IIMA Book by Prof. T V Rao Profiles Kunwer Sachdev Among Managers Who Make a Difference
Kunwer Sachdev, founder of Su-Kam Power Systems, is profiled in one of IIMA’s most widely read management books — IIMA — Managers Who Make A Difference: Sharpening Your Management Skills, authored by Prof. T V Rao and published by Random House India in 2010. The book, part of the flagship IIMA Business Books series, features leaders whose management style has meaningfully shaped Indian industry.
What the book says about Kunwer Sachdev
“Kunwer Sachdev, Founder and Managing Director of Su-Kam, is a great example of one who turns every problem into an opportunity and converts it into business through his creative talent. A graduate in Physics, and the son of a railway clerk, he now owns a Rs 500 crore company with aspirations to be a global player. He started his career selling ballpoint pens in Delhi. He wanted to do something different. He noticed people in flats and hotels using Master Antenna system and started a cable TV business that gives access to both the TV channels. When his inverter was not working he used to learn about inverters and started making inverters that work in different seasons and under different conditions. He then added remote controls. Today Su-Kam is the leading power back-up solution provider in India, with its consistent focus on technological innovation.”
— T V Rao, IIMA — Managers Who Make A Difference, Random House India, 2010
The book goes on to note that Su-Kam “has attained heights unheard of, in the largely unorganized industry” and that “having a clear technological edge, creating new benchmarks and upgrading standards for the industry, comes naturally to Su-Kam.” It highlights that Kunwer Sachdev has filed over fifty patents and continues to search for new opportunities to apply his creative genius — with Su-Kam products offering features like remote diagnostics, allowing the team to assess the working of a Su-Kam inverter sitting in Gurgaon.
C K Prahalad spotted Kunwer Sachdev as a case of Indian Innovation
One of the most notable references in the book is its source note: “Reproduced from the video on The Next Practices: Innovations from India, seminar conducted by C.K. Prahalad, Ahmedabad Management Association, 2007.” The late Prof. C K Prahalad — among the most influential management thinkers of his generation, and author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid — had personally identified Kunwer Sachdev and Su-Kam as a great example of Indian innovation during his AMA seminar in 2007. That identification is what carried Sachdev’s story into IIMA’s teaching material.
Why this is a big management-literature milestone
Being written about in an IIMA book by Prof. T V Rao — the founder of the HRD movement in India and one of the country’s most respected management academics — places Kunwer Sachdev in a very select group of Indian entrepreneurs used as teaching cases in the country’s premier management institution. The profile appears alongside other exemplars of Indian management, and puts Su-Kam’s story in the same intellectual company as Tata’s Nano and other benchmark Indian innovations that the book’s wider chapter discusses.
The book also directs readers to Rashmi Bansal’s Connect the Dots (Eklavya Foundation, 2010) “for the latest story on Kunwer” — a further endorsement, given that Connect the Dots is one of India’s best-selling entrepreneurship books and profiles founders who built businesses without formal management education.
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