From head hunter to TV honcho

MUMBAI: In 2008, The Wall Street Journal put Indrani Mukerjea alongside other globally recognised India-born businesswomen like PepsiCo’s chief executive Indra Nooyi and Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer who recently quit the company, on a list of ‘The 50 Women to Watch’. Mukerjea, who was ranked 41 on the list, had by then risen from being a not-so-famous headhunter to leading a broadcasting group backed by heavyweight private equity funds.Her meteoric climb up the corporate ladder was chronicled in many interviews across publications and websites during the time highlighting her grand plans to make INX into a media empire.
Mukerjea co-founded INX Media along with her husband Peter Mukerjea, a former Star TV CEO, and became the face of the broadcasting group till the time the duo exited in 2009.
Branded as an ambitious woman, her first brush with entrepreneurship was when in 1996 she started INX Services, which specialised in executive level hiring. Known to have done some hiring for Star TV, which some people say was how she met Peter, not many executives in the headhunting space remember her for her work. “I’ve not heard of her for the past few years now. At the time when she was running INX, the recruitment firm, we always heard about it as an organization aligned with Peter Mukerjea. It would have been a small outfit with a few employees,” the head of a top executive search said on condition of anonymity. In 2005, she managed to strike a partnership with IMD, a global search firm, to leverage from their worldwide presence. “This is the time when she created some news in her headhunting career,” an executive from the recruitment industry said.
With no broadcasting experience to boast of, many thought Mukerjea was a complete outsider to the industry. Says one employee who worked at NewsX in its early days, “Although Peter was responsible for the channel, she was a part of the decision-making process all throughout.”
Mukerjea had said in a 2007 interview to a media & advertising portal, exchange4media.com, “I’ve been hands-on right from the funding stages. What has worked for me is that I’ve been a viewer all my life, and hence not been so close to the woods. This is one reason why I have been able to make the channel fresher.”