Dr. Milind Padalkar is an educator and management consultant with rich experience in academia as well as industry. He has held top management positions in both spheres, leading business transformations and organizational change, and building performing teams.
In the field of academics spanning a couple of universities, he was Pro Chancellor leading the digital transformation of a university, Dean (School of Management) building strategies for growth and excellence, and Dean (Student Affairs) investing in building a learning and growth culture among students of a university. In the field of Information Technology, he has led global profit centers at industry majors such as HCL Technologies and Cap Gemini (formerly: Patni Computer Systems). leading business transformations, profit center management, launching new businesses in international markets, strategic deal-making, and negotiations in international and domestic markets, and rescuing large troubled projects/programs. He has lived in the US for some time and extensively traveled to Western Europe and Asia-pacific countries for business development and client relations.
His teaching portfolio spans quantitative/analytical courses such as Project Management, Six Sigma, Forecasting methods; as well as reflective courses such as Interpersonal dynamics and negotiation strategies, Ethics and Corporate Governance, Management Lessons from History, Structured Literature Review, Analytical Methods in Qualitative Research. He has designed and taught new courses, and experimented with different pedagogical variants such as storytelling, role plays, gamification, filmography, simulation; and devised strategies to increase the learner’s attention span as well as ensuring the integrity of examinations especially for the online mode of testing.
His research interests include Project management, Social networks & behavioral dynamics, Game theory, Inter-personal dynamics, and Topics in public policy & governance. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals. He has won several best paper awards at leading international and national conferences.
He has earned his Ph.D. from IIM Kozhikode in the area of Quantitative Methods and Operations Management. His research thesis investigates theoretical antecedents of project failures, and offers insights into the workings of parameters to predict and pre-empt potential failures. He holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, and B. Tech. from IIT Delhi.