Why I Returned to the Classroom After 22 Years for PGP MAX

After spending more than two decades in corporate life, I reached a point where I felt it was the right time to reskill and relearn. Everything I had gathered over the years had served me well, but it was also time to consciously unlearn parts of it and position myself for the next level. That desire for renewal and reinvention brought me to ISB. 

PGP MAX had been on my mind since 2010, when I first heard about it in the year the programme began. It took fourteen years for the timing to align, but when it finally did, I applied and made it to the cohort in 2024.

A Turning Point

I have been a banker for the past twenty-three years, having worked with ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank, and I now serve as Principal and Senior Vice President at FundsIndia (Westbridge PE Firm). 

With that many years in corporate life, I felt an urge to step back, refresh my thinking, and prepare myself for the next two decades of my professional journey. PGP MAX arrived at exactly the right moment.

 

A Cohort That Expands Your Horizons

What struck me immediately was the richness of the cohort. We have people from multiple backgrounds and functions, and that diversity brings so much depth into the classroom. 

Five participants come from the defence forces, three from the Indian Administrative Service, and several from companies such as Microsoft and Adobe. 

Every conversation reflects the breadth of experience in the room, and it brings various functions to life in a way that is difficult to explain until you experience it.

Learning That Sharpens Decision Making

The teaching style at ISB has been eye-opening. The course is led by some of the world’s best professors, and their approach is completely different from anything I had encountered before. 

The learning moves from case-based to tools-based and finally to decision-based analysis, and this structure helps you internalise concepts practically and memorably. This kind of pedagogy is rare to find in the Indian subcontinent.

When I compare ISB with other schools, it stands out clearly. The faculty, the teaching methods, the cohort, the diversity of professional backgrounds, everything adds up to create an environment that prepares you for the world with a new sense of clarity and confidence.

We are being equipped to take on the next chapter, and for me, this journey marks the beginning of exactly that.

Transition to New Role

In my current role, I manage a mix of business growth, operational discipline, team capability development and customer service excellence. Much of my day revolves around reviewing units' performance, coaching teams, ensuring compliance, collaborating with cross-functional units and solving operational bottlenecks. Balancing growth, risk, digital adoption and people readiness remains a continuous challenge.

Some of the key challenges I encounter include ensuring capability consistency across distributed teams, driving change management for new digital processes, managing customer expectations in a highly competitive environment and aligning productivity with compliance and cost pressures.

This is where ISB has been extremely valuable.

Courses like Leading People & Organisations (Prof. Ram Nidumolu) helped me rethink leadership, team motivation, and psychological safety. I now handle team capability gaps and conflict with far more empathy and structure. Psychological safety, work crafting, and frameworks have helped me enhance team motivation and resilience. Competitive Strategy & Marketing Management (Prof. Jay Anand/Prof Siddharth S Singh) sharpened my approach to differentiation in an intensely competitive banking and financial market landscape. These courses improved my ability to evaluate strategic trade-offs in portfolio, pricing, and distribution strategy. Decision Making Under Uncertainty (Prof. Ravi Subramanian/Prof Nishant Rav, I and Prof. Anand RV) has improved my ability to make structured, data-driven decisions, which are useful in evaluating new initiatives with probabilistic thinking. And courses in accounting, finance and macroeconomics (Prof. Mohan Venkatachalam/Prof Ramabhadran S. Thirumalai/Prof Krishna Kumar ) have strengthened my understanding of financial drivers, enabling deeper conversations with finance and leadership around resource allocation and cost optimisation

Overall, ISB is helping me transition from an operational leader to a strategic, systems-level thinker, thus bridging tactical execution with long-term value creation and preparing me for larger responsibilities and board-level roles.

Synopsis

Vivek Mahajan is a seasoned banking professional with twenty-two years of experience at ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank. Currently Principal and Senior Vice President at FundsIndia, a WestBridge Capital portfolio company, he joined PGP MAX to reskill, unlearn old patterns and prepare for the next phase of his professional journey.