At a recent conference that AIESEC India hosted, we had the pleasure to meet Mr. Aditya Dev Sood – Chairman of Adainta School for Leadership & Innovation. Here’s a conversation we had with him.

Question: What is your company all about?

“Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation is a new institution that promotes a radical new approach to education. Project based, hands on, through industry partnerships, learning by doing through simulations and not in classrooms & lecture halls. Our thinking is that this kind of approach is really required in the Indian context where people are in college but not necessarily learning.”

Question: How Relevant is the organization to India today?

“We see there’s a huge gulf between the needs of industry and the way our higher education is working. And we hear this from the HR departments of large industries all the time that they end up hiring smart people who have zero experience, zero skills, zero capacity and they have to do a tremendous amount of training in house, once they’re on board. They don’t come with the ability to do a task analysis, manage their own time, manage anybody else’s time use HTML or social media effectively. They don’t come with an array of skills that make them valuable. And forget about large companies, in the case of start ups people need to do a lot of different things reasonably well. So we need multiple different kinds of skills – some of them being very basic and some of them are more sophisticated and all of these kinds of abilities are only acquired by learning by doing, solving problems & addressing challenges. They aren’t learnt by giving examinations and skill concepts. The difference between skill & skill concepts is the difference between theoretical learning & hands on learning.”

Question: How important are having these skills in the world today? How important is leadership today?

“Even those of us who are involved with leadership, understand that it is a very subtle concept. But when people start engaging the question, it grows in the mind & the consciousness to the point where one understands that one has responsibility for the world around us and this world is not going to run itself.  It requires us to take initiative, own problems, build solutions to those problems and along the way make these things into sustainable business models and business plans that will make these initiatives viable for the future. Leadership too often gets compartmentalized into either govermentality or else into management. Leadership is something above and beyond these two kind of dichotomies and yet it cross cuts and informs both of these areas. We have an approach to leadership that involves self discovery, enhances approaches to communication and better interactional skills. In some ways you might say this is the surface of leadership but in some way because we treat the same surface, what happens inside grows as well.”

We’re sure you’ll have some questions to ask him as well and for that, we’ve organized a tweet chat only for you! Some questions that will be addressed in the chat include:

• Is youth the solution to the leadership need of Indian Politics?
• What do you think makes a good leader?
• What do you think are the biggest problems faced by today’s youth?
• What kind of leaders does the country need in the present circumstances?
• In the wake of the country’s socioeconomic condition, what can the youth of today do to make a tangible difference?
• What sort of education does the youth of today need to be equipped with to be better and more responsible leaders?