A Mensa member and a management Guru, Sankar Krishnan is soft-spoken. The intelligence behind the polite smile is clear as day. After spending years helping organisations around the world as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, he is now helping build the next generation of leaders as pro-vice chancellor of Ashoka University while also serving on the advisory board of a number of enterprises in healthcare and technology.
He talks to Edge about his student years, which began at College of Engineering Trivandrum (CET) as a B.Tech student, and what he thinks about the education system in India.
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Although Loyola School takes academics seriously, they had a lot of other extra-curricular activities for students and we had to choose what we wanted to do. So, I learned to prioritise choices in school itself and that is something that came in handy during college life. The major difference in college is that you have to do a lot of things on your own. In school, many help you to get through, but not in college.
During my time, computer science was new to India and I’ve always been curious about new things. So, choosing it was a spur of the moment decision and I had a wonderful time learning it. For instance, Thiruvananthapuram hosted the National Games for the first time in 1987 when I was in my second year and some of us students were fortunate enough to take part in the back-end operation helping Keltron make a software for games management.
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Similarly, management was more of a happen-stance than a planned decision. There were talks at that time on the merits of taking a management degree after engineering. The exams weren’t as hard as they are now. So the group study sessions were fun rather than stressful.
Becoming a manager
I had great teachers at both CET and IIM. But the system of teaching was totally different there. Classes moved forward through discussions mooted by professors and there were open book examinations.
While in CET, the answers were to-the-point, for management studies we were taught that there could be more than one way to answer something and usually the correct one was not something precise but a compromise between different answers. It was not as rigid as the set-up at CET.
After IIM, I joined McKinsey & Company, Mumbai. Putting into practice what I learned was quite an experience. You realise the difference between theory and practice. You’ll have to take the views and concerns of different parties into consideration before making a decision.
Management outlook
Indians are trained to be competitive from a young age. Our system is designed around exams and a lot of data. So, we are naturally good at analysing numbers and figures. It is a handy skill and something highly appreciated by others. Yet, we are often vague when it comes to communication, especially when it comes to saying no. That was one of the things that I noticed while working with people from different countries. They don’t have any qualms in saying what they want.
Though I haven’t studied in universities outside India, during my career I’ve had the opportunity to visit many top institutes abroad. The thing that struck me the most is the atmosphere of intellect and knowledge in universities there. It is unlike anything I’ve felt. Walking in Princeton, you can feel the presence of geniuses like Albert Einstein and John Nash.
Education here
The issue here is that we focus on knowledge dumping and exams. What we need to do is make the system more liberal and let the students explore before they choose something to excel in. That is what we are trying to do at Ashoka. The students are free to explore different subjects in the first year and only in the second year they need to choose a major.
Courses take an interconnected and interdisciplinary approach to instil in students a curiosity to be critical and make them better rounded for the future. The aim at schools and colleges should be to teach them how to learn something rather than throwing tons of information at them.