Professor Debashis Chatterjee

Prof. Debashis Chatterjee's professional career has been a rich blend of international professional and academic experience in India, USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, South East Asia and South Africa. Prof. Chatterjee was a Fulbright Fellow at the Harvard University and MIT. He was recently a Visiting Fulbright Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Professor Chatterjee has taught for more than a decade in IIM, Lucknow and IIM, Calcutta. He pioneered and founded the global Center for Leadership and Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM). He also taught in the MBA programmes at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota and at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Debashis Chatterjee was for the last couple of years Dean at the S.P. Jain Centre of Management, Singapore. He is currently the Director at IIM, Kozhikode, a leading national management school of India.

Prof.. Chatterjee's interest areas include Transformational Leadership, Personal Growth, Learning Organization, Self-Mastery and Asian Culture and Management. His publications include several internationally published books such as Leading Consciously (Butterworth-Heinemann). Leading Consciously has been translated in several foreign languages and was adjudged among the top 5 international management titles of 1998 by the magazine Management General published from the United States. His recent books, Light the Fire in Your Heart (Full Circle) and Break Free (published by Penguin in 2006) focuses on creating a cognitive model of wisdom leadership. His research papers have been published in Harvard University's Journal, Compass and in Business The Ultimate Resource (Perseus) edited by Daniel Goleman. Chatterjee writes a column called "Success Sutras" that is read by more than four million readers every week.

Prof.. Debashis Chatterjee has directed Executive Development programs on Leadership, Self-Management and Learning Organization for over ten thousand managers in more than 100 Companies in all six continents of the world. Some of the large organizations that have subscribed to his programs include Motorola Inc., Ford Motor Company, British Petroleum, AT&T, 3M, Infosys Technologies Ltd., Tata Steel, Monash University, Australia, University of St. Thomas, USA and Lucent Technologies. He was described as one of the "thought leaders" of the world by Professor John Kotter of the Harvard Business School for his contribution to the theory and practice of leadership.

Timeless Leadership: Leading the Schools for the Future

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Leading schools demands balancing the dynamics of two overlapping worlds: the systems world and the human world. In the business of education, the systems world is the "business" component whereas the essence of "education" is embedded in the human world. Leaders in schools require a deep appreciation of the human being as a source rather than a resource. This would demand commitment to the generative capacity of a learner beyond curricula, uniform standards, league tables, evaluation system, or "one best model" of teaching. Leaders in school have to think beyond the usual agenda of development: character building or nation building! They must inspire in the learner the freedom to observe, to enquire, to act, to relate and to be, to deepen roots and to grow wings. Future schools need to create unique spaces for the learner for kindling the fire within. Finally, leading schools in the human world demand mastery in three timeless disciplines of human-the three C's: concentration, contribution and connection.