Finding the Theme!
Margie Parikh
It was 2017 then — pretty much like any other year in my 20+ years at BK School of Business Management. The new batches had arrived. The enthusiasm of the students, the excitement of class activities as part of studying organizational behavior, the co-curricular activities… The new cycles had fused more life to what already throbs at our campus. The heat in the weather had ebbed, but the energy at the campus was at the full tide.
One thing new this time around was a new Diploma program which aimed at comparing the Western and Post-Vedic thought on leadership. Searching for the grains of leadership in the texts meant for wider purpose — like philosophy, spirituality, and more — did pose challenges, but it did not seem altogether incongruous.
The common format of our Diploma programs at our institution includes a module on introduction to General Management and Communication. Since the participants of this new program are all senior — someone is a CEO, someone is a Consultant, someone is an owner of an industrial unit, someone is responsible for Human Resource Management in a software firm — my thought was not to give them the content and assignments in the standard format.
So, what were we to do? During the kick-off session where the participants and I discussed the course objective and approach, the idea of organizing a TEDx event emerged. It will involve a lot of general management and communication and will provide an opportunity to create assignments which were practical and fruitful in many ways — we agreed.
So, one of the first steps — after obtaining the clearances from the University — was to brainstorm for the possible themes. The participants of the Diploma program went from class to class to brainstorm the theme. Our campus is awake every day from 8:30 AM until 10 PM when the evening classes close. When the students of the regular, two-year MBA program came to know, they went much beyond the brainstorm and joined the development and program organization wholeheartedly.
The feeling was that leadership is central to the processes of management, entrepreneurship, and change. That way it is pertinent in every generation, every era. Leadership is pervasive — there is so much of possibilities that leadership can unlock at any level — from the global level, right down to ourselves.
The early waves of brainstorm generated more than a hundred suggestions in short bursts and then, in a densely packed committee room, some 30-plus people jammed together to tease out the theme. Every scrap on which ideas were written, was put up for discussion.
There was a question: how could we express our theme so as to present the phenomenon of leadership as an age-old yet ever-pulsating, unfolding, unending, everywhere type? All these adjectives came up while accepting an idea, rejecting an idea, or improvising an idea. Akil suggested that expressing leadership as a journey conveyed a lot: non-leaders would evolve into leaders, leaders would find new heights (or lows), and no one stayed frozen at one place. It was dynamic. Then someone said that at least one word be kept in a word that came from Sanskrit, written in Devanagari script. When combined with the rest of the expression in English, it could convey the pan from local to global. The Sanskrit word for “leader” is “Neta”. The noun Neta comes from the verb ‘Ni’, which conveys the process of taking, directing, bringing.
Another idea was to emphasize the unfolding nature and show it in a timeless manner. There had to be something to convey that leadership was not a one-act play, a one-time feat. Nor was it exclusively modern reality.
In the end, we settled for the theme that Namrata gave the words to: “Netrutva: An Eternal Journey”.
There it was!
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