Narayana Murthy never skipped a class. Here's why...
Google's Sundar Pichai recently said that he shared a friendly rapport with the canteen staff and would cut often classes. Here are other top bosses and their college stories.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently spoke about his student days at IIT Kharagpur, where he shared a friendly rapport with the canteen staff and would cut classes. Over the years, leading names have shared stories of the time before they became captains of industry.
One would be right to expect the Infosys co-founder to be an exceptional student.Murthy, who pursued engineering from Nationa l Institute of Engineering in Mysore and later a master's degree from IIT Kanpur, said he had the “dubious distinction“ of never missing a class, even when the entire college was on strike. The reason?
Murthy's respect for his father, who was a teacher. “I respected my father, and so I knew I had to respect every teacher. And to respect a teacher you must go and sit in the class,“ he said.
A few years after a degree in architecture with structural engineering from Cornell University (1962), the Tata Chairman headed to Harvard Business School for the Advanced Management Program. In 2013, Tata called his initial weeks at Harvard “confusing“ and commented on how he felt “humiliated“ by the calibre of his peers. He said, “It was the only time in my life where I sat and crossed out day by day how many days were left before I could return to the normal world,“ Tata said. “But what it did do for me, as I soon found out, the confusion sort of disappeared, and you understood the magnitude of what you had learned in a manner that I believe is not possible to do in places other than at this business school,“ he said.
The HSBC Group general manager was the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School in 1982. Kidwai said she always tried to change the mind sets of those who were dismissive of her career because she was a woman and gave her Harvard days a part of the credit. “My years there encouraged the go-getter in me, but they also honed my inherent cultural traits. My basic sensitivities as a woman became fundamental,“ she had said in an interview. She added, “I liked and enjoyed the door being opened for me. So, I was always cautious not to slam it on anyone's face.“
The Bharti Enterprises founder has a degree from Arya College in Ludhiana. In an interview he had said, “I was not a great student. For me, the biggest time of difficulty was passing out of college. The principal was my father's professor. He asked my father to send me under his wing and that he would ensure that I'll at least be a graduate, which I did become in 1976.“
Mittal confessed to being a student with decent grades, with extensive participation in extra-curricular activities such as being a private pilot, the college's table tennis captain and also the “best at guessing which questions would make it to the paper“.
The managing director of Kotak Mahindra Bank terms his undergraduate years at Sydenham College as “a turning point“. In an interview, Kotak said in his first year at Sydenham, he stood second in Bombay University, which stunned him. “After that, I topped the university in both Junior BCom and BCom. Doing well in education became a very important part of life,“ he said. A passion ate cricketer since childhood, Kotak joined Jamnalal Bajaj School of Management for an MBA, but had to lose a yea r due to an accident on the cricket field.
