GUEST LECTURE Mr. Rajiv Nehru
Mr. Rajiv Nehru, General Manager – Rohan Builders
When one generation learns from their forebears and does not try inventing the wheel twice, this is progress. In keeping with this mantra, the students of the third year attended a guest lecture on Role of Technology, Human Resource and Capital in the Development of the Economy rendered by Mr. Rajiv Nehru.
General Manager of Rohan Builders by profession and a charming man by personality, what started as a lecture on science and economics and all the worldly wise soon turned into an interactive session with this learned man giving us bits of his life stories.
The coherence and glue to the lecture was this commonly used jargon “Management”. Taught to us students of economics as merely a definition and later pursued as a specialization, Mr. Nehru broke it down into four simple parts. MAN – AGE – MEN – T. MAN as the word suggests is a human resource and this never ending need to control and support labor. AGE he said is not the number but the values, exposure, and experience that one has. At the age of 26, Mr. Nehru was the Director of National Institute of Construction Management and Research (NICMAR). MEN is cumulative of all the kinds of resources that we find, be it capital, money, time, space or information. And how we perform our duties of balancing these three to the T will decide how good a manager we are. After this, sir touched upon information as a resource and the asymmetry in the availability of this resource. We use this in our day-to-day activities like deciding which college to go to or which phone to buy.
On a more personal note, he spoke about the importance of planning early, the need for adaptability and the need to be able to work with the given resources as a constraint. All in all, what we learn in books, he taught us in action. And given the paucity of time and the barrage of questions that the students had, it could be concluded that the lecture was a successful one.