On com culture, thirteen perspectives, and learning more outside the classroom than in it
I paid a significant amount of money to study at IIM Lucknow. The curriculum is rigorous. The faculty are accomplished. The exams are not forgiving. By any reasonable measure, it is a good place to learn things.
And yet. The most useful education I got in two years did not happen in a classroom. It happened in a borrowed office that smelled like something had died in the ceiling… because something had, probably, died in the ceiling, with twelve other people, across seventeen hours a day. The learning was a side effect. A significant one.
Let me explain.
First, Com Culture
At IIM Lucknow, there is an unspoken but extraordinarily efficient sorting mechanism that kicks in within hours of arrival. Bengalis find Bengalis. Malayalis find Malayalis. Tamils find Tamils. People from Delhi find other people from Delhi and then subdivide further by colony. It happens without effort, without anyone deciding to do it. You arrive slightly disoriented, you look for something familiar, and community is the most available familiar thing. So you reach for it.
Nobody thinks of this as a choice. It doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like gravity.
The result is that you can spend two years surrounded by people from every corner of India and come out the other side having mostly deepened existing friendships and made new ones with people who grew up in the same city, speak the same language at home, and share the same opinion on which festival food is superior. This is comfortable. It is also a quiet waste of a remarkable opportunity, and most people don’t notice it’s happening because comfort rarely announces itself as a problem.
My own friend group was not entirely innocent of this. Then I joined the placement committee, and the committee had other plans.
Thirteen People, One Very Small Office
The placement committee had thirteen members. Between us, we covered Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and at least one biography so geographically complex it could only happen in modern India. We were also now spending seventeen hours a day together in a borrowed office that was not designed for thirteen people and their various opinions about how things should be done.
The office had a false ceiling. Something lived in it. We were never fully sure what… theories ranged from a rat to a cat to something more philosophically troubling, but the smell made its presence impossible to ignore. Old papers, recycled air, thirteen people, some of whom had not showered in a day or two, myself occasionally included, and whatever was happening behind that false ceiling.
This is the place I spent fourteen months of my life in. The smell eventually became background noise. The false ceiling became familiar. At some point, without noticing, it became home.
During active placement months, placement committee members eat with committee members. Which sounds like a punishment but is actually how you end up with memories of all thirteen of you crammed around one mess table… a table not designed for thirteen people either, a theme emerges, eating at odd hours, sometimes laughing, sometimes in the specific silence of people who have been awake too long and have run out of words but are still, somehow, glad to be there. We also ordered food to the office with some regularity. At 1am, when the process is running and nobody has eaten since afternoon, a shared meal in that office felt like more than a shared meal.
The Excel Sheet Incident. And The Other Excel Sheet Incident. And The One After That.
Here is something nobody tells you about running placement processes: a significant portion of your emotional energy will be directed at a single Excel sheet.
It was a good sheet, technically. Heavily automated. Formulas for everything… candidate status, company status, shortlist generation after eliminating placed students. The kind of sheet that, when it works, feels like a minor miracle of collective human effort.
The problem is that it was accessible to all thirteen of us. Simultaneously. On our own laptops.
Anyone who has worked with a shared, formula-heavy Excel sheet knows where this is going. Delete one row, accidentally, always accidentally, and the whole thing unravels. Shortlists stop generating correctly. Numbers go wrong. Someone notices, announces it to the room, and then begins the mass interrogation: kisne kiya? kyun kiya? Who did this. Why did this happen. Who was in the sheet.
The culprit was always someone in the room. It was always an accident. It took about five minutes to fix. And it happened every one or two days, reliably, like a small recurring natural disaster that we never managed to fully prevent and never stopped being furious about.
The five minutes of fixing were never the problem. What followed was… thirteen people, thirteen completely different ways of responding to the same minor crisis. Some went straight to solutions. Some wanted to understand what went wrong before moving on. Some found the whole thing funny by the third time it happened. Some did not. What struck me, every single time, was how reasonable each reaction was on its own… and how much work it took to land somewhere everyone could live with. Over a deleted row in a spreadsheet. This is what thirteen perspectives actually looks like in practice. It is, in retrospect, the best training I got.
This is when I understood that thirteen perspectives is not a number that sounds large until you are actually in the room.
Adapting. Eventually.
India is a fruit basket… dozens of cultures, each with its own taste, colour, and strong opinion about what fruit is supposed to taste like. The Bengali assumption about directness is not the Rajasthani assumption. What reads as efficiency in one cultural grammar reads as coldness in another. What one person experiences as warmth, another experiences as a boundary being crossed.
I found out that I have a style, direct, moving quickly from problem to solution, that I had always experienced as neutral. It is not neutral. Some people found it useful. Some found it slightly alarming. A few, I suspect, found it both depending on the day and how much sleep they’d had, which during active months was never enough.
The thing about realising this is that realising it does not immediately fix it. You don’t have one uncomfortable moment of self-awareness and emerge transformed. It is slower and more repetitive than that. You misread someone, you notice, you adjust. You misread someone else in a completely different way, you notice that too, you adjust again. This goes on for months. The adjustment is not a switch. It is a gradual recalibration that happens through enough small collisions that you eventually stop making the same ones… and start making new, more interesting ones.
What helps is that you are doing this with people you see every single day, which means the relationship survives the awkward moments because you don’t have the option of avoiding each other. The office is small. Avoidance is not a strategy.
There was a moment, mid-season, when a slotting discussion had gone fully sideways… too many options, too many opinions, the room going in circles. One of the quieter members of the committee, someone I had not previously associated with the word decisive, spoke once. Laid out the logic. Restructured the entire plan in five minutes. The room aligned.
I had been misreading that person for months based on how they operated in low-stakes situations. The pressure revealed something I hadn’t seen. This happened, in different ways, with most of the people in that office. Pressure is a better character reference than any amount of normal interaction.
What the Classroom Missed
The MBA teaches you frameworks. Porter’s Five Forces. Discounted cash flows. Organisational behaviour theories with enough sub-categories to fill a semester. These are not useless… they are useful in the way that a map is useful. They tell you the terrain. They do not teach you how to walk in it.
The committee taught me how to walk in it.
Managing people who want different things simultaneously. Understanding that the most difficult person in the room is usually the most uncertain one. Knowing when to push and when to let something resolve on its own. None of this is in any syllabus. You learn it by being in rooms where the decisions are real and the consequences land on actual people and the clock does not pause while you figure out the right framework.
I learned more in that smelly borrowed office than in two years of coursework. I say this without disparaging the coursework, which was fine and which I mostly completed. I say it because it is true and because I think it is worth saying out loud: the most valuable parts of an MBA happen in the margins, not the curriculum. Not by design. Just by the nature of what the margins demand from you.
The Friends You Couldn’t Have Engineered
During active months, the only people I ate with were the twelve others. The only people I saw, for most of the day, were the twelve others. This is either a recipe for deep friendship or prolonged mutual exhaustion. In our case it was both, which is also friendship, just the more honest kind.
Those twelve people are among the ones I now know most clearly. Not the polished version… the one that existed at 3am when the work was hard and the patience was gone and what remained was just how someone actually is. You cannot find that version at a networking event or a carefully arranged group dinner. You find it by accumulating enough shared hours that the performance becomes impossible.
The com culture will keep you comfortable.
The committee made me plural.
And taught me things no classroom could.