Indecisiveness turns him off and change is the tonic he thrives on. From advertising to entertainment to technology, the 40-something Alex Kuruvilla has sailed in many boats. And it won’t be too wrong to label him a maverick. He’s had to make some sacrifices though, like the ponytail he traded for a suit when he transcended to a corporate head honcho from being a copywriter.

Let’s start at the beginning of this journey. During his college days, Kuruvilla was smitten with the written word. So, after completing his bachelors from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, he joined The Statesman as a sub-editor, and later moved on to J. Walter Thompson (JWT) as a copywriter. The ad agency was then called Hindustan Thompson Associates (HTA). Then the business side of advertising caught his fancy, and he shifted there. But that phase didn’t last too long.

Soon, a young and footloose Kuruvilla was backpacking all over Europe and later America. “I led the American lifestyle for a year, travelling all across the country. One fine day, I found myself completely broke and decided to head home,” he recalls. And it was back to HTA again. He joined the client-servicing department at HTA Delhi in the early 1990s. Since then, he has not ventured back into the creative. His return to advertising coincided with numerous brand launches like Pepsi, which made it a very exciting time.

The comeback to advertising also made Kuruvilla aware of his true calling. “I realised that my forte was the right-left brain balance,” he says, explaining why he chose to stick to the business side of entertainment and advertising.

He also moved to Dubai and worked for Publigraphics, a Dubai-based agency started by Young & Rubicam. Here, he lived out of a suitcase as he travelled to clients in west Asian countries and North America.

However, there were bigger things calling, like the television industry, which had become a hotbed of opportunities with the cable and satellite boom in the late 1990s. It offered more scope for Kuruvilla to use his creatively inclined managerial skills.

In 2000, he joined MTV as their India chief. “Those were the best years of my career,” he reminisces. So why did he choose to quit MTV? “I tend to get bored doing the same thing after seeing a full business cycle which usually happens after five or six years,” he says.

There’s a word of caution for those who may want to emulate this. “You should think of quitting only after you hit a plateau in terms of learning or completing a full business cycle. If you change jobs every two to three years, you may end up being perceived as a flash in the pan,” he says.

Kuruvilla has now joined the board of Coruscant Tec, a company that designs and sells mobile content and operates in the area of commerce too. “It’s a new field altogether for me and I’m enjoying beginning on a clean slate,” he says.

A fresh beginning empowers you with the ability to be innovative. That’s why he thinks a B-school may not necessarily be the pathway to success in a field as dynamic and innovation-driven as the entertainment business. “It’s easy to apply two years of B-school education but it’s not easy to see things simply, from the eyes of a child,” he says. “The world is too full of jargon and people are afraid to be simple.”

So what’s the word of advice that Kuruvilla would give to ambitious youngsters? Pat comes the reply, “Gun for my chair.”

As told to Gouri Shukla in Mumbai