Dr. Abhishek Kumar

Abhishek Kumar earned his Ph.D. in Management from Pondicherry University. His doctoral work involved creation of scale to measure brand personality of media brands. He completed his MBA from Bharathidasan Institute of Management (BIM), Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu and his undergraduate studies in economics from the University of Calcutta. He has also completed Associateship from Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He has held several academic leadership positions prior to joining AIMK including Director - Training and Member Secretary of the Research Advisory Committee of Anant National University Ahmedabad, Vice Chairman Placements, Vice Chairman Admissions and Chairman – Club Activities at BIM Trichy.

He has a rich experience of more than a decade in academia. His courses on brand management, leadership, product innovation and philosophy of architecture are particularly popular among students.  Before becoming an academic, he served in leadership positions across media (ABP), banking (Yes Bank) and telecom (Bharti Airtel Ltd) industries for nearly a decade. He also had a brief stint as a cadet at National Defence Academy, Khadakvasla, Pune. As a business head in Yes Bank, he led his branch to the first position in CSR initiatives across all Yes bank branches in the country besides delivering on superior customer service to its customers and achieving healthy growth in the branch book size and branch profitability. Under his leadership, children’s newspaper, The Telegraph in Schools, won the world’s best children’s newspaper award by World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Paris while increasing its circulation and advertising revenues substantially. He began his career as an HR professional with Bharti Airtel Limited where he was instrumental in rolling out HR interventions at regional offices of Mumbai, Gujarat, West Bengal and Corporate Office at Gurgaon.

He regularly conducts leader development programs for middle and senior-level managers, faculty development programs in case writing and phenomenological research methods. He has published more than 20 research articles in international peer-reviewed journals. He has written three popular case studies on leadership: A Tale of Two CEOs, Ganges – A Temporary Institution and The Telegraph Goes Nude, and three case studies on product management that are published by Harvard Publishing and Vikalpa The Journal of IIMA. He has also written a book on leadership titled, ‘Three dimensions of Successful Leadership’ and has recently published an article titled ‘Humanistic Leadership in the Tata Group’ for the prestigious journal Cross-Cultural and Strategic Management from Emerald Publishing. He is currently finalising the manuscript of a book titled 'Of Newtons and Apples- Insights into 50 great minds of human history'.

He has a deep and abiding interest in literature and philosophy and has written extensively on subject-object split, phenomenological conception of product and philosophical analysis of literary texts. His understanding is fashioned by a close reading of the works of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault. His method includes dwelling upon the aesthetic content of the matter at hand and is a heady mixture of the sensuality of D H Lawrence, iconoclasm of Bernard Shaw, tragic appeal of Thomas Hardy and delightful rigour of Thomas Mann.

Email ID: kumar.abhishek@aim.ac.in