Biography
Nitin Sanan is from India and today he is Operations Manager at Meusburger in Austria, but the way he got there is the part worth knowing. He came for one week. Thirteen years later he is still there, which tells you most of what you need to know about how that one week went.
He started as a service engineer, the only foreigner in the factory, and for a while he communicated with the people around him through drawings, because the words were not there yet. From that start he built a team that stayed loyal to him, learned the language and the place, and kept climbing until he was running operations.
The thirteen years are not just a career story, they are a whole life that got built somewhere he only meant to visit.
Areas of expertise
- Operations management
- Manufacturing & engineering
- Team leadership
- Cross-cultural communication
- Building loyalty
- Starting from the bottom
What the conversation covered
We talked about the one week that turned into thirteen years, and what actually happens when you arrive somewhere as the only foreigner on the factory floor with no shared language. He described communicating through drawings in those early days, and how he slowly built a team that trusted him and stayed with him.
He was good on speed and on leadership, the kind you learn by doing rather than reading, and on loyalty, both the loyalty he gave and the loyalty he earned back. And he talked about what it means to put down roots in a place you never planned to stay.