After having heard about him through Jayeshbhai (via Karma Capitalism article in Business Week), through Birju at Columbia, featuring him in DailyGood and reading his profound 63-page syllabus, it was a pleasure to meet Professor Srikumar Rao (several times) last week!
In a nutshell, Professor Rao has pruned lot of religious and spiritual wisdom and, rather successfully, framed it in a business-school context. Having led a marketing team for Warner Brother for one of the highest grossing film in US history -- Exorcist -- at the age of 23, going on to do his PhD in Physics, succeeding in the business world, and ultimately stumbling onto his own path of happiness, he seems to have a credibility that business school students respect. His class at London Business School and at Columbia is wildly popular, he has been covered by all kinds of media from NY Times to Time Magazine to CNN, and he is coming out with his second book next year.
On a crisp morning last September, Srikumar S. Rao leaned upon a lectern, set his marble-shaped eyes on 35 Columbia Business School students and simply stared.As I invited him to Karma Kitchen, he invited me to his 8AM-4PM workshop with 400 students at Berkeley's Hass School of Business. It was great to see him in action -- funny, insightful and spiritual. He said stuff like:
Cellphones silenced and BlackBerries muted, these aspiring executives stared back, then began eyeing one another more anxiously with each mounting minute.
Finally, a young woman shattered the silence. "O.K.," she started. Dr. Rao, mellow and fatherly, grinned back, testing the patience of the typically type-A business students.
In a school where most of the 200 or so classes are Wall Street-centric, Dr. Rao's course, called Creativity and Personal Mastery, is as unbusiness as business school gets.
Posted by Nipun Mehta on Sep 25, 2007
On Sep 27, 2007 Jenny wrote:
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