Vansh Lakhina, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore - India's Most Promising Incoming MBA Students 2022

Im an individual who embraces a success-driven mentality, and all my experiences and expeditions have been based on it. The thing that makes me unique is my eclectic 4-year work experience, which is spread across Consulting, Product Management, and Entrepreneurship. These experiences have taught me fundamentals of understanding an industry, forming a hypothesis, and designing processes to test these notions, one key skill that I am developing at IIM is the ability to double down on the industry, grow, and achieve scale. Lastly, I am a passionate mountaineer and like to stay close to nature as and when time permits

Tell us more about your extracurricular achievements

My top 5 extracurricular achievements:

Fastest Rappeller: Held the title for the fastest Rappeller among 300+ national and international participants at the Shivling Adventure Club, New Delhi
Qualified 3 Levels of Goethe-Institute German Exam: This score is based on International Scale for German Language. Proficient to teach German.
Marketing Team Lead, Enactus Dr SSBUICET- Non Profit Student Organization: Helping underprivileged communities in developing business models, innovate products, expanding their skills with Training sessions and Marketing their products into commercial markets. I held the post of Marketing Lead for a team of 30 Undergraduate students.
Held the post of Vice President, Engineering at the Asian Regional Space Settlement Design Competition which was focused at Idealizing the goal of space colonization into economic feasibility, with the existing technologies.
Running Marathons: Participated and organized in various 21km, 10km, 5km Running Marathons

Tell us about a time when you messed up, and what you learnt from the experience?

I am working on my weakness of clogging myself with multiple tasks, which often leads to me working for late nights. On one such occasion, I took the task of working on 3 end-to-end engineering projects. Though the project was shipped to the client timely, but the Project Manager got a bit worried about whether I'll be able to ship the project or not. Hence, I learned that before starting any work, I must plan for things ahead.

Tell us something about yourself that others may be surprised to know about you.

I seek for opportunities to contribute in any environment. I believe that the best way to get a seat at the most coveted table is to pull up the chair. I dont wait to be invited; I actively seek out for opportunities to participate and contribute, in the form of my talent and unique perspective

What have been your two biggest successes in life? What did you learn from them?

Rebounding to become the Gold Medalist during UG, after a not-so-good 12th Board result, which in-effect affected my JEE rank (During 2014, JEE Mains Rank was a combination of 12th Board (extremely high weightage) marks and JEE Mains score). - Learnt to belief in myself
Pursuing the option to undertake an MBA after having experimented various spaces like Entrepreneurship, Product Management, Business Consulting, Engineering Consulting- Learning: Able to understand (and respect) the position of an MBA in fitting the puzzle to solve business world's problems

Professionally, what is your ideal image of yourself five years from now? Where do you see yourself?

Professionally, I wish to create my name in the pharmaceutical space. I wish to either lead projects for a company, or start a venture on my own in the same. Being a pharmacist's son, I am of the opinion that the Pharma space, especially in India, needs to be streamlined to better suit the pharmacists as well as the consumer.

What is the one skill or characteristic you possess that you are most proud of, and why?

'To wake yourself up after a defeat, after a desire is unachieved' is the hardest thing that I feel one experiences. In this regard, the one skill that I'm proud of is that after such an event, I accept my defeat/weakness with pride. I let go off the inhibitions that I'll fail again, and give my best shot at the next best alternative.

In your opinion, what skills or qualities does a successful manager possess?

The single most important quality of a manager (especially people manager) is to be empathic towards employees (your reportee), which might have been again highlighted during the tumultuous times of COVID

Tell us about an ethical dilemma that you may have faced, and how you resolved it.

Throughout my professional journey of 4 years, I have learnt that organization-based ethical dilemmas are best resolved through articulating and communicating your thoughts to the right person/group. However, personal dilemmas are what eats your brain. Being a Gold Medallist during my undergraduate program (Chemical engineering), I always had a dilemma that if I'll be leaving this field, I'll not be doing justice to my degree and profession ethnically. Having worked for 2yrs at a chemical engg firm, I realized that managerial and technical confluences occur after a couple of years in the corporate world. So, it was merely about a mind-set change that let me resolve this ethical dilemma to shift from engineering and explore the business world.

If you were the CEO of any company of your choosing, which company would you choose and what would your first action be as CEO?

If given the opportunity, the company that I would choose to work with will be LinkedIn. I'm highly fascinated about its ability to revolutionize the professional world. Though the work of the CEO is managing the organization, but currently as an outsider, I would like to suggest a couple of changes from a product perspective. One of them will be that currently, the profiles on LinkedIn are in the same format for a student as well as a working professional. The students at times input their school/college achievements into work experience, which gets counted under work-experience in LinkedIn analyzer tool - LinkedIn Recruiter. Hence, a separate profile/interface, though part of the same LinkedIn community, for students and working professional will be better for recruiters (LinkedIn's revenue customers)