Leadership Talk Series: Nitin Seth

Students at IIM Lucknow had the opportunity to interact and gain insight into “Organisational Transformation & Leadership” from experience of the stalwart – Mr. Nitin Seth.



Mr. Nitin Seth (MD & Country Head, Fidelity Worldwide Investment) kicked off the session by sharing his own career experiences with class. The winner of President’s Gold Medal at IIM Lucknow was the first student to be picked by McKinsey from campus. He did consultancy across industry - manufacturing, operations improvement, financial institutions and business strategy. After an attempt at entrepreneurship, he came back to McKinsey to spearhead McKinsey Knowledge Center (McKC). When he joined McKC, it was merely a research back office with hardly 30 people. McKC had been a very satisfying experience for him. Mr. Nitin transformed the center into largest and most diverse knowledge hub at McKinsey. Indian IT/ITeS sector is close to his heart and he has been closely associated with NASSCOM.

Nitin emphasized that there are lot of opportunities in India in current economic scenario. Organization need to undergo transformation – the biggest reason being the challenges in global environment. Somehow, India has not been up to the mark in producing leaders. There is perhaps no direct answer, but “few reasons could be – British subjugation, and weak political and educational system” – he emphasized.

Talking about organizational transformation, Mr Nitin identified 4 forces coming together that may force an organization to introspect and go for transformation –
1. Global economic crisis – Organizations have gathered an unsustainable level of debt – a serious issue.
2. High degree of competitions as markets is going global.
3. Shift of wealth from west to east has led to increased purchasing power in Asia.
4. Technology has always caused a paradigm shift in way organizations do business. These days following 4 factors are kind of trend that businesses must not ignore –
a. Social Media
b. Explosive growth in reach and power of mobile phones
c. Growth of data
d. Cloud computing

Mr. Nitin stressed that to remain competitive – Organization must act fast. Change has to happen at all levels. Everyone in organization should take responsibility. This is again one of the ways to bring out the leader within. Mr. Nitin also shared best practices in driving change –
1. Organization must understand and evaluate the change before implementing it.
2. The change has to be communicated well through simple and consistent messages.
3. Identify change agents: Communication has to be decentralized; organizations need to identify people who can pass on the message.
4. Focus on quick fix – It helps organization to build trust and confidence within and outside.
5. “Go slow to go fast” – Organizations must think long term and not try to rush into everything.
6. Need to build stronger stakeholder position.

Again, for a organization to succeed, it needs leaders. Is there a quick formula? Answer is “NO”. However, Mr Nitin was kind to share a few traits that every leader must have. He termed this framework as 5C that leaders possess.



The whole class was inspired and mesmerized by in depth knowledge of Mr. Nitin. After Q&A, class thanked Mr. Nitin for sharing pearls of wisdom with students.

- Siddharth Asthana

Kakkar Ko Takkar - 2012

“The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring and thus more intelligent and even competitive”.

These are the words of wisdom by the famous environmentalist Paul Hawken, which propelled the Kakkar Ko Takkar 2012, an annual marketing club event of IIM Lucknow – Noida. The themes for this edition were -environment, social, and economic sustainability. The promotion of a creative idea based on these themes fired the imagination of the entire class. The fertile minds got together to create innovative ads resourcefully.

The event took off with Prof. Rajeev Kumra welcoming chief guest Ms. Radhika Agarwal – VP, Marketing at Shopclues.com. Our own alums Manish Chandra and Rajbeer Kaur added more colors to the event by their gracious presence.



Students presented captivating footages on power, e-waste, plastic waste, corruption, river pollution and many more current issues. With every passing team showcasing their thoughts, creativity, the competition was getting tougher to evaluate for the jury.

The winning team of Somya, Abhijit, Bharathi Shekar & Karthik walked away with the coveted first prize by giving a strong message to save power with the punch line “Save Power to Empower”. The team managed to shoot the video with a basic camera and showed the stark disparity between consumption of power in the urban and rural areas.

External jury Ms. Radhika was delighted by the work of the teams with minimum resources. She further sensitized the batch on E- Commerce, internet marketing and its challenges. She inspired the class stating that passion is the only important criteria to be successful in life.

This year, Max – Marketing club of IPMX added another flavour to the event by seasoning the event with the spice of Viral Marketing. Max uploaded all entries of the advertisements and challenged the participating teams to grab maximum views on Youtube. Here again “Power team” proudly walked away with maximum hits.

The adverts can be viewed at the following links:

Winning Ad:



Runners Up:



Watch all the Ads here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL567252DA51FDC0DC&feature=view_all

-   Neelam Talera

Emerging Trends & Challenges in New Age Marketing by Ms. Anisha Motwani

Ms. Anisha Motwani is the Director and Chief Marketing Officer (C.M.O) of Max New York Life insurance. She has over two decades of experience across diverse industries and has authored more than 50 articles on 'brands and business of consumers' for leading newspapers and magazines.

She had an engaging session with the students on various facets of new age marketing. She introduced traditional forms of marketing like print, radio, television, OOH, augmented reality etc. and then focused on how each of these can be leveraged to boost marketing and promotions in present day context. Even with the proliferation of social media, Television as a media is still relevant. She highlighted the importance of media optimizer tool in deciding composition of marketing channels and associated budgets, but cautioned the young marketers that despite being heavily quantitative, Marketing is more of an art than a science.    



Ms. Anisha then moved on to the new age marketing tools like social media, mobile, PDAs, e-commerce based platforms etc. She emphasized the need to create a proper “digital diet” among all such tools with a single aim to provide authentic information to end customers. Integration, alignment and scaling up were highlighted as the main challenges in new age marketing.  She summarized her talk with few examples of new age marketing used in promotions like MTV tweets for Nano driving campaign during their prime time shows and a real case study of how she designed marketing campaign of Max New York Life’s new product around new age media like Facebook and online communities that finally resulting in increasing sales by over 15 percentage.

The main take away for the class - In new age marketing what that matters is a well designed Social Business strategy.

- Nikhil Bhargava

Shadow Banking

As I write - Shanghai is going gung-ho on shadow banking via web, harnessing E-commerce to its best. A  significant chunk of unregulated $ 2.4 Trillion* market in China is eventually moving online.

 What specially caught my attention, when I researched further was, that this conduit of capital, is making up 25-30% of the World's Financial System. In 2010 itself, just before when governments world over started tightening their credit policies, the market was an estimated $ 60 trillion** , truly reflecting, the impact it has on the global economy.

To my thinking, China's spurt in such unorganized retail lending, points at 2 things for Asia:

 - First, it aptly validates the acuteness of credit shortage all across Asia. Post 2010, with an ever increasing tightening of credit, there has been a mass acceptance of such institutions primarily because of more hurdles and checks put by banks and at the same time, quick availability of desired credit from these shadow banks without any process hiccups.

- Second, it is a precursor to the future Asian Credit crisis. With the sudden surge of such institutions and hence, of such unorganized loans, the quantum of bad debts are bound to go up, as these institutions are not guided/governed or regulated by central bank. These toxic debts will eventually worsen the overall credit flow. That day may not be far then... when analysts and economists globe-over start envisaging Asian crisis, on the footprints of European or American credit defaults. 

However, shadow banking is not all that villainous... It offers customers a  wider array of choices, in terms of credit supply. These institutions can often provide credit, that is more cost-efficient than banks. And most importantly, to customer segment , who might not otherwise have such access, in a way, aiding respective governments, in their financial inclusion drive.

There are disadvantages though...  These institutions have the tendency to lure customers by doling out more rewards out of the investments, much more than banks, thereby increasing risks mounting in the financial system. On a more of illegal means of funding, these unregulated shadow institutions can be used to circumvent the strictly regulated mainstream banking system and therefore avoid rules designed to prevent financial crises. 

If we recall, it were these shadow banks sitting in tax havens, that created the real estate bubble during first few years of this millennium that jettisoned the world economy out of the safety zone and landing amidst the Financial Crisis which we are still struggling from...

 - Article written by Malay Ghosh, IPMX05 

*    Data picked from Economic Times, 25 July 2012.

 ** As reported by  Financial Stability Board  (a regulatory task force for the world's group of top 20 economies (G20).

Chat with Mr. Manoj Tandon on “What B-School courses lack”

It is fascinating to talk about a thought provoking article, especially when it is with the author himself. That was the experience IPMX05 students had when Mr. Manoj Tandon, Associate Director at CSC came over to the campus for the leadership talk series. He was also excited to talk to the students about his article –“What B-School courses lack”.

The article was written in the perspective of two year management course, PGP.  But, most of it was relevant to one year management courses as well. The talk series was structured as a discussion between the author and the students. He encouraged students to criticize the points and generate new ideas and suggestions. Manoj Tandon started off with the points about bloated egos and the unawareness of the ground realities. Manoj Tandon also agreed that to an extent this could be overcome with the depth of the experience the IPMX batch carries.

He went on to discuss the lack of foundation and the importance of implementation. Student’s observation was that management education, especially of the kind of IPMX, focuses on adding new skills and providing new perspectives to solve pertinent real life problems. The breadth of the industry experience in the class – Army, Information technology, Tourism, Finance etc will add to this learning experience and provide the interesting perspectives and develop well rounded personalities. In the end, students were pleased by the experience they had and were energized by the prolific discussion they had with the author.

-          Bijumohan

“Consulting – What is in store?” by Mr. Rohit Bansal

A guest session that was highly anticipated was one by Mr. Rohit Bansal (Vice President, EXL Services). The batch had a lot of curiosity about making a career in ‘C’ – is it the right career for you? What does it entail? What knowledge, resources and skills do you need to arm yourself with?

The ‘C’ that was the talk of the IPMX batch was ‘Consulting’.

Mr. Rohit introduced the batch to ‘blue-sky thinking’. He shared how consulting is both a science and an art. Answers from science need to be tapped and sanitised for customer needs. He talked about developing a target operating model for firms which would encompass dynamics of the organisation, market, business entities, IT, strategy – which is why consulting leads to challenging assignments. This would often lead to questioning the fundamentals, problem solving and arriving at a unique solution suiting the client.

At this stage, it was clear that a person has to don many hats as a consultant and think out of the box. But why do you need to choose a career in consulting? A career in consulting is just as rewarding as it is challenging. It gives one the opportunities to work with various clients at senior levels. It also gives the person tremendous opportunities to evolve as an individual. A consultant should be able to get the client to buy into the solution being proposed rather than what the client wants to hear. Consulting will help a person develop life skills and the ability to think differently. A consulting career also provides the opportunity to experience diverse sectors and geographies.

Mr. Bansal was kind enough to share an overview of the Consulting Industry as well.  After the session ended, the audience continued the discussion with Mr. Rohit Bansal over tea as well. The batch was very thankful to the guest for the wonderful session. Mr. Bansal gave good food for thought for the batch to ponder over.

LStore Ver 2.0

The euphoria and excitement was upbeat when we the team of 5 (@IPMX-5) took up the ownership of L’store from the previous batch; who started this venture last year. This store not just embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship but also provides a sense a kinship and belonging to the college. To experience the application of all the gyan which we were getting in the class made the whole venture even more thrilling. Talk about MBA jargons and we were already knee deep in it, be it 4Ps of marketing, inventory management, Account receivables/payables, market research, price elasticity etc…

With childlike excitement and unbridled enthusiasm we started our first day in store at 5.30pm on hot summer day in May and tried to sell to everyone and anyone coming to the cafeteria. I got busy cajoling and convincing customers when suddenly I realized that all the others (all guys) were missing and there was a weird lull, so I went to check at the stall and sure enough the “boys” were making the first sale to a very nice lady from wmp “Almitra “ .  I must say whatever the reason for the collective effort we succeeded in making our first sale :) and there was no looking back.

It’s been 2 months since then and we’ve got a feel of what it means by “customer’s always right” and the importance of proper/clear communication in marketing.  Dealing with vendors and logistics is a whole new ball game.Whenever I am at the stall and fold piles of t-shirts I remember Rajbeer’s (founding member) observation of having new found respect for the salespeople in stores.

 -   L’STORE TEAM

Aditi Nanda, Deependra Singh, Nithin Subhakar, Rakesh Narayan and Shomi Agrawal