The Xavier Institute of Management here held a two-day Business Excellence Summit on September 22 in the presence of 26 distinguished alumni of the college spanning across 30 years.
The central theme of the event was, ‘Building the vision for XIMB at 40 in accordance with the VUCA world.’
The summit commenced with Vice Chancellor and Director of Xavier University Dr Fr Paul Fernandes delivering a speech on excellence and universal education.
The Day 2 of the summit comprised of panel discussions on topics that aimed to discuss the challenges the XIMB would have to surmount in the next ten years.
“Without compassion, you cannot become a good leader,” Sidharth Rath (Group Executive, Axis Bank) quoted as the panel discussed on how management education inculcated leadership capabilities. The panel consisted of eminent guests like Sanjib K Ambasta (Senior VP, Aftermarket Business CV and Vespa 2W, Piaggio) and Prithwish Mukherjee (Marketing Head, Vodafone, Kolkata).
The summit also witnessed leadership talks by esteemed alumni like Shreeprakash Hota (Associate Director, HSBC), Subrat Sarangi (Associate Professor in Marketing, KIIT University) and Dipankar Das (Business Development Head & APAC Sales leader, BridgeI2I).
“90 percent of what I learnt was from XIMB,” Simanta Mohanty (VP HR, Community Empowerment lab) said in his insightful leadership talk. Nilanjan Roy (Business Head, Global Health and Group Benefits, Cigna TTK) gave a heartfelt talk about how having a mentor is very important.
Mrinalini Khusape (Head Special Projects- Sales and After Sales, Skoda India), lalit Desiraju (Senior Director, Capgemini), Krishna KV (Senior VP, Transactional Banking, Yes Bank), Vijay Sinha (Senior VP HR, JSW Energy ltd) and Sanjay Nayak (Strategic Business Practice Head-Industry Solutions, Infosys BPO) insisted on using persuasive leadership to get people to contribute. “If you create values, money comes on its own,” said Chittaranjan Mohanty (Own Venture, Former Executive Director, JP Morgan Chase) while Ashok Dash (Director-Partner Development (Tier I System Integrators), Microsoft) ended the session with a brilliant sermon on growth mindset.
There were also panel discussions on certain industry relevant topics which saw leaders like Sidharth Rath (Group Executive, Axis Bank) marvelling at how impactful the change in the next thirty years will be, stating that, “India is at the cusp of a big change, the seeds of which are already sown.” The panel discussed strategies which the XIMB needs to adopt to surmount these challenges and be an enabler in the VUCA world, with Al Jagannath (Senior Director, Dell-EMC Alliance, VM ware) noting, “If we are not prepared to change, we will be VUCA-ed.”
On how management education could foster entrepreneurship, Chandra Sekhar Chitrala (Managing Director, Catalyst IT Solutions) stated that management education is giving a huge boost to the employment in the country. Om Prakash Agarwal (CEO, Plastend) believed that entrepreneurship can be taught but a calculative risk is needed while speakers like Susanta Mishra (CEO, PlacidivisionPvt ltd), Zafrullah Khan (President HR, Emcure Pharmaceuticals) and Ashok Singha (Managing Director, CTRAN Consulting ltd.) discussed the topic further, with Singha noting, “Being an entrepreneur, we consistently have to be innovative.” Student representative of XIMB Rahul Patnaik thanked the management and the alumni along with the core team.