A company built on listening

Anand’s career ran through accountancy and sales before it settled in learning and development, and he still draws on both. Accountancy taught him to read the figures and the far-reaching consequences of a decision; sales — as a branch manager at Real Value Appliances, then national sales manager at H&FS — taught him to recruit and train teams, open new markets, and shape strategy.

As a senior facilitator and coach he works in leadership, performance management, change management and sales. Recent client work spans L’Oréal, Siemens, Deloitte, SKF, Syngenta, Vodafone Essar, Armacell, Akzo Nobel and Hindalco. He is empanelled by Krauthammer International (Netherlands) to run sales programmes internationally for Siemens and Akzo Nobel, and by Gyanodaya for leadership and management workshops across the Aditya Birla group. He is visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, teaching business communication to postgraduate management students, and has trained groups in India, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, the UAE and the USA.

He is CEO of the J B Ludhani Group of Schools. He reads a client’s need quickly and answers it simply, and colleagues tend to describe him as a natural encourager. He draws deep inspiration from the Bible, which has shaped how he sees people and situations.

Margaret has done the thing Epignosis advises educational trusts on: taken a school from an empty plot to a running institution. From 1998, alongside an operations career with the Evershine Group, she was given charge of the group’s education work and set up two SSC English-medium schools — J.B. Ludhani High School and Ludhani Vidya Mandir — under the J.B. Ludhani Charitable Trust. Between them they now have around 3,000 students and 158 staff; she is Executive Director of both.

The operational discipline behind that comes from twenty-two years (1992–2014) with the Evershine Group, where she helped deliver more than 60 million sq ft of development across Vasai and Mumbai, latterly as President – Infrastructure for the 157-acre Global City township at Virar. She holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Education Management from Symbiosis, completed the Senior Management Programme at IIM Lucknow, and is working towards a doctorate in the field.

She also co-founded Karuna Welfare, a trust that built and runs The Ambassador High School and a residential hostel for orphaned children at Waliv, Vasai — around 2,000 day students and 100 resident children.

Kriti’s background is marketing and communications: branding, messaging, and writing the material that explains a piece of work to the people it is for. She studied computer engineering at AISSMS, Pune, then took an MBA in marketing from Chetna College, Mumbai.

She is based in Mumbai and handles the marketing function for SSOE Consultancy India, an architecture and engineering firm — planning and running its branding, communication and marketing writing. She brings that same clarity to how Epignosis’s programmes and ideas are put into words.

Mini was one of the first batch of women officers commissioned into the Indian Air Force. Over a twelve-year service career she worked across the full span of human resources and administration — organisation development, personnel management, resource mobilisation, disaster relief and mission-critical operations — and, later, education management.

That range is the point. She has had to read and work with people at every level of an organisation, and is at ease across cultures and contexts. At Epignosis she brings that to education-management engagements and to organisation-development work: the staffing frameworks, the people systems, and the steadiness a new or changing institution needs.