It is a wonderful winter evening at our home in Delhi. Our guests are business executives with years of company building experience between them. Sumantra is there too with wife Sushmita. Someone veers the conversation towards the falling moral standards of married men and women in Delhi, quoting increasing instances of elopement and scandal. Another points out that this is no different to the "promiscuous West" over which some Indians fondly claim moral superiority. It is the kind of flippant conversation that often punctuates a perfectly intelligent evening. It takes either artful tenacity or native brilliance to restore the balance of the evening.

"I hold a different view on this," says Sumantra trilling his 'r' with the authority of an imperious pedagogue. "This is not about morality-it is about flawed Organisation Design." He then proceeds to explain to a rivetted audience the three central institutions that men are involved with throughout their lives-the government, the place of work, and marriage. Governments through history have evolved, morphed, and adapted to changing contexts from autocracies and plutocracies through monarchies and dictatorships to democracies. Politics of coalition and inclusion predicate the changing needs of our time and respond to the plurality of our polity.

The workplace too, over time, has seen significant changes. It's not enough to think of employees as assets. Perhaps we should think of them as volunteer investors, choosing to invest their talents in the organisations they have joined. It is a very different dynamic to 'command and control'. The context has changed dramatically and the workplace is responding. Now examine the institution of marriage. It was designed at a time when the average lifespan of a male was about 30 years! Today, it is well over 70 and there has been no attempt at redesigning this fundamentally important institution. Strictly monogamous men (like he himself was) would soon be extinct. Such fallibility is intrinsic to the design of any institution whose context has changed dramatically but where the boundaries of design have been held static. Needless to add, Sumantra left the audience totally speechless and carried on innocuously about the Delhi winter.

His genius lay in the simplicity, directness, and everydayness of his postulates. This is clear in his writing-his books and articles directed at the business manager are devoid of the didactic, appeal to the business practitioner, and help the reader learn without being taught. Sumantra once told me that some of his best writing was never read outside of the academic community. Still, he possessed the rare ability to relate to managers across cultures and business contexts and draw insights from what he called the "smell of the place". Not only was his articulation lucid and direct, he was unafraid of speaking his mind. He felt business schools played a role in the clutch of corporate scandals that gripped the US by teaching agency theory and transaction cost economics to 'legitimise' large stock options managers gave themselves, ending in fiascos like Enron. He wrote: "Unlike theories in the physical sciences, theories in the social sciences tend to be self-fulfilling. A theory of sub-atomic particles does not change the behaviour of those particles. A management theory, if it gains enough currency, changes the behaviour of managers. Whether right or wrong to begin with, the theory becomes 'true' as the world comes to conform with its doctrine." His was a strident voice among scholars that compelled attention and urged a bias for action.

When he began collecting Indian contemporary art, he went about it with childlike enthusiasm, relying completely on the advice of good friends to build his collection. "This is simple Ricardian economics", he would tell my wife avidly. "I will use your expertise to build my collection, and your husband can use mine to clarify his business thinking." Once he was having a rambunctious dig at a central piece of work in our collection, saying he could have painted that himself on a good day. I said to him it was a contemplative work and he would see more merit in it after he went through his single malt. "That is precisely my point Vasant," he shot back, "I need the scotch to appreciate your painting, but my Hussain makes my scotch taste better."

I will miss Sumantra, his electrifying presence, his impish challenges and his blue-eyed clarity and charm. He was an extraordinary scholar, a sincere and caring friend, and above all, a rare jewel among men.

Vasant Kumar founded and runs Scriplogix, a boutique life sciences consulting company from Princeton, New Jersey, and can be reached at www.vasant@scriplogix.com. He was earlier VP (Strategic Planning & CIO), Ranbaxy Labs.