Leading through disruption at the 2026 India Business Conference
By Nivedita Sundararajan ’26 MBA
The 2026 India Business Conference (IBC) welcomed 250 attendees, 15 speakers across nine sessions to the Kellogg Global Hub. Beginning in 1995, this year’s gathering marked its 23rd edition; however, there was a time when it looked like the conference might not happen at all.
When plans fall apart
I was co-chair of the 2026 IBC along with Aayush Khanna ’26 MBA and Shubham Gupta ’26 MBA. Together, we led a committee of 45 students. By early spring we had everything in place: Speakers were confirmed for April 11, vendors were selected and contracts were sitting in my inbox waiting for signatures. Our theme was The India Question: How India Leads Growth and Innovation amid Global Uncertainty. Little did we know we'd have to navigate the second half of that title.
As the conflict in the Middle East escalated and international travel got messy, speakers started writing to us about cancelled flights and rebooked routes. A few candidly shared they weren't sure it was safe to fly at all. With the conference less than two weeks out, we made one decision right away: speaker safety came first. Nobody argued with that. It just made everything else harder.
By the time the third cancellation came in, I had vendor contracts on my desk and day-of payments ready to send. I decided the vendors needed to hear from me before I had answers, so I told them we might need to move the date.
We had seen the situation getting worse over the previous weeks, and as a team we had already talked through the “what ifs” before we were forced to. We put every option on the table: cancel, postpone, go virtual or rebuild. There was no playbook for this, so we had started sketching our own. When the moment came, we already had options to choose from.
We chose to rebuild.
Rebuilding in six weeks
In retrospect, deciding to rebuild was the “easy” part. The harder part was standing in front of the team — who were each balancing final exams, career recruiting and preparations for graduation — 10 days before the conference date and telling them that months of finished work would need to be redone. What I'll remember is that the team remained by our side: offers of support and contacts started coming in that same evening — and that carried the rebuild.
Rebuilding meant resecuring almost everything. Work that had taken us months the first time — outreach, sponsorships, marketing, logistics — got redone in a fraction of the time. Of the 15 speakers who took the stage in May, all but one were confirmed in those final six weeks leading to the conference. Two things made it possible.
The first was Professor Mohanbir Sawhney, our faculty advisor, who backed us the entire way. He helped us think through the hardest calls. The second was the alumni community that showed up. They opened their networks, made introductions and helped us rebuild a speaker lineup, which I genuinely thought might take another year to put together. IBC is 30 years old, and it turns out a lot of people feel some ownership of it. In the end, that’s what saved us.
At last, the conference day arrives
Dean Francesca Cornelli kicked off the day, followed by a welcome from the Consul General of India in Chicago. HCLTech CEO C. Vijayakumar gave the opening keynote on leading through ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information. Professor Sawhney sat down with Sam Pitroda, a technology pioneer who led India's telecom revolution, for a conversation that highlighted the country’s telecom transformation. A founders conversation featured the team behind Kolkata Chai Co., the New York-based authentic masala chai brand founded by two Indian American brothers which has expanded into national retail. Indian tennis legend Vijay Amritraj closed the day with journalist Kavita Chhibber, grabbing the room’s attention with Davis Cup stories.
The Go-to-Market (GTM) Challenge
This year’s conference saw something new: the first Kellogg IBC Global GTM Challenge, a market-entry competition pairing MBA teams with seven Indian startups expanding into the United States. While the main conference moved dates; the challenge didn't. Finals took place in the first week of April, exactly as planned, in the same days everything else was being rebuilt.
Over 100 participants and 45+ teams from 14 business schools across the U.S. and Europe worked directly with founders on real go-to-market problems. Finalist teams presented their projects at the Global Hub, judged by Professor Sawhney; Sajal Kohli '95 MBA, senior partner at McKinsey & Company and Stefano Quaranta, GTM partnerships Lead at CADDi.
Running a new competition complementary to the conference while we were rebuilding programming was not ideal. More than anything else we did this year, the challenge says what IBC is really about. Founders in India received meaningful strategic support while students on two continents gained experience solving a real-world problem no case study can give.
A friend of mine attended this year, and she walked away with a conversation that became her summer internship.
1995 to 2026
One moment put the year in perspective for me. Kohli, who had helped organize the very first IBC when he was a student, was back at Kellogg 31 years later, moderating a session and judging the GTM finals. The person who helped start this conference was in the room evaluating the newest conference feature. I keep coming back to that.
Walking away with two key lessons
I came into this year believing the plan was the plan. It isn't. A good plan matters much less than a team that can throw it out and build a new one in six weeks and a community that picks up the phone when you call. I watched 45 people step up and redo months of work without being asked twice. Of everything from this year, that is what I am most proud of.
The other lesson is about decisions. The hard ones didn't arrive when we were ready. They arrived in the middle of finals, with money already committed and information we didn't have. What made them manageable was having done the uncomfortable thinking early, before we needed to.
IBC returns next year, and the GTM Challenge will grow. I'm handing this off and moving to the alumni side, where people seem to stay involved for decades. Now I understand why.
Read next: When the right people are in the room
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Kellogg School of Management or Northwestern University.