Institution Building: Experiences, Lessons and Challenges

I feel priviledged to have been invited to deliver this speech. I had the fortune of inteacting with Mr. yasaswy closely for over a decade. He was one of the geniuses with a huge sense of practical wisdom. We used to spend hours discussing many things. Every such conversation was enriched with new knowledge and ideas. One of my last conversations with him was in the context of the visit of the current head of the Mewar royal family of Rajasthan to the Indian School of Business (ISB). We shared our thoughts on the legacy of 76 generations of continuous service of the Mewar dynasty to the society even post-independence, and the challenges of building an institution across the centuries. Our efforts to recollect the names of families and organizations with similarly rich heritage did not yield much. We concluded that institutions are rare and building and preserving them are not easy tasks.