Sitting Down with Ruchin Kansal, Stillman’s New Leadership Development Director

By Miguel Mendez Perulles
Stillman News Writer

With a successful career with insights into the pharmaceutical industry, the consulting industry, and digital disruption, Ruchin Kansal recently became the head of the Leadership Development Honors Program at Seton Hall University. He is a constant learner and a visionary leader. In a rapidly advancing world, he learns as much as he can to prepare himself and his students for the future’s disruptive changes and constant globalization. Kansal emphasizes that an open mindset is key to succeeding in a continuously globalizing world where we see many people from different cultures working together.

Ruchin grew up in India, his father worked for one of the state’s largest electricity companies, which meant his family was constantly moving around India. He became a cadet in the Indian air force. His career there was short-lived, so he decided to obtain a bachelor’s in architecture at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, working for TATA motors after graduation.

Moving to the United States at the age of 24, he graduated from NYU Stern with an MBA. Ruchin’s desire to build companies and work with people led him to a role in consulting at Ernst and Young on September 10th, 2001. On his second day at the job, his world and the world around him collapsed. During his first project at EY, he worked with Johnson and Johnson, sealing his fate in the pharmaceutical industry for the next 20 years.

One of the innovations that Ruchin Kansal is most vocal about is the digital transformation of businesses. As Ruchin puts it, “If you can’t think digital first, you are already a dinosaur.” In his time at Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the largest privately-held pharmaceutical companies, Ruchin was the head of business innovation in which he incorporated the digital aspects into the company’s operations. While working for Boehringer Ingelheim, Ruchin co-authored “Redefining Innovation” with his boss Jeff Huth. In this book, he details how the pharmaceutical industry will be affected by the digital age and how it will have to become more consumer-centric to generate more value for its customers.

I wanted to know how leaders and the “traditional” leadership style would change in the digital age; Ruchin’s response was nothing short of shocking. He said that with the time horizon of companies shortening, leadership would have to be much more focused on the short term. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry across several industries, leading to the ineffectiveness of a long-term “traditional” leadership approach, in which a company would obtain enough market share to raise the barriers to entry and keep out its competition. Ruchin believes that the new leadership style will have to focus on explosive growth and quick customer acquisitions.

There will be a shift from generalized leadership to specialized leadership, resulting in groups of leaders heading a charge on a new venture and what Ruchin calls “plug and play” leaders, in which a company will hire someone for the short term to guide a team towards an objective and then let them go. This will cause our generation to become job skippers. This new style of leadership will make companies more agile to constantly changing markets, and since corporate environments will no longer be the breeding ground for industry leaders, a massive displacement of human capital will come as a result. At the same time, these “new” leaders will have to understand the digital business environment as a business model to become successful or be left behind.

With such an astounding career in corporate America, Ruchin turned to the Leadership Institute with the desire to shape the leaders of tomorrow, leave a legacy, and make an impact on society. Acknowledging the impact that he can make on the world with this endeavor, he holds his responsibilities as the head of the Business Leadership Institute in high regard. Ruchin is committed to educating his students and helping them succeed as leaders in the digital age.

Ruchin’s consulting background has brought tremendous value to the Leadership Institute. With decades of experience of meeting some of the most intelligent and influential people in corporate America and working with some of the biggest companies on the planet, Kansal possesses a global perspective that he wants to share with his students. Ruchin’s emphasis on this global perspective puts a focus on learning from different cultures, especially in a time where we will see increased group collaboration across industries. Keeping true to his objective of achieving a more global perspective, one of Ruchin’s passions is traveling; his most recent destination was Kenya. He expressed his love of learning more about the world and its many cultures through travel.

Ruchin has gone through such a big change from a background in architecture to consulting to teaching at Seton Hall that when I asked him where he saw himself in five years, he gave me an honest “I don’t know.” Ruchin expressed his desire to teach and have an impact on the world. He sees the future of the Buccino Leadership Institute in a bright light, getting recognition on a national level and praise for the quality of the leaders produced through this program. Ruchin’s dedication to Seton Hall and the Leadership Institute is admirable. He has taken an intrinsically paternalistic role towards his students, making himself as accessible as possible. For him, his job as a professor is a vocation, doing everything in his power to understand his students at a personal level.

Contact Miguel at miguel.mendezperulles@student.shu.edu