About

Ravi Sreedharan is the Founder and Director of Indian school of Development Management. He worked in the corporate sector across the globe for 24 years before switching to the Social Sector in 2011. He is an Engineer from IIT-BHU (1985) and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad (1988). Most of his professional engagement has been with the MNC Bank ? HSBC covering various geographies including the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Pacific. At HSBC, Ravi held numerous senior positions including Regional Marketing Manager ? Middle East and Africa; Consumer Banking Product Head for Asia Pacific, Retail Banking Director, Indonesia and CEO & President Director of Bank Ekonomi (member of HSBC Group), Indonesia.

In 2011, at the age of 49, he quit a successful corporate career, to return to India and pursue a career in Social Work. He was part of the leadership team at Azim Premji Foundation 2011 to 2015. Azim Premji Foundation works in 50 districts across the country to improve the quality of government schools and learning levels of children in the least privileged sections of the society. This involved working at the grass-root level with teachers, school leaders, school management committees, communities, panchayat raj Institutions and with the administration from the Cluster and Block levels all the way to Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD). Ravi has done a lot of work - specifically in the School Leadership space across the country. His work ranged from researching and defining qualities required in good school leaders to designing interventions to develop these qualities. This work was at the level of village schools at one end; and advising National Level Programs of the Government in developing curriculum and programs for strengthening school leadership across the country, at the other end.

While working in the social sector across numerous villages in the country, Ravi saw an acute shortage of good, relevant leadership not only in the education sector but also in the entire development sector. To address this critical issue, he left Azim Premji Foundation with an idea to build a pioneering, world class, iconic, not-for-profit institute in the country dedicated to Development Management. An institute that will catalyse a big change in the way organisations in the development sector are managed and become far more impactful, sustainable and achieve significant scale.

Ravi is the Founder and Director at the Indian School of Development Management (ISDM). In a short period of less than three years, he and the team at ISDM have established a pioneering institution to nurture the discipline of Development Management which aims to facilitate the creation of a cadre of professional leaders and managers for the development sector who will make a significant difference to the impact, scale and sustainability of organisations working for the betterment of society and especially improving the quality of life of the underserved.