Soumitra Dutta believes real learning starts with discomfort

Soumitra Dutta's father‚ a doctor in the Indian Air Force‚ was often transferred every three to four years‚ and so Dutta was constantly moving from city to city‚ always having to start from scratch in a new school and new social landscape. For Soumitra Dutta, former dean of Oxford Said Business School, it proved to be an education - the ground shifts beneath you and you have to find your footing again․ But he did not realize its significance until much later.

Across a career that has spanned Chandigarh to Delhi to Berkeley to France to the UK‚ he now sees a thread woven through these transitions. “The most fascinating learning you have is about yourself. You actually start understanding‚ or at least questioning‚ why you see the world in a certain way, which does not align perhaps with the way people around you see the world," says Dutta.

The capacity for self-examination is an important trait for being a good leader, says Soumitra Dutta. It is about coming to know yourself․ The kind of self-knowledge you can only get when you are removed from the environment that produced you and placed in one that takes a whack at every assumption you have always held to be true The fish‚ Dutta argues‚ only realizes the existence of water once it is no longer in water․ Living abroad‚ working across cultures‚ navigating institutions with fundamentally different operating logics it is these types of experiences that make the water visible

His wife is Spanish‚ and during four decades together, he has acquired a deep fluency in a culture and worldview substantially different from the one he grew up in․ He believes that this exposure to different ways of organizing family life‚ different emotional registers‚ different definitions of success‚ has shaped his approach to leadership as much as his professional experience

Adaptability is not something you either have or do not have It is a capacity built through repeated exposure to situations where your existing frameworks stop working You can learn to cultivate it‚ to see friction as a friend‚ to treat discomfort as data instead of an annoying distraction

Soumitra Dutta emphasizes that learning happens when you not only understand but are also willing to change your own viewpoint if necessary. The willingness to change one's mind when evidence and reasoning suggests that one should do so‚ rather than holding on doggedly to an existing position‚ is necessary for becoming a good leader.