Her Story
About Armana
Armana Chadha is a Senior Associate at L.E.K. Consulting, where she has worked for the past year and a half after pivoting from the entertainment industry. She earned a business major from USC along with a screenwriting minor. Her career began in entertainment with a role as assistant to the COO at Endeavor Content, now known as Fifth Season, followed by an admin position at Netflix that provided exposure to strategy and other areas. This experience led her to pursue consulting, a transition she achieved through extensive networking, case interview preparation, and leveraging her administrative skills. In high school, she was actively involved in Future Business Leaders of America, serving as secretary at the sectional level in the Inland Empire, California, which helped develop her communication and networking abilities.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Armana
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think that it's a mixture of things. Part of it is some people in my life, like my partner, who is really supportive of me. He just has such a confident attitude throughout life that I felt like having a different perspective of how somebody else approaches life and who goes into it confidently gave me a sense of, oh, I don't have to be afraid when things are going too well, I don't have to be afraid to be confident. I also think my parents have also been super supportive of whatever pathway I've wanted to go through in life. I also just feel like there's been a lot of really amazing information online, books, reading a lot of interesting books like The Big Trust by Shade ZRai and The Power of Now. All of these things, even online, you see a lot more bits of mental health and things that you can be aware of to get better.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Better to ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission. Also, explore as much as you can and don't be afraid to fail in those spaces. The more exposure that you get throughout life will eventually lead you to whatever direction you need to, but if you're too afraid to even go anywhere, you're gonna end up where you are today.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Discover what you want. Have exposure to things that you think you want to help you figure out where you want to go, and spend time with yourself to figure out who you are as a person, what you enjoy, what you don't enjoy. Make sure that you align yourself with good friends and people that actually support you. Try to sit with yourself and try to reflect on what makes you happy, what you enjoy, who makes you happy, who you want to surround yourself around. Use technological advancements in small ways but not letting them overpower your life.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Right now, AI is a big one. People are always talking about how consulting is gonna be automated. The way to overcome that is to figure out how AI could be useful in combining the human skill set to best overcome whatever challenges there are in a field. AI is incredible, it's an awesome tool, but that means that combined with human partnership and output, we can come out with even better things and faster. If we can view it as a tool versus something to be afraid of, it will hopefully help us come out on top.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Authenticity is something that I try to bring into my personal life and my work life. Given some of my confidence issues in the past, I think that has been a little difficult, but now as I'm trying to learn it's okay to be myself, it's okay to crack jokes, it's okay to be who I am. When you show people who you are and then you also are not afraid to communicate, then I don't think that there's anything that you can get yourself in trouble in. Having difficult conversations, all of that, if I show people who I am, we all learned to work together better when we are vulnerable and honest about what we're feeling.
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