On January 23, 2018, the S P Jain Institute of Management & Research hosted the Second Dr. M L Shrikant Memorial Lecture to mark the 82nd birth anniversary of the former Dean who led SPJIMR for 28 years and saw it emerge as India’s premier school of management.
The memorial lecture was delivered by Mr. Ishaat Hussain, former Director, Tata Sons, who spoke on “Building of a Global Company: a personal experience in ethics, leadership and growth.” Members of Dr. Shrikant’s family, faculty members, staff and students were present in the SPJIMR auditorium for the lecture.
Prof. A. B. Kulkarni, SPJIMR’s senior-most faculty member, spoke of his association with Dr. M L Shrikant and the former Dean’s foundational base of bold new ideas, values and a practitioner’s approach. It is this leadership that helped SPJIMR stand out for its programmes and attracted the best of participants and recruiters to campus, he said.
Mr. Hussain quoted Dr. Shrikant’s words to highlight the kind of leader the former Dean was: “We teach that material success is important but it can ring hollow without an understanding of the deeper purpose that must guide our decisions and a spirit of service that must lead us to action”.
He said: “This resonates with me deeply as I spent 37 long years with a group for whom this is very much the guiding principle for all that the group does. Like Dr. Shrikant, I also believe that management practices and philosophies are contextual and we must blend western theories and ideas with the Indian ethos”.
Mr. Hussain ended his 30-minute lecture by asking the audience to ponder over why it is that governance always appears to be in a state of crisis in peoples’ perception and the subject matter of much criticism.