and how decisions will affect their roles.
The emotional dimension is not separate from the business problem. Fear, disappointment, and uncertainty influence whether people resist, disengage, or participate in rebuilding. Effective restructuring therefore requires both analytical discipline and human judgment.
Seth’s experience points to three intertwined leadership obligations: confront reality without softening it beyond recognition, establish a credible alternative, and respect the people who must live through the transition. Neglecting any one of these can undermine the others.
Resilience Is More Than Endurance
Another profound part of Seth’s account concerns continuing to work while receiving cancer treatment. She explains that work gave her a constructive focus and helped her maintain a positive outlook, which also affected those around her.
Her choice should be understood as personal rather than prescriptive. Serious illness does not create an obligation to stay productive, and resilience cannot be measured by how quickly someone returns to work. In Seth’s circumstances, however, professional engagement provided structure and distraction during a period of uncertainty.
This broadens the meaning of resilience. It is not simply the ability to absorb pain without showing it. Resilience can involve identifying what offers purpose, accepting support, adjusting expectations, and finding a way to retain agency when much else feels uncontrollable.
The same principle applies beyond health crises. During career setbacks or organizational upheaval, people often benefit from concentrating on the next meaningful action rather than trying to eliminate uncertainty altogether. Seth links the recognition of personal victories with relief from the anxiety created by an unpredictable future.
Leaving at the Peak Can Be a Deliberate Act
In 2016, at age 50, Seth left her job despite being at a high point in her career. By conventional standards, the decision could be labeled career-limiting. Within her own definition of success, it became another moment of choice.
The departure did not bring her contribution to an end. A chance meeting with a former colleague led her to NASSCOM, where she became involved in work focused on the skills needed for emerging digital technologies. The transition shows why stepping away from one professional identity should not automatically be confused with retiring from relevance.
It also reinforces the value of relationships built over time. Opportunities do not always arrive through formal applications or carefully plotted plans. They can emerge because previous colleagues remember someone’s judgment, reliability, or ability to solve difficult problems.
At NASSCOM, Seth’s work became connected to a much larger national priority. Digital skilling and workforce readiness increasingly occupied boardroom and policy conversations as India sought to protect and strengthen its competitive position. The platform she discusses eventually reached two million learners and gained recognition at senior levels of government.
Those achievements gave her every external reason to continue. Yet success did not remove her right to choose another ending.
Retirement as a New Pattern of Yes
Seth reflects on six years of intense commitment to the skilling mission. That immersion produced results, but it also involved missed celebrations, fewer holidays, and less time with family and parents. Her decision to retire came from seeing the full cost of the work alongside its impact.
This is one of the talk’s most valuable leadership lessons. Meaningful work can still demand too much. Social value, institutional recognition, and large-scale results do not automatically make every sacrifice sustainable.
Seth describes her final day as September 16 and frames the next phase as an opportunity to begin saying yes again—to experiences, relationships, and possibilities that concentrated professional responsibility had pushed aside. Retirement, in this telling, is not withdrawal. It is a redistribution of attention.
Her broader message is that endings deserve as much intentionality as beginnings. A person can be proud of what has been built without remaining responsible for it forever. Strong leaders contribute, develop others, and eventually make space for new stewardship.
A More Durable Definition of Professional Success
Seth’s career offers no promise that every risk will be rewarded or that reinvention will be easy. Instead, it presents a sturdier framework for navigating uncertain work.
Success can include advancement, but it can also mean recovering from rejection, learning a new domain, guiding people through a painful turnaround, or leaving an admired role at the right moment. Skilling protects adaptability; technological understanding improves leadership; and personal priorities keep professional ambition connected to a life beyond work.
The unifying idea is agency. Circumstances will shape a career, and institutions will apply their own labels. Yet individuals can still decide what their achievements mean, what trade-offs they will accept, and when the next chapter should begin.
