Is engineering the only career
That an engineer should pursue
Or do engineers make better MBA.
This is a question that often comes up in alumni discussions. Did those alumni who pursued careers outside of engineering waste their IIT degree – or worse – did they waste the govts scarce resources – did they deny the country a good engineer.
The jury is still out on this.
I watch the SuperCA pronouncement with great interest. Today’s announcement pertains to my IIT batch and branch-mate Pankaj Bhargava I recall he went to IIM and then someone told me he was selling coconut oil for use in hair care.
This I now realise is a bad generalisation. Just like everyone south of mumbai is not a Madrasi – everyone who goes to IIM doesn’t sell soap or oil.
Pankaj built a career in HRD. After being head of HRD at Marico, he built an entrepreneurial career and eminence in a sub set of HRD called value dynamics.
I understand as little of value dynamics as I do of Operations Research (I have a masters in operations research)
However what I do understand of value dynamics is around what it can do. The IIT Alumni Council spent years trying to create a global volunteer driven organisation for development and deployment of cutting edge technologies. The objective was laudatory – get India to lead in all the 64 advanced critical technologies in 100 months.
Let’s just first understand the gravity of the ambition to put things in perspective.
In the last 75 years as a country we have invented nothing.
Narayana Murthy, a well known alumnus of the MTech program from the Kanpur campus of IIT once famously remarked, “we must work 70 hours a week”. Many of us intuitively disagreed. Are we coolies at a station that our output should be measured in hours. As an ideator and imagineer I could be far more effective thinking whilst I play golf or go boating. What anyway is this concept of working ? I think I am working every waking hour. Or I should be.
When we looked at the 2019-23 report of ASCI on the 64 advanced critical technologies – it was worse than anything we had expected. India did not figure anywhere. China led in 47 of the 64 technologies. USA in the rest. India in none.
The council decided to change this. We resolved to get India in the top three of all 64 within 100 months. And number 1 in at least 16 of them. This was hardly trivial.
This is not the house of Adani or Ambani or Tatas. This is a non profit. No balance sheet. No employees. No control structures. No govt authority. How would we do it ? What structure would enable it.
We went everywhere looking for a suitable org structure. No luck.
And then we found value dynamics. We now have a time table for India to be number one:
2025 – Biofuels
2026 – Crypto
2027 – Batteries
2028 – Digital Twin
2029 – Nuclear
2030 – Drones
The list goes on. …
If we didnt have an org structure
We would not be able to deliver
Pankaj works not because he knows HRD
But because he knows engineering
