Not a whiteboard-and-PowerPoint offsite: how Kunwer Sachdev ran a Su-Kam training day — and asked every employee to walk barefoot across a bed of burning coals.
Corporate training usually means whiteboards, slides, and polite nods across a conference table. At Su-Kam, under Kunwer Sachdev — often called the Solar Man of India — it looked nothing like that. Sachdev believed real learning happened only outside a comfort zone. Sometimes that meant, literally, walking through fire.
The training day that Su-Kam veterans still remember
One outdoor camp in particular stayed etched in the company’s memory. A full day of rigorous activities run by expert trainers built up to the final challenge, announced only at the end: employees would walk barefoot across a bed of burning coal.
Whispers, nervous laughter — and then a queue
The announcement landed the way you would expect. Whispers, nervous laughter, hesitation. Then people started stepping forward. What the exercise proved to those employees was not that fire does not burn — it does. It was that the fear of stepping was several times larger than the actual step. And that gap, once you saw it clearly, was the point of the entire day.
“Sachdev believed true learning happened only when people stepped beyond their comfort zones.”— Walking on Fire, Su-Kam training archive
Why the story is really about culture, not fire-walking
The Su-Kam veterans who tell this story are not celebrating a stunt. They are describing a founder whose management style refused to let people hide behind their titles — who wanted employees to feel, physically, what it is to override an internal ‘no’ and act anyway. That instinct is the same one Sachdev built the company itself on.
Walking on Fire — Su-Kam training archive (Solar Man of India) →