After nearly a decade at IOCL, leading critical aviation fuel operations, infrastructure expansion projects, and high-stakes crisis management assignments across India and neighbouring countries, Kaustav Palit reached a defining moment in his career.
Seeking to bridge execution with strategy, policy, and long-term decision-making, Palit joined the Executive Post Graduate Programme (EPGP) at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore for academic year 2027.
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Today, he is leveraging the programme’s academic rigour and global exposure to prepare for a future shaping India’s energy, aviation, and infrastructure landscape. Know his views about the program and why he chose it.
1. After spending nearly a decade at IOCL and taking on significant responsibilities in crisis operations and aviation fuel expansion, what made you decide that this was the right time to return to the classroom?
The honest answer is that the decision was both a pull and a push. The pull was mostly intellectual. I had spent around nine years in operations, commercials, and business development in the energy sector. At Indian Oil, one of India’s largest energy majors, I led aviation fuel operations and commercial strategy across 40 airports in the eastern sector, managing business exceeding ₹5,500 crore annually. My work was closely linked to infrastructure development and equitable growth — I led the commissioning of fuel facilities at seven airports in underserved regions, generating ₹130 crore in revenue and enabling connectivity under India’s regional aviation expansion. The commissioning of facilities at Darbhanga Airport during the COVID lockdown, through multi-agency coordination, received national media coverage.
I also had the opportunity to be deputed to Bhutan and supported bilateral fuel infrastructure projects in Nepal. But increasingly, with India’s rapid growth in aviation and its diversifying energy needs, I saw an opportunity to leverage my experience and move beyond operations — toward market structure, policy, capital allocation, and long-term strategy. I could sense the ceiling of what I could do without a more rigorous foundation in business thinking.
The push came from an unexpected direction. In 2024, I led the emergency defueling of a crash-landed Myanmar Air Force aircraft at Aizawl — an operation that averted what could have been a national disaster, requiring simultaneous coordination across defence agencies, civil aviation authorities, and diplomatic channels, under significant time pressure and physical risk. The Chairman’s Special Commendation that followed, and the public acknowledgement from the Hon’ble Minister of Petroleum, were deeply gratifying. But what struck me more was realising that the decisions I was making in those critical hours — about risk, coordination, communication, and outcomes — were not purely operational. They were leadership decisions. And I wanted to be far more decisive and prepared for that kind of leadership going forward. IIM Bangalore’s EPGP — one of the best one-year full-time MBAs globally, designed for experienced professionals — was the right environment for that leap.
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2. Was there a specific professional experience or turning point that made you realize you needed a stronger strategic and leadership perspective beyond your technical and operational expertise
Looking back, two experiences genuinely stand out. The first was my deputation to Bhutan, where I was asked to author Bhutan Oil Corporation’s national Aviation Exposition Manual — a document that would govern ₹75 crore in annual operations and had to be approved by the country’s regulatory body. This was far beyond my technical remit. It required me to understand how a sovereign country’s energy infrastructure intersects with regulatory frameworks, international standards, and bilateral relationships. It brought me to the realisation that the most consequential challenges in energy are not technical — they are strategic and relational. That realisation feels even more urgent today, as we watch the global energy landscape being reshaped by geopolitics.
The second was a corporate business development project I led at IOCL, where I assessed 25 national highway corridors to identify high-potential Auto-LNG markets. The project involved traffic density modelling, HSD sales analysis, infrastructure proximity mapping, and state incentive frameworks — ultimately projecting ₹1,841 crore in revenue potential across 390 TMT per year of LNG demand. That project showed me the tremendous opportunity India has in its energy transition — and the gap between executing a plan and being the person who builds the strategic case for it. I wanted to close that gap and complement my real-world experience with stronger analytical and strategic capabilities. That brought me to IIMB.
3. Many professionals hesitate to leave a successful career trajectory for higher education. What factors gave you the confidence to make this transition at a peak stage of your career?
I will be honest — the decision was not without risk. I had Outstanding ratings across all my years at IOCL, with awards and recognitions from the Chairman and Executive Director on multiple occasions. I handled a sensitive role with a growing portfolio of responsibility and a clear internal trajectory. Leaving meant resignation — the programme requires full-time enrollment. And yet, I found the maths surprisingly clear when I thought about it honestly.
The first factor was conviction about the direction. I knew I wanted to move toward management consulting in energy, infrastructure, and digital transformation. That transition is far harder to make from within a PSU without the signalling and network that a top MBA provides. The question was not whether to make the move, but when.
The second was the quality of the validation I had received. A GMAT Focus score of 705 — equivalent to 750 on the classic scale — admits from ISB and IIM Calcutta, a shortlist from NUS, and a merit scholarship at IIM Bangalore all acted as strong signals. When the best institutions are telling you that you belong in their classrooms, it would be a mistake to ignore that.
The third was timing. I was nine years in — experienced enough to have real perspective to bring to the classroom and beyond, but not so senior that the transition would close doors rather than open them. The window was right, and I chose to act on it.
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4. How has the Executive Post Graduate Programme at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore changed the way you think about business strategy, leadership, and decision-making so far?
The most significant shift has been in how I frame problems. In operations and commercials, I was trained to identify the constraint and design solutions around it — which works well in the Indian execution landscape. At IIMB, I have been exposed to frameworks that force me to ask prior questions: What is the real decision being made here? Who are the actors and what are their incentive structures? What does the data actually say versus what does it appear to say?
For instance, working through Porter’s Five Forces and VRIO analysis for our Competition & Strategy project taught me how to decompose competitive advantage in a way that holds up to scrutiny. In Financial Accounting, working through DuPont decomposition and cash flow analysis has meant I now instinctively ask whether reported performance reflects real economic returns. In Entrepreneurial Management, building the business case for a campus cycle-sharing venture — where we developed a live MVP deployed across four top-tier campuses — forced me to think about unit economics, customer acquisition, and scalability in a way that operational roles simply do not require.
Perhaps most importantly, the programme has equipped me with the right analytical tools and made me far more comfortable with structured decision-making under ambiguity.
5. Coming from an energy and infrastructure background, which aspects of the programme have been most relevant in helping you bridge operational execution with long-term strategic thinking?
The Indian energy landscape is undergoing rapid transformation with India having a real chance to catch up to developed countries. For this, I believe young dynamic leaders with the right experience, credentials and motivation are required for which one year MBA programs are a natural fit.
In the EPGP, the Decision Sciences coursework has been particularly valuable — working through linear programming models for analysing supply chain, resource optimisation and applying hypothesis testing to real market data (I ran a statistical study using python programming on the ‘Friday Effect’ across six global stock indices over 20 years) has sharpened my quantitative rigour significantly. In my energy career, I made investment decisions worth crores on IRR projections and feasibility studies, but my statistical toolkit was largely intuitive. Now it is more disciplined.
The Designing Organisations module has been equally relevant. Energy companies — especially PSUs — are deeply complex organisations with layered hierarchies, competing mandates, and enormous coordination challenges. Facing real work problems or difficult IR environments, we were not always equipped to handle them to the best of our capability. Understanding process design, control systems, and how organisations change has helped me contextualise and articulate challenges I lived through for nearly a decade.
6. What are the key leadership skills or capabilities you hope to develop through this programme that you believe will be critical for the next phase of your career?
To me, three stand out. The first is structured communication — the ability to take complex, ambiguous problems and present them with clarity and conviction to senior stakeholders. Consultants live and die by this capability, and while I have always been comfortable with public speaking — I was a finalist in multiple national-level debates at IOCL — the programme is training me to communicate analytically, not just persuasively.
The second is cross-functional leadership. My energy career was largely within a defined domain — aviation fuel, LPG, infrastructure. Going forward, I want to work on problems that cut across functions, industries, and geographies. I believe that industries and innovations are becoming increasingly modular, and cross functional thinking is most important. The programme’s diverse cohort -professionals from finance, technology, manufacturing, pharma, and consulting is itself a training ground for this.
The third is what I would call calibrated ambition — knowing which problems are worth working on and why. Energy transition, digital infrastructure, sustainable logistics — these are generational challenges. I want to be among the people who shape and lead them, not just execute within them. The programme is helping me build the analytical and leadership foundation to credibly aspire to that role.
7. Looking ahead, what are your long-term aspirations, and how do you see the Executive Post Graduate Programme helping you create a larger impact within the energy sector or beyond?
In the near term, I want to move into management consulting — specifically in energy, aviation infrastructure, and digital transformation, with firms that operate and lead in strategy and execution. My background in large-scale infrastructure operations and commercials, bilateral energy partnerships, and business development gives me a perspective that is genuinely differentiated in that space.
In the longer term, my aspiration is to be part of the leadership of large infrastructure platforms — particularly in airports and energy sector, where India’s growth story will be written over the next two decades. India is commissioning new airports at a rate the world has rarely seen; the intersection of aviation infrastructure, energy supply chains, and digital transformation is a space I understand deeply and care about enormously.
The IIMB EPGP is the bridge that makes this journey credible — it provides the knowledge, the alumni network, and the academic rigour that allows someone with extensive real-world experience to walk into rooms where large decisions are made.
Also, recently I was nominated by IIM Bangalore from EPGP to the Berlin Global Dialogue, a platform that brings together global leaders from business, policy, and academia. Opportunities like these reinforce my belief that the future of energy leadership will require professionals who can operate comfortably across technology, policy, infrastructure, and global markets.
8. If you could give one piece of advice to mid-career professionals who are considering stepping out of their comfort zone to pursue executive education, what would it be?
Apply the same rigour to this decision that you would to any major investment decision — and then trust the output.
Most mid-career professionals I have spoken to who are hesitant about further education are not actually uncertain about the value of the programme. They are uncertain about themselves — about whether they are good enough, whether they will fit in, whether giving up a successful career trajectory is worth the risk. That uncertainty is understandable, but I now believe is also largely unfounded.
If you have built real expertise, led real teams, and delivered real outcomes — and if you are genuinely curious about the next level of thinking — you will not just survive a top-tier programme, you will thrive in it. And the cohort you join will be among the most intellectually engaging, professionally accomplished, and generously helpful people you will ever be in a room with.
The real risk is not in making the move. The real risk I feel is in spending another five years wondering what you might have become if you had.
