Dr. Daneshwar
Sharma
Professor & Director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Jaipur Business Communication
What did you want to be growing up?
A poet, honestly. I just didn't know yet that the world would also pay me to teach people how to argue clearly.
A leader that inspires you?
Mahatma Gandhi — because he understood that communication is moral before it is rhetorical.
Your go-to comfort food?
Daal-baati-churma on a Jaipur winter evening. A meal that listens to you as much as it feeds you.
Describe your current role
I serve as Professor & Director of Business Communication at Jaipuria Jaipur. Eighteen years in, my work runs along three rails — teaching MBA students how to write, speak, and listen for a working life; mentoring faculty as a former Dean of Student Affairs and Area Chair; and running JaipuriaTalks on YouTube, where I get to bring the people I'd love my students to meet into their feeds. I've also taught internationally at Fiji National University, and that experience still shapes how I think about classrooms.
What role does institute culture play in your work?
Communication is the most honest x-ray of an institution's culture. You can tell within a week of joining Jaipuria whether people speak to each other across hierarchy — they do, and that changes what students absorb without anyone teaching it. We've built a campus where a first-year MBA can disagree with a director in a corridor without it being a Big Moment. That permission is what makes the rest of the curriculum work.
From Struggles to Smiles
Highs and lows of the journey
The highs are seeing student communication go from cautious to confident in two semesters, being trusted as Associate Editor of Business and Professional Communication Quarterly (Routledge–SAGE), and conducting 50+ Management Development Programs for senior bankers and business leaders. The lows are the slow patches — research that takes years to peer-review, a YouTube episode that didn't land — but in academia, the long arc almost always pays back.
What do you love beyond the classroom?
Poetry, and the use of poetry as therapy — I serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Poetry Therapy. I read sacred texts and literature with the same attention I'd give an HBR case, because they often have richer leadership material. And of course JaipuriaTalks, which is half hobby, half mission — bringing thought leadership to students in a format their thumbs will actually open.
Selected Talks
"Clear writing is clear thinking, and clear thinking is the most underrated leadership skill of our time."
