A career spent on both sides of the same problem.

After a B.Tech. in chemical engineering from IIT Delhi and graduate study at the University of Virginia (an M.S. and a Ph.D., the doctorate in computer-aided design applications for process optimisation), I spent thirteen years in the software product industry in the United States and India.

I worked as an engineer and project leader on process simulation software in California, set up offshore development operations as an expatriate manager, founded and ran a software product engineering company, and served as Chief Technology Officer of a UK-based business building derivatives risk management software for energy trading, where I headed worldwide software delivery and grew the India facility past 125 people.

That period gave me a practitioner's understanding of technology: what it can genuinely do, where implementation becomes difficult, and why a technically sound product does not automatically produce a business result. It is the reason I am sceptical of demonstrations and interested in data foundations.

During my technology career I completed an MBA at IIT Delhi, specialising in Finance and Information Systems and graduating with the first merit position in the class.

I joined academia in 2002 as Professor of Finance and Information Systems, teaching corporate finance, financial derivatives, financial engineering, risk management and business intelligence. Over time my responsibilities widened into academic programmes, admissions, institutional technology, curriculum and international relationships, and I served as Dean (Academics) across two terms.

What began to interest me then was not how technology works, but how organisations use it, and why some applications create real value while others, technically identical, create none.

I led three institutions: Great Lakes Institute of Management in Gurgaon, then Management Development Institute Gurgaon, then eight years as Director General of IMI Delhi, India's first corporate-sponsored business school. I led the Delhi campus throughout, and had overall responsibility for all three campuses (Delhi, Kolkata and Bhubaneswar) for most of my tenure.

The responsibility in each case spanned academics, admissions, student quality, placements, faculty, research, executive education, corporate and alumni engagement, internationalisation, marketing, new programmes and the profit and loss.

At IMI Delhi that work produced a place in the Financial Times Masters in Management global top 100 for five consecutive years, from 2022 to 2026, making it one of only four Indian business schools to achieve this, and a place in the FT Masters in Finance global top 70 in 2025 and 2026. It also brought AACSB accreditation for the Delhi campus in 2022 and AMBA accreditation across all three campuses.

Leadership changes how you evaluate technology. A system that looks attractive may create work elsewhere. A use case may depend on data the institution does not hold. A pilot may succeed technically and never be adopted. An investment may be genuinely interesting and still not deserve institutional attention. These are not technology questions. They are leadership questions, and they are answered differently when the outcome is yours to defend.

My interest in technology did not disappear when I moved into higher education; it changed sides. As an institutional leader I made the decisions on CRM, on Coursera for Campus, on ChatGPT Edu, and more broadly on where technology could improve academic processes, student experience and institutional performance.

Sitting in that chair teaches something that is hard to learn anywhere else: buying technology, deploying technology, adopting technology and producing an outcome are four different things. Most institutional technology failures happen between the third and the fourth, and most vendor roadmaps are built as though the first two were the hard part.

I spent eleven years in the United States and have taught master's students and executives across Europe, Asia and Africa. My international engagement in higher education has been substantially through AACSB and EFMD: accreditation committees, peer review, institutional mentoring and advisory roles.

Reviewing other schools is the most instructive work I have done. It is where you learn that institutions differ in strategy, governance, capability and context so sharply that an approach which transforms one will fail in another, and that a great deal of what looks like institutional weakness is actually evidence built to answer the wrong question.

Technology experience tells you what a system can and cannot do. Academic experience tells you how teaching, learning and faculty actually behave. Institutional leadership tells you which outcomes people are accountable for and what it costs to move them. A management and financial perspective tells you whether something is worth doing. International work tells you that context is not a detail.

The purpose is not to encourage institutions to use more technology, or companies to build more features. It is to identify where either one can make enough difference to deserve the attention, and then to make that choice into implemented, measurable change.

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