P. Ranganath Nayak

Chairman and CEO (retired)

Examiner Club Historian

WEBSITE:
www.prnayak.org

PAST EMPLOYERS:   

Cytel, Inc., Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., Tata Motors, Arthur D. Little, Inc., Boston Consulting Group

Publications of Interest: 

• Book on Creativity and Innovation, Breakthroughs! by P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham   

• Book on Product Development, Product Juggernauts, by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and P. Ranganath Nayak, published by the Harvard Business School Press

• Ranganath Nayak’s Talk on Creativity and Innovation, Examiner Club,
  12/15/2021 

• Ranganath Nayak’s Talk on Why I became a Citizen 

• Emerson and The Examiner Club by Alfred G. Litton 

• A History of the Unitarians and the Universalists in the United States, by Joseph Henry Allen, a founder of the Examiner Club

The “P” in my name is for “Pangal,” a tiny village on the southwest coast of India, in a region called the Konkan. One of the languages spoken there is Konkani, my mother tongue. About 200 years ago, my family migrated from Pangal to a slightly bigger village about 20 miles north, and, starting in the 1820s, built a grand joint family home that is still in use and at one time housed more than 100 people.
I was a student in a Jesuit School in Bombay in the 1950s, and am now retired and living in Belmont.

Soon after my arrival in the USA in the Fall of 1963, I met my wife-to-be, Sandy Tompkins, at an Israeli folk dance in the Radcliffe Quad. We had a wonderfully happy marriage, during which I learned that there was more, much more to life beyond STEM. She was an archaeologist-cum-social anthropologist.

During my working life, I spent 8 years doing hard-core Mechanical Engineering, after receiving a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. I then was in Management Consulting for 24 years, during which I wrote two books on Innovation, Breakthroughs! and Product Juggernauts. I then ran a startup doing advanced statistical work for clinical trials of medicines for 14 years, before completing a successful sale of the company. It continues to flourish.

I joined the Examiner Club in 1988.

My avocations are mentoring, studying creativity and innovation, volunteering to help a public elementary school, and fighting climate change. My time now is spent in volunteer activities, among which are: 

• mentoring young entrepreneurs at MIT through MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service

• helping the principal of a public elementary school in Boston as part of Friends of the Bradley

• working on civic problems in the town of Belmont, MA, including strengthening the desire to fight climate change, about which more in a moment, and 

• helping the Examiner Club to flourish and thrive. 

I love to cook, discuss philosophy, politics, and science, and go for walks. 

I have replaced half of my front lawn with a native habitat of plants that invite birds, butterflies, and beneficial insects, and hold rainwater. I got help from the St. Kateri Conservation Center. I believe this is a way to fight climate change, a topic on which I have given two talks at the Examiner Club. I am also helping to create a Miyawaki Forest in Belmont, a mini-forest conceptualized in the 1970s by Japanese horticulturalist Akira Miyawaki. 

Here, students outline the planned Belmont forest.