Alumni Association Updates
Updates and Information on upcoming events from the alumni association.
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New Leadership Programme in Infrastructure Management at ISB

Raj Kamal (Class of 2003)

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Ajay Jain
PGPMAX Founding Class






Tell us a little about your family background/ history. How has it influenced you?
My father was in government and every year used to get transferred to a new location. This helped our family in dealing with change quite naturally in our lives. My mother’s hardships in dealing with the uncertainties in the life of an upright government officer’s wife and still providing best possible upbringing to us gave many lifelong lessons and deeply influenced me for life.

Briefly describe your personal and professional achievements (including recent awards/ special projects).
I have always been blessed with a great team all around which always kicked me up in life and in my career. I had a great ecosystem all around, with family and work, which always gifted me ample free time to try my hands in variety of fields. I led a social services team and transformed a mental retarded centre (which was shortlisted as 1 of the best 3 projects in India by PMI, USA); I ran PGPMAX Founding Class exclusive girl-only orphanage campaign (our class is privileged and proud to provide same and in some sense even better facilities than our kids get, to 50+ young girls); I tried to transform the life of many senior citizens by getting them to take yoga classes every day in Gurgaon in 3-4 Bhartiya Yog Sanshthan’s centers; I have been an active volunteer since inception of ‘running and living with a vision’ which aims to encourage 300 million Indians to join regular long distance running; I’m an active normal marriage life counselor (couples and their families come from different cities for result-oriented normal married life transformation). As all this doesn’t pay me and in fact consumes almost 25% of my income. Hence, I need to work in the remaining time in Xchanging, taking care of their Xuber commercial insurance software product development globally. I was always blessed with industry-beating retentions and engagement, and 360-degree customer satisfaction scores throughout my career due to having an excellent team all around.

Tell us about your profile prior to attending ISB and recap your professional life after ISB, including your career progression.
I graduated from a functional leadership role into a business leadership role.

How do you think your time at ISB has contributed to your career and personal growth?
ISB PGPMAX course gave me around 60 friends for life and ‘made’ my life by completely transforming our orphanage initiative when our classmates adopted it and took it to new heights. It is now aptly called PGPMAX Founding Class Little Star Orphanage. ISB gave me tremendous tools, a framework to articulate gut feelings into much better structured processes, ways to convince a board, global CEOs, shareholders, etc. However, I wouldn’t say it helped greatly in terms of vertical and monetary growth.

What do you enjoy most about your current career position?
Creating value all around and transforming the lives and careers of 1000+ employees and, indirectly, their families as well.

Briefly describe a typical day at work, in a way that illuminates the kind of challenges and opportunities your role involves.
Blessed with a great team, I mostly spend time reading, coaching, and getting us ready for the future.

What is the next new thing in the industry or vertical you are working in? Are there any trends that you can identify?
“No-frills”, customized to individual levels, and aggregators service economy (led by software) due to technological disruption, is happening all around and will eventually reach enterprise levels as well.

What was the main highlight or most memorable aspect of your programme at the ISB?
Great faculty and friends..

If you could offer a word of advice to the current class at ISB, what would it be?
Enjoy more time with friends as eventually this is what you remember and not what was taught in the class.

How do you feel you can contribute to ISB?
Rather than a direct contribution to ISB, if I continue to endeavour to make the kind of contributions mentioned in #2 above, then I think that will be the biggest contribution to society as a whole.

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