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As a youngster Sandeep Kumar spent hours crouched beneath the coffee table in his parents’ home sketching on the tabletop’s bottom. “I was four or five years old and that’s when my parents first realized I’m a very creative person visually. I think spatially,” says Kumar, assistant general counsel, KONE, a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry.
His parents still have that coffee table.
Kumar harnessed that creativity in visual arts and applied it originally as designer and project manager in the architecture profession and today in support of KONE’s operations. Leading a team of more than ten legal professionals across the US, Canada, and Mexico, he’s a strategic legal partner to day-to-day operations of the business. He also offers legal perspective on special projects, embedding directly with business teams.
With a mind like a canvas and passion for the visual arts, Kumar naturally wanted to study the visual arts, but his parents pushed back. The three settled on architecture. “It was a compromise,” says Kumar. He earned a degree in architecture from the University of Illinois in Chicago and spent the next eight years working in the architecture profession. Despite a promising future in the architecture profession, Kumar applied to law school, another decision his parents questioned. “But now as they reflect on it, they realize why I did it,” says Kumar.
Living at the intersection of art, architecture, and law, Kumar brings a unique perspective to his role at KONE, applying structure, creativity, and design thinking to his work. “Doing a painting or a drawing, there’s a couple of key attributes that go along with that. With oil painting, you have a canvas that’s blank. The first thing you do is plan and think about composition,” Kumar explains.
When planning a work of art, Kumar determines the message he’s trying to communicate and where the elements will appear, not unlike listening to KONE business partners expressing their concerns. “When people are presenting matters to me and seeking advice, my mind becomes a canvas. I hear what they’re saying, and I translate it into a visual in my head. And that visual maps out all the facts and potential solutions,” says Kumar.
Whether spreading oils on canvas or dispensing legal advice at KONE, composition, accuracy, and timing matter, says Kumar. “It may be cliché, but sometimes you have to take a step back and let the paint dry. Sometimes when you’re dealing with a complex matter, you have to give a little bit of space between what you’re hearing and the decision-making process. Then you know the advice that you’re going to give,” says Kumar. “All these skills have evolved from my time painting and drawing but equally apply in the business context. Those skills have taken me very far,” says Kumar.
While artistic creativity and sensibility have informed Kumar’s success as a lawyer, his eight years in the architecture profession also played a role by affording him an array of skills, like work ethic, project management, scheduling, and process discipline. “You have to be a workhorse in architecture, especially in your early years. I learned what it takes to put in the time and do whatever it takes to get the project done on time. There are all these other skills that I learned and carried forward,” says Kumar.
When he arrived at KONE he faced a variety of challenges. KONE had just lost several lawyers, and his first inclination was to access the templates and matter files. But nothing existed. Nearly overwhelmed he realized he had to find a solution. So, he did what he does best, namely view the opportunity as a blank canvas and apply his visual creativity. His manager empowered Kumar to develop a new filing system, templates, and processes. “He let me grow that role the way I wanted to, in conjunction with my co-counsel,” says Kumar.
Driven by a desire to help others Kumar took his role to the next level, expanding it beyond just supporting the three business lines. He began supporting acquisitions, human resources, marketing, and KONE’s global colleagues with intellectual property matters. “I did a lot of things that transformed the role into what it is today. A lot of what happens in the operations counsel role today is based on the foundation that I built years ago,” says Kumar.
Today Kumar faces many big challenges. One such challenge is working across three countries and respecting the cultural nuances associated with each. “It could be communication style, a loss in translation, different terminology, different regulations, or different laws. You always have to keep in mind that when you have direct reports, although they report to you and they report to the law department, they sit in a country where they’re surrounded by colleagues, and they have influences that are outside of just the law department. It’s important to find balance,” says Kumar.
