On the 25th of August, 2017 the Vinod Gupta School of Management proudly hosted its very own alumnus Mr. Sourav Niyogi, Managing Director, Accenture for a guest lecture under the recently unveiled Pratyaksh series of guest lectures. Pratyaksh is a fresh endeavor by VGSoM, IIT Kharagpur to host personalities from diverse walks of life who have risen to prominence in their field of work and can enrich the future managers from VGSoM with their ideas and experiences.
Mr. Niyogi completed his Mechanical Engineering from NIT Silchar and went on to work with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. before he joined the Vinod Gupta School of Management. After graduating from this institute, he went on to work with industry majors like GE Capital, PwC, and Accenture UK. He possesses a diverse set of skills and is an expert in the challenging domains of management consulting, business processes, business transformation, and supply chain management.
Mr. Niyogi recalled his days at VGSoM when he joined here as a student in 2001 and shared some of his fondest memories of the past. He reminded the students of how lucky they were to have such great infrastructure and faculty base at their disposal and expressed his pleasure about the rich industry-academia relation and the regular guest lectures from corporate luminaries that were now hallmarks of the Institute.
The session was really interactive and Mr. Niyogi answered all the doubts that students had with them. According to him, understanding the work culture of an organisation and overcoming the cross-cultural challenges in an organisation were keys to managing transitions at workplace effectively. Mr. Niyogi having worked extensively in the field of consulting for the energy sector shared a number of crucial insights on this sector and touched upon the emerging trends in it. He expressed his strong belief of there being a lot of work left to be done in the field of alternative energy which inevitably holds the future of mankind. According to him, development and acceptance of these forms of energy will not be easy on account of a host of reasons – technological as well as business related. Oil and natural gas industries will eventually come to an end but not as quickly as everyone is expecting it to, leaving enough time and space for companies in this sector and those around it to adjust in due course of time.
As an analyst, Mr. Niyogi knew the importance of data. He emphasised on the fact that data will be the driver of the new economy but will be useless if we cannot draw any insight from it. The purpose of analytics in his opinion is to help companies take better decisions and that will be impossible if analysts cannot provide insights on the data. Talking about work life balance, Mr. Niyogi spoke about it being actually impossible to maintain a perfect work-life balance. Rather, the best that could be done by us was to integrate our work with our personal life effectively and that called for us to enjoy our work thoroughly.
As the session drew to a close, Mr. Niyogi encouraged the students to be sincere and determined in their efforts as there never could be any replacement for these crucial ingredients in the recipe to achieve success. The students were delighted to be so well advised and encouraged by one of their own and look forward to more such interactions in the days to come.