Patna, July 22: As part of its Leadership Lecture Series, Chandragupt Institute of Management Patna (CIMP) hosted Hari Singh Shekhawat, an eminent HR leader on Thursday, in its auditorium. Shekhawat is an alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, who went on to serve some of the biggest names in the industry, including ITC, Whirlpool, Bank of America, Honda (HMSI), Holcim, GoAir (since renamed GoFirst), and the Wellspun Group, where he was president – Human Capital and General Affairs.
During his long and illustrious career spanning 35 years, he provided strategic leadership to firms across sectors and is particularly known for his critical role in two outstanding turnaround stories: Whirlpool and HMSI. At Whirlpool, Shekhawat helped drastically reduce the firm’s excessive backward integration by hiving off or outsourcing several non-core businesses and services. At HMSI, he helped resolve the biggest industrial relations (IR) crisis in the history of Indian industry.
The session began at 10:00 AM with a welcome address by Prof. (Dr.) Julee Banerji, Training & Placement Officer, CIMP. Shekhawat, in his address, described the key moments of his life, starting from his school days to life at XLRI and then some of the significant events in his career, each of which held invaluable lessons for the budding managers in attendance. These simple yet powerful and timeless lessons included the importance of knowledge (domain knowledge as well as general knowledge, detailing how the latter, in particular, had helped him immensely in his career – academic and professional). He laid adequate emphasis on communication skills, narrating his own journey from being a total stranger to English to offering training programmes to employees of Bank of America and Whirlpool, abroad.
Shekhawat highlighted the qualities of some of the most influential business leaders he had worked with, including Ajit Narain Haksar (ITC) and Russi Mody (Tata Steel): honesty, compassion, empathy, humility, and the ability to think on one’s feet. He also answered several questions from students, including those on choosing an organization to work with, wherein he urged them to focus on the organizational culture rather than on the remuneration. In this context, he narrated his own beautiful and inspirational experience of how he chose ITC over Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), by spending a day each in the lobbies of the two firms, observing the behaviour of their employees!
Shekhawat floored the audience with his energy and endearing style of narrating wonderful anecdotes and answering questions patiently and empathetically. Several faculty members and officers of the institute attended the event, which concluded with a vote of thanks from Prof. (Dr.) Rana Singh, Director, CIMP.
