The Art of Continuous Learning: A reflection on becoming a student again at seventy

For most of my life, I have been the one holding the chalk and later the marker pens. A lecture hall at IIT Bombay, a factory floor in Vietnam, a boardroom in Mumbai, a workshop in Berlin — the setting never mattered. I was almost always the one explaining, interpreting, or provoking thoughts.

So, when I enrolled in the ten-month Stanford Seed Transformation Program, the Professor inside me raised an eyebrow.

“At seventy? You wish to sit in a classroom again?”

Life enjoys testing our assumptions. A week-long in-person module, another week-long Zoom sessions, a Business Transformation Advisor dissecting organisational purpose and asking: Where do you want to go? How? And why? There comes the homework, the transformation studio where we get into the famous “Stanford process”, the Leadership Labs where five fellow companies speak openly about their adaptive challenges. And at the end you go through a 360-degree evaluation of your leadership to discover yourself.

It felt unfamiliar.

Did it feel uncomfortable? I am not sure.

But it simply felt overdue.

Learning Through Two Lenses: The Student and the Teacher in Me

In every session, I realised I was learning in two ways. One lens focused on the content — frameworks, case studies, and insights during discussions. The other lens quietly observed the pedagogy.

“Why did the professor choose this case?”

“What is the logic behind the sequence?”

“How would I have facilitated this discussion?”

This internal commentary sharpened my attention. Watching great teachers reminded me that clarity is never accidental; it is the outcome of deliberate design.

The pedagogy aligned with my instincts, yet was more structured. That was both comforting and confronting. It reminded me how easy it is to rely on intuition, and how necessary structure is when an organization prepares not for a transition, but for a transformation.

Unlearning: The Quiet Challenge

Learning adds layers. Unlearning removes them. At seventy, the removal takes more courage.

For three decades, my company Environmental Management Centre (EMC) operated like an amoeba — with agility, trust, and an ability to understand contexts rapidly. We worked without formal plans or hard-wired systems. Things seemed to work, somehow. At least many of us thought so. Meanwhile, the world was changing and we hadn’t changed.

Seed forced me to confront certain habits I had normalised over the years. Some long-held assumptions had disguised themselves as “experience.” A few shortcuts had quietly become “intuition.” And several recurring patterns survived because I believed, almost automatically, that “we will manage.”

Seeing these clearly was uncomfortable and that discomfort became my real curriculum.

I understood that learning at seventy is not about acquiring more information; it is about removing layers that no longer serve you. The barriers are often emotional, not intellectual.

From Services to Customers: A Needed Shift

For years, we spoke of EMC’s breadth of sustainability work. Comprehensive, but insufficient. The program pushed us to ask a different question:

“Who exactly are you serving?” and “what is impact you want to achieve”?

Through careful reflection, three customer groups emerged: Governments and Institutions, Financial Institutions, Corporates and their Supply Chains. We then went further into a more detailed segmentation, sliced and diced and visualized the customer journey.

This shift was not cosmetic. It required realignment in thinking. The anchor was no longer the variety of services we offered, but the needs and contexts of those we served and impact we wanted to create. Sounds simple now!

Once the customer lens became clear, practice areas surfaced naturally — but now rebundled and repurposed. That was to me a discovery.

Rethinking Growth: Embracing a Different Model

Our fee approach had long been aligned to traditional consultancy markets. But the program nudged us to rethink engagement. Performance-based or success-linked fees emerged not as a tactic, but as an opportunity to create shared ownership. We also realized that we would need to shake and make such a market by taking a leadership. We got the confidence doing so as we steered our journey in areas such as sustainable finance.

Well, when outcomes matter to both sides, relationships shift meaningfully.

Culture: The True Inheritance

After assessments and internal discussions, one conclusion stood out:

We were not passing down a set of offerings.

We were passing down a culture.

A culture shaped by intellectual discipline, ethical consulting, empathy, curiosity, and commitment to learning. A culture influencing how we treat clients, colleagues, interns, and the work itself.

Yet we had never articulated it internally and publicly. I understood that an unarticulated culture is vulnerable during transformations.

As the months unfolded, I also became more aware of the subtler dimensions of my own leadership. Seed made me see how often I lead through invitation rather than assertion, and how this style has shaped EMC’s culture of openness and shared responsibility. But it also made clear where I must evolve in bringing greater structure to decision-making, in codifying what has so far lived in instinct, and in creating deliberate space for the next line of leaders to take ownership. These realisations were not dramatic; they settled in quietly, yet firmly, reminding me that leadership at this phase is less about directing and more about enabling my team and partner institutions to strengthen beyond the founder.

The Leadership Lab and the Cohort of companies

Five fellow companies shared dilemmas, such as succession concerns, cultural shifts, organisational fatigue, personal blind spots. These were leadership conversations without gloss. They showed that experience does not eliminate uncertainty, and that honest reflection is required at every age of the organisation.

One unexpected source of learning came from the cohort itself. Listening to other business leaders, their dilemmas, experiments, failures, and resolutions offered a form of insight no framework could replicate. Their honesty stripped away the illusion that leadership becomes easier with experience. Instead, it revealed how each organisation, regardless of scale or maturity, carries its own anxieties and aspirations. The Seed cohort became a classroom of its own: a place where I found inspiration, perspective, and a renewed sense of companionship in the journey of building institutions. I am all excited now to immerse my company in Seed’s vibrant alumni network when I meet some three hundred Seed companies in Jaipur at the end of this month.

Succession: A Reframed Understanding

Seed reframed my understanding of succession.

Succession is not choosing “the next person.”

It is co-creating a plan that energises the future, acknowledges risks, and requires humility.

It is giving core team members a true seat at the table, early enough to influence direction.

Then comes the hardest discipline: learning how to be present without becoming intrusive; how to guide without tightening your grip; how to remain watchful without drifting into micromanagement; how to support without casting a shadow.

Succession is not about walking away — it is about stepping aside with attentiveness.

The Art That Endures

Seed reminded me that continuous learning is not about accumulation. It is about openness:

openness to rethink assumptions,

openness to reorganise what no longer works,

openness to articulate what was once implicit,

openness to a future not authored by a single person.

Why This Reflection Matters — And Why Now

After the Seed experience, my Professor Friend asked one final question:

“Now that you have all these insights, what will you do with them?”

The canvas of sustainability has matured today. But expectations have changed. Clients now seek depth, verification, measurable outcomes, sustainable finance, and trusted guidance, not from a consultant, but from a consul. This demands new capabilities, new clarity, and leadership as a team.

This is why this moment matters to EMC in its transformation.

We are refining our practice areas, articulating our culture deliberately, and preparing for a future that demands both rigour and imagination. But this transition needs people drawn to responsibility rather than comfort.

We seek people and partners who value ethics, intellectual clarity, curiosity, and empathy. People who see culture as practice, not as a statement of values on a webpage. People who want to help build an organisation rather than simply join one.

This reflection is therefore not a call for résumés. It is an invitation to those who wish to be part of a journey that is thoughtful, purposeful, and ever evolving.

Well, Stanford coaching has done its job to seed EMC with a new vision and an implementable transformation  plan. In time, this seed will become a tree anchored by deep roots – a tree that shelters, nourishes, and invites birds and butterflies to its branches, its flowers carrying a subtle, enduring fragrance. This is the tree that I will pass by during my morning walks wearing headphones and listening to my favorite Mark Knopfler.

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