While introducing Mr. Soota, Fr. Abraham, the Director of XIMB, spoke of his impressive track record and rich experience starting with the Shriram Group of Industries in India in 1965 and going on until his present position in Mindtree today and also elaborated on how he has successfully led all the companies he has been in. Mr. Rajeev Kaul, the CEO of the Nicco Corporation Pvt. Ltd then delivered a short speech on how India today is ideally positioned to realize her full potential.

The topic of this year’s lecture was “Realizing Your Personal Potential”. Mr. Soota started by saying that the realization of one’s personal potential should be the most important task in anyone’s life. His focus was not only on successful careers but also on the innumerable other factors that contribute towards the shaping of a personality.

According to him, Success was the ability to set and meet achievable targets, and then continuously raise the bar. He also quoted the following inspiring saying by Sri Sri Ravishankar:

“Stretching sound is music, stretching music is dance, stretching smile is laughter, stretching mind is meditation, stretching life is celebration”

Mr. Soota added his own personal touch to the above saying by adding that “stretching goals is success”.

He then went on to mention some of the reasons why managers fail. He identified six key reasons, as follows:

 Over-stretching or under stretching
 Fear of failure, an inability to take appropriate risks
 Complacency due to early success
 Putting the “self” before the team
 People tending to be either good managers or good leaders, when it was actually necessary to be both
 A mismatch between the skills of the person and the requirements of the job.

According to Mr. Soota, three entities – the head, the heart, and the mind – should all be considered while making personal decisions in life.

He then went on to talk about the importance of living up to one’s potential in areas such as caring, learning, sharing and helping other people. He talked about caring as being not about softness but about fairness, and about bringing joy into the lives of people around you.
Going on to the issue of learning, he talked about how the vast amounts of information readily available today were ensuring that the onus of learning was shifting onto the individual, thus creating a situation where individuals were having to take the responsibility of their own self-development. He also said that sharing, rather than diminishing, would actually enhance gains. According to him, it was not about “dividing the pie, but increasing the size of the pie”.

Mr. Soota concluded by saying that the future would invariable be determined by circumstances outside our control but our decisions and our determination to see it through would definitely have a huge impact on the nature of the experience.

The speech was thought-provoking, and as a result there were a number of questions from the student community which Mr. Soota (along with Mr. Rajeev Kaul) answered patiently and comprehensively.

A speech that the audience will certainly remember and look back on, from an unforgettable speaker, made this Foundation day a day to remember.