A few weeks ago, three people associated with our Foundation since its inception met. One was our retired Founding CEO. The other, a retired Chief Secretary of State, was a member of our first Board, while I had joined in the very early days. Appropriately, we met in the office where it all began over 25 years ago. It would have been natural if we had just reminisced about the old days, armed with stories—some warm, some funny—that explain how we grew.

But all three of us live in the present. Our appreciation of the new remains keen, and our self-critical lens is never put away. So, even as we relived wonderful milestones, our conversation kept jogging back to things we did not do well, to regrets about slipped opportunities, and mistakes we could have avoided. Foundational habits die hard. It struck me that we were not just remembering the thrilling privileges of the ‘pioneer’, but constantly dissecting errors in our early strategies. A fly on the wall might have thought this was a cold, dispassionate review, when it was actually a warm, enthusiastic recall of a time when we wanted to do nothing else with our lives.

We said our goodbyes with a hug, the bond unspeakably strong. Driving home, I played back our conversation. To me, that exchange defined how our Foundation evolved, giving us our identity, culture, and approach to work. From a handful of people in 2001, how did these early behaviours percolate down the line as we expanded to 3,000 people across 60 districts? Shorthand like ‘organization DNA’ does not do justice. The founding CEO spent over two years—before the Foundation was even established—researching and articulating our vision, priorities, and organizational character. The CEO handpicked his team, spent months working closely with each member, and led by example, showing what mattered most and what mattered least. Day upon day, the organisation built its culture.

Culture is a fuzzy word. To sharpen our understanding, I will pick just one aspect running through every strand from Day One. The Foundation was a learning organization. It is the core of our working style; the reason we enjoyed our work and learnt not to take ourselves seriously, even though the work itself was serious. It made us light of heart and light on our feet.

Put aside all those researched tomes on “Learning organisations” and allow me to just make sense through personal examples. On my second day, I was on a bus to Gulbarga. My assignment? To attach myself to the District Education Office and observe its working: to learn about public education from the perspective of a government functionary; to see how hierarchy works, how some things suffocate while others function; and to see how differently public training programmes run compared to corporate ones. I learnt why, on a 14-hour bus ride, my lady colleague did not take a single sip of water—because there would be no proper toilets until we arrived. I had to write this down not as a conventional tour report, but as an immersive, introspective diary. The following week brought another immersive visit to government schools in one of India’s most disadvantaged districts. Each member was on a similar journey of discovery. While I was in Karnataka, our CEO and two other colleagues were doing the same in Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh. When we pooled our notes, we were building an ever-sharpening understanding of a complex issue: equity and quality in education.

Over the next six months, the Founding CEO brought India’s finest educationists, practitioners, and academics to our office conference room. The early members grew by listening to an eclectic spectrum of civil society leaders, senior civil servants, and public intellectuals who shared knowledge and insights. Not everything they said was agreeable, but the focus was on absorbing; deciding what to keep and what to discard could come later.

Within a year, we launched large-scale programmes. To some it looked foolhardy, but we were committed to initiatives where speed, scale, and quality had to merge. We made mistakes but did not hide them. Each programme champion would present their project, warts, and all, to an invited educationist, NGO head, or education secretary. We learnt to call out our errors and acknowledge things we still did not understand. What we were building was a climate where admitting ignorance is a core strength, not a vulnerability. We grew accustomed to bathing in public view. The guests knew we wanted to learn. Some were kind, others brutal, but they all told us what they believed. At the end of these sessions, we brainstormed. Sometimes the CEO would not budge; other times he would suggest a major redesign.

This was not just happy chemistry. In our own way, we had created an institutional architecture - structured, open review clinics built directly into the operating calendar to enable honest reflection, ensuring the practice outlives the pioneers. What were we building through such measures? Counter-intuitive it might seem, but the organisation was building a spine of transparency, humility, and self-confidence. A combination of transparency, an ability to laugh at ourselves, the drive to improve, and a mandate to think big, enabled ego-free assessment and agility.

That is why the Foundation’s leaders have openly written in mainstream media about things we got wrong, using our errors to alert others. When they wrote about the perils of silver bullets like digital learning, or advocate for teacher capacity, foundational literacy, and numeracy, it stems from a hard, dispassionate distillation of our own experiences. Being a learning organisation requires the sublimation of both organisational and leadership egos. It percolates into how employees write appraisals, and how people embrace different roles across their careers. It lives in the freedom for the youngest recruit to pull the leg of a veteran, the culture of self-deprecatory storytelling during intense meetings, and the way critique is received regardless of age or seniority. It translates directly into the spirit of the organisation’s operating plans.

When an organisation grows from a pioneering group of 50 to a 3,000-strong team across 350 locations, not every node will demonstrate this perfectly. There will be aberrations—the odd dictator or insecure control freak. But if they remain exceptions and if the larger spirit stays intact, the leaders can take heart.

The retired Founding CEO and hero of this piece? Dileep Ranjekar.

(S. Giridhar is one of the earliest members of Azim Premji Foundation)

Published on September 28, 2026