We celebrate K.S. Prashant’s leadership in transforming teams and driving global success with his commitment to innovation and collaboration.
Through a three-decade-plus journey, Pragati Leadership has helped shape the culture of management coaching in India. Many top executives have taken advantage of our corporate coaching and management development programs, including employee leadership and cultural transformation training. In 2022, we launched the Pragati Leadership Inspiring and Successful Leadership Awards (ISLA Awards) to identify visionary leaders espousing the values enshrined in our management leadership training programs. This year’s ISLA Awards winners include achievers from large and emerging enterprises as well as startup founders. Invariably, they have built – and been built by – teams with whom they have journeyed to professional milestones while also achieving social goals.
One of the Exemplary Leaders picked by the ISLA Awards 2024 jury is Mr. K.S. Prashant (Managing Director (India), IDeaS Revenue Solutions), whom they recognized for his transformational leadership in driving value creation and empowering his teams to drive global customer success.
Driving Strategic Transformation
Mr. K.S. Prashant leads the India Center at IDeaS Revenue Solutions, which provides product development and 24×7 support for analytics-based and cloud hosted-based Revenue optimization products, for the hospitality industry. Under his stewardship, the Indian Global Technology Center has evolved from being a cost-effective unit to becoming a strategic powerhouse and playing a pivotal role with teams that have complete ownership of product development and customer engagement.
In his award acceptance speech, Mr. Prashant began by underscoring the value of receiving an award from Mr. Arun Wakhlu, whose work with Pragati Leadership he had followed since the latter’s inception in the early 90s – paralleling most of his professional career and his time in Pune. He reminisced that Pragati was known to have a unique position in focusing only on leadership and leadership development at that time. He added that he felt validated by the many colleagues, ex-colleagues, and friends in attendance, from whom he had learned a lot.
Speaking about having only been in Pune throughout his professional life, Mr. Prashant explained how his daughter – his “critic number one” – would jokingly say that he always swam in a small pond, and how he could now tell her that the fish was now certified. Apart from his daughter, he thanked his parents who taught him the value of acquiring knowledge and discipline, values which had served him well in his journey. He was also grateful to his wife who demonstrated adaptability and empathy daily and ensured that he got schooled to perfection on those attributes.
Mr. Prashant expressed his belief that leadership is never built in isolation and hazarded that he was taking a risk, as leaders are supposed to do, in “preaching to the choir”. Leadership, in his view, usually derives from small experiences. Drawing attention to the points made in Mr. Siddharth Kak’s keynote address about engaging with a diverse set of people, he felt he had been blessed to have a great set of relatives, friends, and colleagues throughout his career. These people had set benchmarks in innovation, risk-taking ability, competitiveness, and also resilience, he observed. Constant interaction with these people, on either a professional, personal, or social basis had exercised his brain, especially in times of uncertainty, and enabled him to make better decisions.
Having worked as an entrepreneur was another blessing for Mr. Prashant, as was working in high-growth companies that have been market leaders. He had had incredible mentors along the way and had worked with incredible leaders from whom he learned the power of ambition and strategic thinking. In essence, his leadership journey was a combination of all these things, which also he felt was an understatement.
Leadership Lessons from Sport
Remarking on the serendipity of planning the ISLA Awards event at the MCA, he dwelt on the teaching power of sport, first as a player and later as a passionate follower. Having played a team sport at the school, college, and district level, Mr. Prashant recalled how such required qualities as teamwork, building teams, and collaboration, were never taken away even when he stopped playing the sport. Demonstrating leadership everyday required bringing these various qualities together.
He noted his agreement with Ms. Ruchika Banta’s mention of leadership being unique to an individual, stating that he did not think there was a template for leadership. Leaders, he concluded, had to make the best of the cards that they had been dealt. He was “just happy” to have been on this journey and privileged to receive the award.
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