K Ramkumar is the founder of the Kautilya Leadership Centre, which focuses on developing leadership by making individuals aware of their personal leadership resources. Unlike traditional skill-based approaches, this personalized model emphasizes that leadership is an inherent resource in everyone.

Ramkumar retired as Executive Director of ICICI Bank, having served on the boards of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and ICICI Ventures. Prior to his 15-year tenure at ICICI, he worked at Hindustan Aeronautics, Unilever, and ICI.

He is passionate about leadership development and played a key role in making ICICI Group a recognized leadership factory. Ram co-founded the ICICI Manipal Academy, which has trained 12,000 young leaders, and the ICICI Academy for Skills, which now operates in 23 locations, skilling 35,000 youth annually. He is also the author of the book Leveraging Human Capital: A Practitioner’s Perspective.

In this episode, K Ramkumar talks about Appreciative Inquiry as a Lever to Maximize Strengths. The core idea is that development is possible only if you focus on strengths. Most coaches get it wrong when they try to overcome weaknesses. Ramkumar offers the example of the cricket team under Saurav Ganguly, where each team member’s strengths were developed. It would be a disaster if Rahul Dravid was asked to play like Sehwag. Instead, the team focused on individual strengths and together they made a formidable line-up.
Great organizations focus on investing in human capital. Most organizations, on the other hand, believe that investing in financial capital or technology is the correct option. Using the example of the leadership team from his former organization, Ramkumar discusses how they invested in leadership and leadership qualities in their organization. He recalled how even younger team members were asked to attend board meetings, where they were not allowed to vote but were given the opportunity to learn.
Ramkumar talks about Abraham Maslow’s Theory of self-actualisation, where every person tries to become the best version of herself or himself. If a person believes that their current version is the best version of themselves, then they are not coachable. But otherwise, every person can be shown ways to discover and improve on their strengths. This discovery process should uncover requirements relevant for the future since current capabilities alone may not be enough. Thereafter, it could indeed be a rigorous process to achieve that target.

Run time – 01:02:46