A guest lecture to the MBA batch at O.P. Jindal Global University making the case that Excel fluency is a genuine lever on business efficiency, not a clerical skill.
Long before anyone was talking about AI copilots, the quiet workhorse of every business was — and still is — the spreadsheet. This guest lecture, delivered by Akshay Narayan to the MBA batch at O.P. Jindal Global University in October 2023, made the case that fluency with Excel is not a clerical skill but a genuine lever on business efficiency.
Titled Cracking the Code: Excel's Impact on Business Efficiency, the session moved past formulas-for-their-own-sake to the thing that actually matters: how the right structure, the right analysis and the right habits inside a spreadsheet can save hours, prevent errors and turn raw data into decisions. It was aimed squarely at students about to enter roles where being fast and right with data is a daily expectation.
The message to the room was simple. The tool is ordinary; the leverage is not. Learn to think in it well, and a spreadsheet stops being a place to store numbers and becomes a place to reason about a business.
This was one of the Academy's early institutional engagements — a reminder that the modern-workplace skills we now teach at scale started as conversations with students in a lecture hall.
