I left the corporate world to pursue my love for teaching. After years as a successful corporate leader I left my high paid job to follow my dream. The reason I eventually crossed the Rubicon is simple as this: I wanted to know some point in the future someone would sit back when and think of me as someone who made a difference to their lives.
Originally, I'd always wanted to be a teacher. But I think I was put off. Finally when the opportunity came I crossed over. My specialism was Launch of Project. Dettol Soap in advertising to The Telegraph, Sananda in the media house. To build the first Heritage Park in India to the launch of the first Internet Company. And this is what I brought to the table. I taught Case studies in Project Management. For me it's all about taking a creative approach to the subject. I'm always thinking of ideas and creating resources for my students.
As the world undergoes a change that is fundamentally altering the way the way we live, work, and relate to one another, in its scale, scope, and complexity, a transformation … unlike anything humankind has experienced before, the main task would be to prepare the to innovate and think.
In its essence, the Change is very simple: organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. They are becoming capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless, incremental value on a large scale.
What is enabling the Change is that rarest of things, a genuine paradigm shift in management? Corporates are focused on continuous innovation for customers and organized to be adaptable, and able to adjust to meet the shifting changes of a marketplace. Think Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, Samsung and Parker.
For those companies that continue to be run like the century old mastodons. The examples here are also abundant. Market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of ‘bad’ management, but because they failed to learn from failures.
The disconnect between what is taught and the vast ongoing societal drama under way continues. I refuse to work from textbooks. The moment one is written it is out of date. My big battle is to get students to engage my students to think differently. I want to encourage my students to be as passionate about the subject as I am.
I remember my inspirational teachers at school were the ones who made the subject come alive. I try to do the same. If I stop being passionate about my subject, that's when I should quit.
Perhaps most importantly, teachers must have a voice in creating the future of teaching. They have a unique understanding of where their profession needs to go and what they need to do their best work for students. We have an obligation to benefit from their wisdom.
In the last five years that I have focused on sharing my experience by teaching on different facets of Communication. I deploy a teaching method which is an amalgam of communication including: talking, listening, presentation, case studies, personal experience, histrionics and participation which can be expressed in a single Sanskrit word as 'Sutradhar'. The word has no equivalent in English, but the nearest is a French word, 'Raconteur', meaning; a person who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit.
Moments
