In a class packed with bankers, consultants, and tech wunderkinds, Snehal stands out at London Business School for a different reason: she has turned unconventional career pivots into a coherent leadership story. As part of Poets&Quants’ “2025 MBAs To Watch,” her profile captures a rising business leader who has moved fluidly across sectors and continents, while keeping a sharp focus on impact and inclusion. From navigating male-dominated industries to spearheading initiatives that give underrepresented voices a seat at the table, Snehal’s trajectory reflects both the global mindset and practical rigor that define LBS. Her journey offers a window into how tomorrow’s MBAs are reshaping what it means to build a career in business-less about linear progression, more about agility, purpose, and the courage to rewrite the script.
Snehal at London Business School From Bilateral Trade to Global Boardrooms
Raised in the crucible of India-UK trade negotiations, Snehal arrived in Regent’s Park with an uncommon fluency in how policy, capital, and culture intersect. At London Business School, she has turned that bilateral lens into a global one, stress-testing tradecraft in classrooms where a debate on supply chains can leap from Mumbai to Mexico City in a single case discussion. Her day now oscillates between dissecting cross-border M&A in Corporate Finance, pressure-cooker roleplays in Negotiation & Bargaining, and late-night project calls that span three time zones. Along the way, she has emerged as a quiet force in cohort life, often stitching together classmates’ perspectives into pragmatic frameworks that resonate far beyond the lecture hall.
- Background: India-UK trade advisory and policy analysis
- Campus Roles: Emerging Markets Club, Women in Business, student consulting projects
- Focus Areas: Trade strategy, board governance, sustainable supply chains
| From | To | Skill Shift |
|---|---|---|
| Bilateral deal rooms | Global board strategy | Policy to enterprise vision |
| Tariff models | Portfolio risk maps | Cost to risk-weighted impact |
| Country briefs | ESG board dashboards | Analysis to accountability |
Those transitions are playing out in real time through her project work with multinational clients, where she now reads board agendas with the same rigor she once reserved for trade clauses.Snehal’s London base has effectively become a launchpad: she shadowed non-executive directors through an elective on Boardroom Dynamics, joined a live advisory engagement assessing geopolitical risk for an asset manager, and co-designed a workshop helping family businesses think like listed companies. In conversations with classmates, she frames leadership through three filters – integrity, interdependence, and impact – a triad she believes will matter more than ever as tomorrow’s boards navigate an era defined less by borders and more by networks.
How an Emerging Market Background Shapes Leadership Ambitions
Raised amid the volatility of currency swings, infrastructure bottlenecks, and policy U-turns, Snehal learned early that ambition in business is less about smooth forecasts and more about navigating productive chaos. Rather of being discouraged by constraints, she began to see them as a live case study in resourcefulness, resilience, and improvisation. In boardrooms that are still learning how to speak the language of innovation, she has had to combine analytical rigor with cultural fluency-translating between founders, regulators, and global investors. That experience forged a leadership vision grounded in realism: big ideas must survive small margins, unpredictable regulation, and markets where trust is still earned face-to-face.
At London Business School, this outlook translates into a distinct leadership ambition: to bridge what she calls the “emerging market ingenuity gap” with global capital and technology. Rather than copy‑pasting Western playbooks, she is determined to export emerging market problem‑solving to the world. Her goals are defined by:
- Inclusive growth – backing business models that pull informal workers and small suppliers into the formal economy.
- Frugal innovation – building products that work in low‑infrastructure, low‑income environments first, then scaling up.
- Ethical scale – treating governance, not growth, as the decisive competitive edge.
| Emerging Market Lesson | Leadership Ambition at LBS |
|---|---|
| Scarcity sharpens priorities | Invest only in problems that matter systemically |
| Regulation is a moving target | Lead with policy‑aware,long‑term strategies |
| Informal networks drive trust | Build coalitions across sectors and borders |
Inside the London Business School Experience Action Learning Networks and Career Pivot Strategies
In an ordinary MBA classroom,case studies end when the bell rings. In Snehal’s London Business School journey, that’s where the real work starts. Through Action Learning projects, she rotated between roles as strategist, operator, and storyteller for live company challenges – from rethinking a fintech‘s go-to-market plan to mapping a sustainable supply chain for a consumer brand. These projects weren’t hypothetical: founders dialed in, data was messy, and stakes were high. Snehal’s week often oscillated between crunching unit economics in a syndicate room and field-testing customer assumptions across London’s startup corridors. The learning was deliberately uncomfortable and intensely collaborative,accelerated by classmates who brought experience from private equity,social impact,big tech,and family businesses.
- Peer-led labs where classmates dissected real promotion decisions and boardroom politics.
- Live consulting briefs with non-profits, forcing commercial rigor and mission alignment.
- Cross-cohort networks that opened hidden job markets across Europe and the Middle East.
| Network | Purpose | Career Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Sector Clubs | Decode hiring cycles | Targeted role switching |
| Alumni Circles | Reality checks on pivots | Refined job search strategy |
| Action Learning Teams | Test leadership style | Credible stories for interviews |
For Snehal, the real currency on campus wasn’t grades; it was reputation within these networks. Rather than chase every coffee chat, she built a compact “career pivot squad” – a handful of peers, alumni, and coaches who challenged her assumptions on everything from geography to function. Together, they stress-tested three potential paths: staying in her pre-MBA industry, jumping to big tech, or joining an early-stage venture. With each Action Learning engagement, she collected proof points for interviews: a turnaround she led in a lagging project; a conflict she diffused between a founder and investor; a product idea she killed before it burned cash.The result was a pivot strategy that felt less like a leap of faith and more like a series of disciplined experiments, executed in one of the most global and demanding MBA ecosystems in the world.
Maximizing the MBA in 2025 Snehal’s Playbook for Building Influence in a Fragmented Global Economy
For Snehal, the MBA is less a credential and more a laboratory for testing influence in real time across geographies, sectors, and cultures. In an era where supply chains are rewired overnight and political fault lines redraw markets, she treats each classroom debate, syndicate project, and trek as a low-risk sandbox for high-stakes leadership. She leans into courses on global macroeconomics and behavioral strategy not to collect frameworks, but to stress-test how ideas travel from London to Lagos to Jakarta. Her calendar is engineered around influence-building moments-cross-club collaborations, faculty-led research, and live projects with multinational partners-where she can practice turning complex, conflicting stakeholder incentives into shared momentum. Influence, in her view, comes from showing up with context, humility, and a bias for execution, then amplifying the voices in the room that are usually sidelined.
- Map power networks across campuses, alumni, and industry forums
- Own a niche at the intersection of sustainability, fintech, and emerging markets
- Prototype leadership through stretch roles in student governance and clubs
- Curate coalitions that link classmates, faculty, and practitioners on real-world problems
| Move | Influence Goal |
|---|---|
| Leading a cross-border impact fund project | Translate local insights into global capital flows |
| Co-designing a module with visiting executives | Bridge academic theory and boardroom decisions |
| Moderating high-stakes policy debates | Shape narratives on risk, regulation, and inclusion |
Her playbook rejects the myth of the single “global leader” and rather backs a portfolio approach to influence. She builds micro-communities-LatAm founders in London, African fintech operators on exchange, European regulators on campus visits-and then connects them with precision. That means obsessing over details asymmetries, asking who is not in the room, and using the MBA platform to convene unlikely alliances. She experiments with different mediums of impact: data-driven memos that travel up to decision-makers,tightly run workshops that generate policy pilots,and short,sharp presentations that cut through noise in investor meetings.The aim is not just to graduate with a network, but with a track record of having bent that network toward outcomes that matter in a fractured, volatile global economy.
The Way Forward
As she prepares to cross the graduation stage, Snehal stands as a representative of the broader transformations reshaping business education in 2025: global in outlook, grounded in purpose, and unafraid to blur the lines between sectors and disciplines. Her journey from London Business School’s lecture halls to the next chapter of her career underscores what an MBA can be at its best-a platform not just for advancement, but for impact.
In a cohort defined by volatility, innovation, and accelerating change, Snehal’s story offers a clear through line: rigorous preparation matched with a willingness to experiment and lead. It is this blend of resilience, curiosity, and intent that makes her one of Poets&Quants’ MBAs to Watch-and a name likely to surface again as the future she’s training for begins to take shape.
