The power of engineering to change the world is undeniable. But as Sainsbury Management Fellow (SMF) Abhay Soorya came to accept, having a stunning technical innovation or background is simply not enough. One needs to convince senior decision makers from a commercial angle to make engineering count practically and to encourage society to evolve. A commercial argument is almost always required in addition to a technical one to bring about change.
This is the realisation that led Abhay to study for an MBA via a Sainsbury Management Fellows scholarship. Within a year of graduating, Abhay is Senior Director of Strategic Solutions at C3 AI and is making his way swiftly but surely to the career destination he had in mind from the very beginning. Abhay shares his story…
A passion for understanding the world practically
It was during my teenage years when my interest in engineering was initially sparked. Whilst scientific subjects, such as maths and physics, offered a fitting introduction, it was the natural curiosity I had for going beyond the teachings of the classroom that broadened my exposure.
I always had more questions about and more motivation to explore topics of interest in greater depth. I started reading actively about concepts that were not in my school syllabus at the time. My journey may have begun with my reading by myself out of this curiosity, but it subsequently led to my venturing into competitions and challenges. I represented my school in many such events, which increased my exposure to science and engineering thinking.
I was also actively seeking engineering opportunities to apply myself to. The first such opportunity that came my way was through a mentor of mine at the University of Birmingham. His research at the time concerned making metals and alloys more resistant and durable, and it involved a significant amount of programming, which I had no experience of till then. Sensing an opportunity to learn more during my GCSE break, I asked if he could provision for me a 2-week engineering study. After successfully completing this project, and having familiarised myself with programming, I sought his mentorship in completing a Design & Technology project at my school. My choice of project (to do with strain gauges and stress monitors) was discouraged by my school because of its extreme complexity, but nevertheless I decided to go ahead, and eventually, I was able to complete it successfully through hard work and guidance, a boost in confidence which fuelled further desire to learn and conviction in myself.
In the subsequent break between my A-Levels, I sought to participate in the Nuffield Gold Award project. Here, I used programming to optimise the performance of turbine blades in aircraft engines made by Rolls-Royce, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham. My research project yielded production results, and this provided the final mental push I needed to invest myself into the discipline.
These experiences sparked my interest in the practical benefits of engineering. Unlike physics, which deals with extremes, engineering deals with the practical, so it condenses these extremes into something which is applicable in modern society. While the physicist thinks “what could happen” or “what is true”, the engineer thinks “what is possible to be made?” One of the main benefits of this is that you can really understand most systems, or systems of systems, in society through engineering. Engineering provides a great way to understand the world in a practical sense, and this understanding solidified my decision to study engineering at the best educational path I could seek.
I went onto read a combination degree, Engineering, Economics and Management (EEM), at the University of Oxford, my main priority being studying engineering. It was during my third year of study that I started to realise that for science to benefit society, one needs an ecumenical lens involving commerce, alongside strict engineering, to truly serve society.
From trading and AI to the heart of the energy space
After graduating, I became a Quantitative Analyst at Symbiosis Laboratories, a start-up in the finance space, founded by a group of professors, students and peers from Oxbridge, Berkeley and MIT in the US. Here I built a trading infrastructure to facilitate the proper buying and selling of stocks, and during the process learned extensively about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even though we built an outstanding product, in hindsight, we were only product-focussed, a thought that would resonate with me throughout my subsequent working life. It was my first example of how a group of educated technical minds had built a great solution but one that could not be commercialised, because that element – the element of business – was thought of as secondary to engineering. My experience revealed its importance to be equal to engineering, a realisation that would pop up again and again and again until I decided to do an MBA.
During this debut role, I also learned more about myself. I could harness my engineering skills and explore the quantitative side of the discipline. Yet it did not provide me an opportunity to exhibit my other skills – speaking, presentation, and the softer side of business – to equal extent; I was building software but was not communicating it, even though many in my sphere thought that I had great oral and linguistic ability. Seeking to utilise my collective skills fully, I left my role at Symbiosis, and after a brief stint in product management for consumer electronics, progressed into an excellent opportunity within the energy space: one that would have me extensively debate technical constructs to resolve disputes, form consensus, and ultimately establish energy policy and regulations in the UK.
Back then, the energy sector was not the high-profile industry it is today. Renewables were not on as many people’s radars as they are in our current Net-Zero world. I had no previous exposure to the energy sector yet, reminding myself of the various engineering challenges that I had completed despite conventional warnings of my ability, I took on the role, spending about five years at Gemserv as an energy technologist and consultant.
Transforming the infrastructure of an industry
Not the energy expert just yet, I joined Gemserv as a Junior Consultant. With coaching from two inspiring colleagues and an environment that facilitated learning, I quickly rose through the ranks to become a Senior Consultant. Being the youngest person to occupy this role in the company’s history was one of the highlights of my career, with my desire to learn rewarded.
Transforming the infrastructure of an industry Not the energy expert just yet, I joined Gemserv as a Junior Consultant. With coaching from two inspiring colleagues and an environment that facilitated learning, I quickly rose through the ranks to become a Senior Consultant. Being the youngest person to occupy this role in the company’s history was one of the highlights of my career, with my desire to learn rewarded.
This responsibility did not mean abandoning the Gemsev’s principal revenue stream behind. I was also tasked on various projects that enabled me to grasp the role of technology within the energy space. The mission took me beyond energy regulation and existing energy markets to new areas, including EVs, AI, IoT, and blockchain enabled energy.
It was at this point that I became one of the contributing authors of the technical infrastructure and regulation for the smart metering rollout in the UK. The smart meter revolution used technology and engineering to define how meters were codified to facilitate common processes industry-wide. Working closely with colleagues, I played a key role here, authoring many of the specifications underpinning the technology of the ~30 million meters currently deployed in UK households. I learned about the difficulty in gathering consensus – each technical development had to be debated extensively and many senior stakeholders needed convincing prior to implementation – and about the issues with such decision-making: it was too slow and sometimes, too ‘straitjacketing’.
My experience setting up and advising on regulation also saw me set up secondary regulations within the UK for electric vehicles and their charging stations. These protocols aimed to harmonise how markets and brands worked together to avoid the diversity of chargers that hindered the entire sector. My role setting up secondary regulations saw me work with various regulatory bodies, in UK and pan-Europe, as well as present to very senior stakeholders: C-Suite executives, ministers, and others. Many of the resulting regulations have been implemented.
During this period, I became a founding member of IoTSF (Internet of Things Security Foundation), a body that works to secure the Internet of Things and makes it safe to connect small scale sensors and actuators, enabling better management of such devices.
A case of soul-searching led me to MBA study
Rather than a specific turning point, it was another soul-searching journey that led me to explore MBA study. Like the introspection while working at Symbiosis (which led to me leave behind software engineering), I found myself looking closely at my lived experiences in search of answers to “what next?”
I reflected on the different work environments I encountered, reflected on my work so far and critiqued where I had skills gaps. A major part of my job at Symbiosis was to present at key investor meetings. After those meetings, unconsciously, my mind would start analysing my performance, interestingly from a non-technical perspective. I would question how I delivered the messages - did I use the right tone? Did I stitch together the right words to make the biggest impact on the audience? Was there a better way to present the arguments? Did I have the skills to continue pursuing a career where communication and presentation were central to the role?
I encountered similar reflections from Gemserv also. One presentation comes to mind when I think back to my days pre-MBA. I was advancing a very technically denominated document to the head of a major governance panel in the UK who was also the CTO at an energy-oriented government entity in the UK. I put in a great deal of work surveying some 300 stakeholders and presented my technical argument. Yet, despite these efforts, it didn’t receive the support it needed. Not because of the (extremely sound) technical aspects, but because of the lack of commercial ones. I had not considered factors like cost, the ability of the people within organisations to implement the new infrastructure or, the sunk costs of investments.
My reflections led me to two conclusions. One was the importance of being commercial, and not seeing the commercial side as a ‘nice-to-have’ but instead seeing it as something integral to make engineering and technology work in society. Second was that I had skills in addition to technology and engineering: to vocalise arguments well, to use the right words, to present with impact, and to help resolve conflict. These two conclusions subsumed into my choosing to study for an MBA – a commercially-minded degree with an emphasis on the administrative and human side of business.
The degree offered a solution and a step towards speaking the business language that would strengthen my ability to spur progression and (hopefully) change the world for the better.
The story of one business school proved inspirational
Often choosing a business school is centred around the duration of the course. Some schools offer MBAs with a one-year duration, others are two years. Despite not having a lot of savings or family finances to fall back on, it wasn’t the duration of the course that influenced my decision but its story.
I am an avid reader of contemporary politics and economics. As a result, I was very aware of what appears to be the deterioration of traditional structures on which society has been established. Rising populism, anti-globalisation, and protectionism, decline in community, and other upcoming issues meant traditional governance mechanisms that currently underpin society would begin to break. It seemed to me that collaboration represented a powerful antidote to evolving geopolitics and the issues above; this was a narrative and ambition that INSEAD and I shared.
Known as one of the most diverse business schools globally, INSEAD brings people and ideas together to make collaboration possible, the aim being to use business as a force for good. Its education is premised on cultivating traits in individuals that encourage a certain collaboration without borders.
My choice was also influenced by where I wanted to work post-MBA. For me, the future was always in Europe. Having decided INSEAD would be my MBA home, I had to think seriously about how I would finance my studies and set out researching all the options. I learned about the Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) scholarship, applied, and was awarded £50,000 towards my study.
A lesson in collaboration through the collision of ideas
The MBA course at INSEAD lived up to expectations, but there were also surprises. The school’s approach to integrating collaboration and into teams is not the traditional speaking out and debating method I had experienced at Oxford University.
Instead of focusing on the exchange of dialogue between all students, INSEAD deliberately brings together students with different worldviews and ideologies into study groups, making the chances of conflict within these groups particularly high. Yet rather than produce negative outcomes, this unique system cultivated new cultural consciences within the group members. Study groups offered an opportunity to deal with conflict, work together to reconcile differences and find workable business solutions, even in instances where we vehemently disagreed with each other.
INSEAD is extremely good at creating study groups that bite, and it was this conflict that spurred the desire to find a narrative that worked for everyone. Increased understanding and empathy - and learning to see problems and challenges from multiple perspectives - has shaped many of the subsequent decisions in my life.
In addition to these cultural and soft skills, I became extremely disciplined with my time. There was no room for extensions on INSEAD’s one-year MBA course! Combine this with the important commercial skills I learned, such as accounting and finance, and I had the makings to reach my destination when I graduated in 2021.
Continuing my journey to the sharp end of energy technology
That destination for me was always returning to a technology-oriented role: to vocalize technology in a societally beneficial way. With my previous four years’ experience within the energy sector, I was still very keen to work at the sharp end of energy technology. Also, the carbon neutral movement was gaining momentum, making the sector an exciting, progressive, and rewarding place to work.
So, that’s what I’m doing right now as Senior Director of Strategic Solutions at California-based C3 AI , an organisation that provides enterprise AI software to enable companies to drive value from deploying AI solutions. My work mostly focusses on doing so in the Energy & Utilities spaces, which constitutes my primary background. AI’s potential here is very rich: enabling smart grids, decarbonising estates, improving the energy extraction capabilities from renewables, providing new solutions to customers, and others.
In my current role, the commercial knowledge and skills I gained via the MBA have proved invaluable. While I have always had the technical knowledge from an AI standpoint, my MBA study has modified my language to such an extent that I now have access to a certain set of stakeholders that I did not have in the past. More importantly, I have the knowledge to identify a wider range of issues and parameters to speak directly to the commercially minded senior stakeholder. To discover whether a company needs a technology solution, I can now read their accounting information, something that was difficult to do before the MBA.
None of this, of course, alters the core technology on offer. It just makes the technology accessible to the stakeholders that want to or have the budget to authorise its development. The MBA supplements the technical mind. You know the language spoken by the decisionmakers who hold the purse strings, allowing you to communicate with them and gain their buy-in. This combination is, to the best of my knowledge, the only way to make technology be practically useful.
My advice? Set your sights on a career destination
I think there is a myth in the MBA schooling world that you need to have everything clearly defined prior to the MBA. The reality however is quite different. While most of the people I attended INSEAD with wrote fantastic essays specifying exactly how they had everything mapped out to a tee, when you speak with your fellow students, you soon learn that very little detail was planned. What they did have in mind was a career destination.
In other words, they had an idea of where they wanted to be in 20 years’ time, but the path to get there was not prescribed. That path could be muddled, fraught with danger or aligned with difficulties, but they wanted to work hard to overcome these challenges and arrive at their destination. Going to an MBA school ‘to get a job in consulting after it’ is less useful, because of its short-term focus, than going to an MBA school with an aim to get to a destination: an executive, a position of influence in an industry of interest, starting a company, or other personal goal.
My advice for young engineers who are at the career point I was at when I was considering studying for an MBA is to have that destination in mind, whatever or wherever that may be. Try to identify and develop the skills and strengths that are required to reach your destination if you have not done so already. And narrate a story of how the MBA will develop those skills and strengths in you.
For me, the skills gap was mostly a need for commercial argumentation, particularly around finance and accounting. I have filled the gap by doing the MBA. In my opinion, there’s far too much time spent worrying about finding a linear direction in the application process - A leads to B, B leads to C, and then D etc. The world is not that deterministic these days; A could just lead to D.
The point is, have an idea of the D and the skills you need to cultivate to get to D (and why the MBA is ideal to learn those skills). Forget about the A, B, and everything else in between. It also opens your mind in a way; you may find that A leads to X, which leads to D, in which case, the serendipity of having found X will grow you and take you in new directions that you never even dreamed possible with ‘linear’ thinking.
Let SMF come along for the ride!
My experience being a part of Sainsbury Management Fellows has been, and continues to be, extremely rewarding. Had I not been awarded the SMF scholarship, I am not sure I could have studied for an MBA at that time.
As a prestigious alumni network that provides scholarships to UK-based engineers to gain MBAs at the world’s top business schools, it really is one of a kind and serves a very important function. There are many engineers who want to advance in their careers and make an even greater impact in society. Yet perhaps because of an underappreciation of the commercial angle, they do not always get to achieve these goals or reach their destinations.
Since being awarded the SMF scholarship and gaining my MBA, I’ve continued to contribute to the wider SMF network. I’m particularly keen to provide the mentorship and support to other engineers that I was fortunate enough to receive at various stages of my career and MBA journey.
At Gemserv for instance, where I worked prior to attending INSEAD, I was actively coached, with two seniors always available whenever I needed guidance. I used this time to extract all the information I could from them in terms of how the energy industry works, its history and its evolution. My growth was facilitated by a combination of my own willingness to learn and my environment’s willingness to help me. I would not have achieved as much as I did without the latter.
With this in mind, I want to give back as much as I can to other engineers, and I’m always ready to support anyone in the SMF network and beyond. I’m already mentoring a few of university students, who won one of our Engineers in Business innovation awards and advancing the SMF cause by promoting the scholarship scheme through INSEAD’s forums to reach the next generation of promising engineers. And this is just the beginning!