Kailash Chandra Mishra, the Vice-Chancellor of Sri Sri University, is a celebrity in the world of finance.
His achievements range from authoring more than 14 books on insurance and finance management to lecturing at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Wharton, Connecticut University, and Manchester University and holding top posts at SP Jain Institute of Management and the Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management. Besides these, he has created management frameworks and been involved in innovations, especially in the field of management education.
Prof Mishra, originally a Gold medalist in Physics, has held advisory roles in many capacities for both the State and Central governments; Government institutions including SEBI, RBI, ASCI, SBI, NIASOM, and the office of the CAG; as well as for foreign institutions like the World Bank.
He also holds an MBA, CAIIB, and Doctor of Literature degree in Financial Management.
Here is an excerpt of a conversation with Prof Mishra:
Q. What do you think makes you so sought after by so many institutions?
One thing leads to another; success begets success. Wherever I go, I do not assume; I try to find out what the problem is and solve it.
I never hide my weaknesses; I believe that if you deliver with substance, you needn’t worry about your weaknesses. In fact, worrying about weaknesses will lower your confidence and weaken your expertise. Let you weaknesses be compensated by your strengths.
Once, when I had gone to Connecticut University to deliver a lecture on finance, I was suddenly asked to talk about how finance can be applied to Indian agriculture. That is when I really found out that I know so much about agriculture. Connecticut University called me back the next year to talk about agriculture finance and risk management.
And then the World Bank came to know about it and they asked me to develop the agricultural model for India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Maldives. That’s how I became an agriculture consultant. I take risks to learn, and this mentality and ability to learn has helped me become versatile.
Q. How did you manage to bring in so much extramural innovation through techniques such as BEAD (Business Ethics Advancement and Development), STUDENT (Structuring The Unstructured by Discussion, Evolution, Negotiation, and Training), POY (Power Of You), DOCC (Development of Corporate Citizenship), and ADLOP (Assessment Development Leadership Outreach Potential) into management learning in various institutes in the US and in India?
I am a firm believer in Indian epistemological learning, of the seven stages of learning: darshan, shravan, pathan, mannan, chintan, bimban, sarja, and sthapan . I try to integrate these techniques into management.
All my learning techniques are centered on managing the undermanaged sectors or unstructured structures. There is no point supplying managers who are not doing service to the society. So the thrust of my innovation is on managing the undermanaged structures and structuring the unstructured while meeting personal aspirations and ambitions.
Q. What do you think about the future of management?
Management has gone through six stages: classical management, quality management, business process engineering, customer relations management, knowledge management, and future management.
Currently, we are running in the sixth generation of management: the future has to be managed today. Whoever captures the future will become the new-generation managers.
Over and above future management, two things are likely: one is talent management and the other is managing the big – population is big, data is big, food scarcity is big, monetary requirements are big.
Talent cannot be created on the day it is needed. There is a gestation period for talent creation and management. In the future, there will be a market for how rapidly talent is augmented, and that can be done through technical methods, spiritual methods, emotional methods, or even congenital methods.
The future of management will not be an organization that will manage a few people, it will always be at a global scale. This means there will be global networks, global sovereigns – one corporate will rule the world.
