From the Classroom to the Boardroom

Before any of the alliance deals, the co-sell partnerships, or the GenAI go-to-market strategy, there was a short stint as an Assistant Professor at Mohanlal Sukhadia University, mentoring B.Sc. students. It lasted a matter of months before the corporate career pulled me away. I've come to think it quietly shaped almost everything that came after, because a classroom is a leadership laboratory with fewer places to hide than a boardroom gives you.

Nobody in a classroom is obligated to listen to you

A corporate title buys you a baseline of attention whether you've earned it yet or not. A room of students owes you nothing — if what you're saying isn't landing, they will simply stop paying attention, and there's no HR structure stopping them. That was, in hindsight, an incredible forcing function. It meant learning to earn the room every single session rather than assuming the room was already mine. Years later, walking into a C-suite conversation about a GenAI roadmap they didn't ask for, that same instinct — you have to earn this, the title isn't doing the work for you — turned out to be exactly the right one.

A classroom teaches you that being right isn't the same as being heard. A boardroom teaches you the exact same lesson, just with better catering.

Explaining something clearly is a leadership act, not a teaching trick

Teaching forces a specific discipline: if a student doesn't understand something, the working assumption has to be that you haven't explained it well enough yet, not that they're not trying hard enough. That assumption is uncomfortable and, I've found, almost always correct — in a classroom and in an executive briefing. When a stakeholder pushes back hard on a Zero Trust migration plan, my first move now is the same one I used with a confused student: assume the gap is in how I framed it, and try a different angle before assuming the gap is in them.

Grading is just feedback with worse branding

Giving a grade is one of the most unforgiving forms of feedback there is — specific, documented, and impossible to soften into vague encouragement. It trained a habit I didn't fully appreciate until years into a corporate career: feedback that doesn't specify exactly what to do differently isn't really feedback, it's just a mood. Every performance conversation I've had since — with an Alliance Manager who missed a target, with a mentee who bombed a pitch — has tried to hit that same standard: specific enough that the person could act on it that same afternoon.

You remember the teacher who believed you could do more than you thought

What stayed with me longest from that short teaching stint wasn't a lecture technique. It was watching what happened to a student the moment I made clear I expected more from them than they expected from themselves — and then gave them a slightly harder problem to prove it. I've used that same move constantly since, with sales reps and alliance managers who were coasting on modest goals: not lowering the bar to protect their confidence, but raising it slightly and backing them to clear it. It worked with nineteen-year-old B.Sc. students. It has worked, just as reliably, with forty-year-old regional sales leaders.

The corporate career is the part of my story with the bigger numbers attached to it — the revenue growth, the partnership value, the mentee count. But if I trace back where the actual instincts came from, most of them trace back to a lecture hall in Udaipur, for a job I only held for a few months. Leadership, it turns out, doesn't care much what industry you first learned it in.