Selected as the ET Young Leader 2012 by a panel of 9 elite CEOs, from a pool of 17,750 (Top 0.15% percentile) young executives across India as having the potential to be exceptional corporate leaders. TAS finalist in 2011, amongst the top 29 selected for the director’s round, across the TATA group. A gold medalist from Great Lakes Institute of Management and Anna University.

The PGPM at Great lakes equipped me with the right business acumen to do well in my career. In corporate life it is incredibility important to ask the right question to solve unknown problems with unknown solutions. The emphasis on case based learning and teaching methodology of international faculty members prepared me well for this journey.

At Great Lakes, students are exposed to world class curriculum taught by international faculty members and constantly motivated to think Big. I got a wonderful opportunity to interact with Professor CK Prahalad on his views on the tapping the bottom of the pyramid market. This motivated me to join a start up team in TCS in 2007 with a mission to bring IT transformation in Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in India and Globally. We built our ERP solution on the Cloud and launched ‘iON' to cater to the untapped market opportunity offered by the SMB market. In 2011, I won the prestigious Tata Innovista Award in Service Innovation category; for conceptualizing the ‘IT-as-a-Service' platform as part of the iON start up team.

The most important takeaway from the program at Great Lakes is the spirit of ‘Teamwork'. In today's corporate environment it is incredibly important to work together with your peers to achieve world class performance standards. At Great Lakes, there is a lot of emphasis on team work - This culture brought a paradigm shift in my approach to handling problems - collaboratively build the right strategy and ensuring rigorous execution by achieving buy-in from all key stakeholders.

Also, at Great Lakes I learnt as much from my more experienced peers as I did from faculty members. It is unique about this program which helps supplement class room theory with practical experience of one's classmates. This helps one gain incredible amount of practical business ready knowledge in a very short time. Coming from a non-finance background, I learnt the basics of finance from my class mates and ended up topping the class on advanced financial analysis techniques taught by world renowned faculty – all in a month's time!

Krishnan CA
Zonal Head, TCS iON
Tata Consultancy Services