Dr. Srikumar Rao

Srikumar S. Rao (born 11 April 1951) is the founder of The Rao Institute and a coach for executives and entrepreneurs who are spiritually inclined.

He is a former business school professor and creator of Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM), a course designed to effect personal transformation. He has authored Are You Ready to Succeed: Unconventional Strategies for Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life, which is an international best seller, and Happiness at Work: Be Resilient, Motivated and Successful – No Matter What, a bestseller on Inc.'s "The Business Book Bestseller List."

His book Modern Wisdom, Ancient Roots: The Movers and Sheker’s Guide to Unstoppable Success was an Amazon bestseller. His latest book The Seventh Jar – Your Path to Personal Mastery and Success was published by Bloomsbury in 2025.

He is also the creator and narrator of the audio-course The Personal Mastery Program.

Biography Rao was born in Bombay (current day Mumbai) in 1951, and received his schooling in Delhi, Rangoon and Kolkata. He graduated from Narendrapur, the flagship school of the Ramakrishna Mission system in West Bengal. He was a physics major at St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and subsequently obtained an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Rao then came to the United States as a doctoral student and obtained a Ph.D. in marketing from Columbia Business School, New York in 1980. From 1977 to 1978, Rao was a financial executive in the mergers and acquisition division of the Continental Group.

Rao was a marketing professor at Baruch College, City University of New York from 1983 to 1985.

Academia career In 1994, Rao created and began teaching a course known as Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) at Long Island University. He moved the course to Columbia Business School in 1999 and taught CPM at Columbia until 2005. He has also taught CPM at London Business School, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

Rao currently teaches Creativity and Personal Mastery privately, in major cities including New York, San Francisco and London, and in corporate settings. CPM has had its own alumni association since it was a course at Columbia.

Training magazine described the course in its Leadership issue of May/June 2012.

Personal Rao is married to Meena Rao, the Director of Organic Chemistry Laboratories at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Selected publications