Q: What is Risk Management and what is its significance today?

Ans: Businesses across the world are in the phase of rapid growth, integration and globalisation. To continue to grow at a rapid pace, business requires taking risks. Businesses that manage these risks well are able to grow and remain successful. On an ongoing basis, businesses have to deal with the changing risk landscape including market volatility, geopolitical crises, widespread economic changes, regulatory reforms and cyber threats.

While such a situation creates many challenges, it also presents an opportunity to take advantage of the potential of risk. Today, successful organisations are those which are able to manage the risks effectively. Risk Management is beyond financial and regulatory risk mitigation, it looks at the overall business environment, and encompasses managing strategic, operational, regulatory, compliance and financial risk of an organisation.

Q: To which fields of business does Risk Management apply?

Ans: Risk Management is required across all industries–manufacturing, retail, telecommunication, hospitality, service. Risk Management also cuts across all business functions in an organisation like procurement, HR, payroll, sales and marketing, manufacturing, treasury and thus is beyond just financial and regulatory risk mitigation.

Risk Management team plays a critical role in all organisations, feeding key business information to the management teams, to enable them take risk informed strategic decisions, which carves the path of success.

Q: Are there job opportunities available afresh or would it mean continuing in the same company / job?

Ans: Risk Management roles open up great career opportunities for both – for freshers and those continuing in same job. In a critical role of ensuring business value maximization along with compliance to organization and regulatory policies, Risk Managers are needed in every organization.

Talking about the current scenario, a lot of time is being spent by companies to train risk management concepts to the resources hired –leading to lower productivity for the organization in the initial phase of employee career.

Thus, a talent pool of professionals trained on a world class Risk Management curriculum will lead to higher productivity for all – small, medium and large corporates.

Q: What is special about the course at GRMI?

Ans: GRMI strives to impart professional education in the ever dynamic discipline of risk management that proves necessary in the prevalent phase of business opportunity evolution across the globe. The curriculum for Post Graduation Diploma in Risk Management (PGDRM) at GRMI has been developed by a combination of corporate leaders from Fortune 500 companies and academicians from Leading B Schools in India like IIMs, FMS, MDI and IMT.

The Global Risk Management Institute offers a one year Post Graduate Diploma in Risk Management (PGDRM) offering exposure to the practical side with the inclusion of live case studies in their curriculum. Apart from the major focus in Risk Management the Institute also moulds the student multi-dimensionally with key subject papers like HR, organisation behaviour, applied cyber risk, strategic risk management and impact of digitization on risk management.

Q: Will a good placement be available? What will be the salary range and who will be the recruiters?

Ans: What’s also been called out by business leaders, is that professionals with specialized education in Risk Management are believed to have faster career tracks, as compared to their peers who join with more generic qualifications.

With a specialized risk management qualification in hand, large consulting and risk consulting organizations like Accenture, EY, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Protiviti, Grant Thornton, etc. and other large corporate organizations like General Electric (GE), Tata Group, PepsiCo etc. will now get an opportunity to induct trained students in their organizations at a much earlier stage.

The range of placements for a Risk Manager across industries : Services, Manufacturing, Insurance, Banking, Retail, Healthcare, Consulting and Entrepreneurship. Students with specialization in Risk Management may earn an attractive salary starting from an initial band of INR 6-8 Lakh per annum.

Q: Are there any scholarships?

Ans: Yes, GRMI believes in rewarding the deserving candidates. GRMI will be screening the candidate profiles basis proven track record–academics and extra-curricular, results of psychometric tests and interview, growth potential of a candidate and basis the output of the assessment, scholarships will be awarded to deserving candidates.

Q: What attributes should one have to do well in the course and succeed in the career?

Ans: Graduates from commerce, economics, statistics, arts, engineering etc. Anyone can take this up as a specialised post graduation option owing to the dynamic nature of the course. The few qualities that student shall have are – analytical bent of mind towards problem solving, ability to think out of the box – to design solutions, willingness to learn, extremely good communication skills and dynamic personality.

(Subhashis Nath is currently a Senior Global Partner and Executive Director at Axis Risk Consulting Services Pvt Ltd, a Genpact company. Founder partner of Axis Risk Consulting, he has also spent nearly 2 years with the Global Center of Excellence of Ernst & Young, and about 9 years with Arthur Andersen. Part of the core team that built Risk Consulting practice of Arthur Andersen in India, he is a qualified Chartered Accountant. He has been a visiting speaker on Risk Management and HR Management at reputed India Business Schools and also at multiple industry forums like NYSE General Counsel, CII, IIA, and others. He maintains a strong passion for education and training and is an avid sports and music buff).

Sonny Laskar, an IIM Indore EPGP alum (2013-14 batch), is currently ranked in the top 250 Data Scientists on Kaggle, the world’s largest Data Science platform. He shares, in an interview, insights into his chosen field of work as data scientist and how his stint at IIMI helped his professional growth.

Q: Can you let us know about your Professional experience?

A: I have been in the IT Services Industry for close to nine years. Started my career in TCS as System Analyst and then moved into Data Centre and Data warehousing management Services.

Post EPGP, I joined Microland in the Automation vertical where I head the IT Operations Analytics wing where we are building a Big Data Artificial Intelligence Platform.

Most of my work revolves around building Predictive Analytics solution for massive datasets.

Q: Tell us something about Kaggle and your journey in Data Science Competitions?

A: I came to know about Kaggle while I was at IIM Indore. IIM Indore’s EPGP program has a strong alignment towards Analytics and hence the link.

Today, Kaggle is world’s largest Data Science platform for competitions where companies of all sizes run their business problems as Data Science Competitions for up to million dollars of prize money.

There are around half a million registered members on Kaggle. I am currently ranked in the top 250 Data Scientists on Kaggle.

Q: Does this recognition on Kaggle help in your professional world?

A: Yes, of course. Anyone who is in the space of Analytics knows about Kaggle and most of the recruiters consider Kaggle rank as very good proxy for competency.

Q: Tell us about few of the competitions you have won?

A: The most triumphant victory was the Avito Duplicate Ad Detection contest sponsored by Avito. Avito is the largest classified portal in Russia, very similar to companies like OLX and Quikr.

All of us who have used these portals know that as time goes, our ads come down in the listing page which basically means lower probability of someone viewing it and hence buying it.  To game this, sellers would be posting the same ad through multiple accounts with different descriptions and photos.

Such activities created duplicate data in the system which adds no additional value; at the same time it impacts customer experience and leads to loss of revenue.

Hence, Avito wanted a Machine Learning solution to this problem where an algorithm would be able to automatically detect the duplicate ads and remove them. Our model was 95.6% accurate as compared to their in-house solution which was 90% accurate. We won the second position in the contest. I had three of my friends from UK and Germany also with me in this competition.

In addition to this, another interesting competition that I won was sponsored by Honeywell where they wanted to predict fuel efficiency of airplanes based on various data that the airplane generated. Since fuel cost is about 30% of the total operating costs, it is extremely important to find out ways to make airplanes fuel efficient.

Similar study was done in past and it was found that total weight of the airplane is an important factor. Hence you must have noticed that most airplanes give you additional discount if you have no check-in luggage.

Last week, I was also ranked 7th in the Women Health Risk Assessment competition sponsored by Microsoft. This competition was about predicting which individuals have high risk of getting infected by HIV. 

Q: What skillsets are needed to be a strong Data Scientist?

A: To be good in this space, you don’t need to be very good at Statistics or be a programming expert or a domain expert. In fact, you need to be all of this and have a little bit of common sense! Understanding of domain is not mandatory but helps a lot.

Q: What type of problems do you see Industry is solving with Data and Analytics?

A: Almost everything. Today, I think there is hardly any company which is not using data to build analytics to create additional value. The ‘Buy-also- this’ feature on Ecommerce websites to the personalised marketing offers to whether you should get a loan or not are all such applications.

Q: Which Industry do you see in the forefront in the use of Data and Analytics?

A: Healthcare, FMCG, Ecommerce and BFSI are in the forefront since they generate huge amount of data which helps them in creating new ways to sell their products. With the emergence of IoT(Internet of Things), we can expect a tremendous focus in this space.

Q: How much did IIM Indore programme help you in your journey?

A: I should say pretty much. It gave a high level view of the overall breadth of the scope and applications of Analytics. Since the programme is very much packed, it cannot teach you the nitty-gritties of everything. Since I already come with a lot of exposure to Data and Big Data Solutions, it was very easy for me to materialise all the learnings.

Q: What is your suggestion to anyone who is currently planning to enter this space?

A: Work hard! There are loads of free MOOCs available. You can master this space without investing a single penny. All you need is time, effort and patience.

INSEAD is very diverse in terms of participants from all over the world. No matter what you want to do and where, there is always someone who has already done the same thing or knows someone who is doing it.

In our last conversation, you said that SOIL is an experiment to bring a change to management education by shifting the focus from creating managers to creating leaders. Can this experiment be now critically reviewed for its success or do you think its still early to judge?

The opportunity to give birth to the School of Inspired Leadership has been a real blessing. In the last five years, we have created an ecosystem that is unique and is contributing to creating a leaders.

Of the 32 organizations that support our one year full time programs, fifteen of them have co-founded the part time ‘Emerging Leaders Program’ and 11 serve as Partners for the part time ‘People Next Program – for HR Leaders’. Six have joined hands with our school and MESA (a US based firm) to initiate the three week Global Leadership Program for Senior Leaders.

SOIL offers a unique ‘Social Innovation Program’ – an integral part of all our full time one year Programs in which student teams work with NGOs one day a week at the grass root level on social problems ranging from literacy to health to ecological balance. This develops emotional intelligence and compassion and makes our alumni stand out for their positive attitude and teamwork – crucial components in leadership.

The 25 NGOs who partner with us do us a big service by allowing us to serve them and their target audience. This gives SOIL graduates a distinct identity.

All our offerings have a strong focus on ‘Self Leadership’ – the key to inspire one self and others.

What new learning systems are you adopting to develop your students into effective leaders?

We are teaching a new course on ‘Transformational Industrial Relations’ so that they can serve the cause of building work places that have harmonious union – management relations free of violence seen in many companies recently.

Our students are actively participating in Consulting projects given to the School of strategic nature. For example, we have been partnering Mahindra Group in their transformation journey called RISE and our students participated in important planning meetings for this initiative. They also were part of an exercise in which we helped the National HRD Network to revisit its vision statement.

In partnership with MIP (a top 25 University of the World) of Milan in Italy, we are introducing new courses on ‘Design Thinking and Innovation’ to prepare our students to contribute actively to the Innovation agenda in our work places.

We also have faculty who consistently are rated above 4 on a 5 point scale by students for their passion and student centered approach. We are blessed to have not only outstanding full time faculty but also inspiring teachers from many parts of the world.

We are fortunate that over 100 of the country’s top recruiters have shown faith in us by hiring our alumni in important roles. Recruiters have appreciated the leadership skills we have been able to instill in students and tell us that our students display positive attitude, enthusiasm and distinguish themselves because of the strength of their values and ability to lead!

Any success stories you would like to share of SOIL students who have successfully transformed into leaders in their spheres?

Two of our students have become social entrepreneurs and are spreading happiness to countless others. Many others have created their own business enterprises which are growing successfully.

But leadership is much more than heading oragnisations – it is also about ‘service to the community. Perhaps that is where our and our students’ biggest success lies. 

We often hear stories of organizations in which our alumni have gone the extra mile to help those in need.

When companies like HCL Technology, Anand group, Maveric, Genpact, Wipro and many others single out SOIL Alumni for their ‘perspective and character’, we feel satisfied that our experiment is working

When companies like HCL Technology, Anand group, Maveric, Genpact, Wipro and many others single out SOIL Alumni for their ‘perspective and character’, we feel satisfied that our experiment is working.

One of the key questions that MBA aspirants might have is: Who is the ideal candidate for SOIL’s programmes? Are there certain qualities a future leader must possess? 

The ideal candidate is around 24-25 years old, has got an undergraduate degree in any discipline and has 1- 4 years of work experience and has the basic values of ethics and compassion.

Such a person has a dream of making a difference instead of complaining about the state of our organizations/community/country/planet.

The person is looking for a ‘Transformational Learning’ experience rather than a short cut to get a better job.

The person deeply loves the idea of being of service to others and enabling others to be happy.