GENESIS OF THE PURPLE PEOPLE
CONSULTING BIGGIES LIKE Deloitte have been hiring several MBA graduates from the top Indian B-schools the past few years. You’d expect the company to hire based on management skills and, at best, soft skills. But there’s a new must-have in B-town—deep tech understanding. “If you do not have an idea about AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning) and analytics and how to use them, you could be missing the woods for the trees. It is the bare minimum expectation we have of management graduates who join us,” says S.V. Nathan, Deloitte India’s Partner and Chief Talent Officer. Adds Aashish Kshetry, VP (HR & Systems) of Asian Paints, another frequent recruiter at the top B-schools: “Good data orientation coupled with domain knowledge is the best fit for us. So, we hire for the first and build the second to make that combination work for us.”
Did your ears prickle? Well, bury the sensation. If data is the new oil, the purple people are the new oilmen. These are new-breed executives with a blend of management (blue) and technical (red) skills. If you don’t have such people in your business, well, you better get them pronto. And if you don’t know where to look, go to the birthplace of business execs. Some of India’s best B-schools are already building data drilling rigs to train these purple oilmen—the management curricula of India’s top colleges are fast acquiring a technical flavour, showcasing courses and specialisations on hot STEM topics like data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Students also need to know how the traditional management disciplines are changing under the onslaught of ML and AI. We had underplayed the technology part earlier”
Errol D’ Souza DIRECTOR, IIM AHMEDABAD
“There’s a fair degree of unanimity among senior executives in the industry that there are three important changes in the business environment—the advent of digital technology, the pervasive importance of data, and the growing importance of ESG (environmental, social and governance) parameters,” says Director Rishikesha
