Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB) wrapped the eighth Business Excellence Summit (BES) 2026 with a clear brief for students and industry alike: resilience is no longer a crisis slogan. It is a design principle.
The two-day summit, themed “Building Resilient Businesses – Navigating Risk to Shape A Sustainable Future,” brought faculty, alumni, students and senior practitioners into one room to talk leadership, technology, ESG, AI and the unglamorous work of surviving a bad day.
The programme opened with a lamp-lighting ceremony and an inaugural address by Dr. Biswa Swarup Misra. Fr. K.S. Casimir, S.J., set the tone in the theme address: openness, collaboration, and the human edge still matter when organisations try to stay standing. The same session saw the launch of *Echoes*, the BES magazine, and *Unnayan*, the alumni magazine.
Day 1’s keynote came from Mr. Sandeep Bagla, CEO of TRUST Mutual Fund. He offered a compact operating system he called the 4A Framework — Anticipate, Absorb, Adapt and Accelerate — and tied it to AI, accountability, digital infrastructure and responsible leadership.
Two panels followed. “Leadership – Leading for the Long Run” and “Technology – Build to Bend, Not to Break” featured Mr. Srinivas Baratam, Mr. Jaydeep Chakraborty, Mr. Sushant Dwivedy, Mr. Bivas Mishra, Mr. Gaurav Chawla and Ms. Jayati Dwivedy. The conversation stayed practical: resilient leadership, technological transformation, governance, AI and value that lasts beyond the next quarter.
Day 2 opened with an alumnus on the podium. Mr. Himanshu Routray, Director at JLL India and an XIMB graduate, argued that careers, like companies, need a plan for uncertainty: risk management, AI literacy, networks, continuous upskilling, compliance, quality and ethics.
The ESG panel, “Resilience by Design,” moderated by Prof. S.S. Ganesh, brought together Ms. Priyanka Ghosh, Mr. Debasmit Mohanty and Mr. Sambitosh Mohapatra. Adaptability, governance, stakeholders, technology and sustainability were treated as one system, not separate checklists.
The closing panel, “Risk Management Built for the Bad Day,” moderated by Dr. Ritesh Kumar Dubey, featured Mr. Kiran Rana and Mr. Chittaranjan Mohanty. The emphasis was blunt: assess risk before the shock, use AI without surrendering judgement, and keep people in the loop when models fail.
Q&A sessions across both days let students press speakers on entrepreneurship, ethics, career choices, ESG and living with uncertainty. The summit ended with the felicitation of dignitaries and a reminder that BES 2026 was less a conference than a working brief: build organisations that can adapt, stay responsible, and still create value when the map changes.
