July 2026 | Senior Leadership

Nothing to Prove, Still Something to Learn

Hemant Virkar has spent his whole career out front. A graduate degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins. Three decades building enterprise health and research systems for federal health agencies. A company, Digital Infuzion, that he founded and still leads. The one credential missing from that record is time in a business classroom, because he never sat in one. So, when he enrolled in Wharton’s Advanced Management Program, his decision raised the question accomplished leaders rarely say out loud: what could possibly be left to learn? Virkar went to find out.

What drew him was where the program would put him. Inside the classroom, he would hear the most current thinking from faculty who research and advise in the field every day. Outside it, he would face one situation after another where his title carried no weight at all. “Real growth happens when you’re uncomfortable,” says Virkar. “You learn from being in difficult situations with others, where you are required to decide and act. You learn horizontally, and you learn vertically.”

The Feedback Came First

The work started before he arrived in Philadelphia. AMP asks participants to interview their own leadership teams, so Virkar put a short list of questions to his executives. The answers did not flatter him. Yes, he was strong on the big picture and good at connecting the dots. But his team wanted more from him in the places that matter most: take on the hard conversations, balance the drive for results with empathy, and listen with real intention.

Listening went to the top of his list. His AMP coach showed him a pattern he had never named: that he listened in order to respond rather than to understand. A tool from the classroom gave him a way to work on it. The Most Respectful Interpretation, known in coaching circles as MRI, asks you to assume the most generous reading of a person’s behavior before you react. Virkar found it far easier to understand than to apply. Asked to grade his own progress, he puts himself at “about halfway.”

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Day one set the tone. The room held founders and chief executives, each one accustomed to being the most accomplished person in any room, and the first instruction was to set those identities down. Get uncomfortable, they were told, because that is where the real learning happens. Virkar took the instruction literally. Whenever he caught himself wanting to avoid something, he did it anyway.

That is now his advice to anyone weighing attendance in the program. “Decide what you are after,” he counsels. “If it is classroom theory, you will get the latest from the faculty. But if you also want the kind of learning that changes how you lead, be ready to let down your guard and get used to being uncomfortable.”

A Lesson on the Water

The lesson that pulled everything together came on the Schuylkill River, where AMP participants learn to row and race in eight-person shells. After watching the group on rowing machines, the coach put Virkar in the stroke seat, the position that sets the pace for every other rower in the boat.

On the water, the boat could not find its rhythm. A stronger teammate believed the stroke seat should have been his. Virkar says the pre-AMP version of himself would have defended that seat. Instead, he remembered what the crew had agreed to that morning. They had named themselves the Gladiators and set two rules for the day: stronger together, and win with fun. He offered to switch.

The crew hesitated, then swapped. The pace locked in, the boat began to move, and the day ended with the Gladiators winning their race. The victory is not what made the memory stick. “I saw first-hand that leadership can come from behind,” Virkar says. “As a founder and CEO, I’m used to being the person out front. But I don’t always have to be the one setting the pace.”

Five Weeks Without Him

Ask most chief executives what keeps them from a program like AMP and the answer is rarely the coursework. It is the five weeks away. Virkar treated his absence as a design problem. Before leaving, he set clear decision boundaries for his team; named the principles and guardrails they should use; and made his chief of staff the single point of contact, with authority to pull him in only when something truly required it. Each evening he read one summary email and sent back his decisions.

Reality then tested his resolve. Digital Infuzion serves federal health agencies, and Virkar was away during a stretch of real turbulence for government contractors: a shutdown, funding uncertainty, and cuts that reached across the agencies the company serves. By his own description he is a fast starter, the kind of leader who sees a problem and moves to fix it. This time he stayed out. His team navigated all of it, and in five weeks they pulled him in exactly once. The structure held. So did he.

The Leader Who Came Back

When Virkar returned, his team told him he had left as one person and come back as another. The first proof came at the company’s annual retreat. Virkar had always been the loudest voice in the room, and this time he was not. When a discussion began to drift, he held back, and someone else stepped in to steady it. The facilitator remarked on how striking it was to watch him not take control. He had learned to sit with a pause rather than rush to fill the silence.

There was a name for what he was practicing. Early in the program, business advisor and author Ram Charan had reframed the job for him: a leader does not need to be the smartest person in the room, and does not need to be the most influential one either. The leader’s real job is to make the room smarter. “Raising the level of the people around you expands your own capacity,” Virkar says. “Problems get solved without you. Better decisions reach your desk.” For a founder whose identity was forged out front, that meant unlearning the very instinct that built the company.

The unlearning now shapes the work itself. He used the discovery-driven approach to strategy he learned at Wharton to set the company’s direction for the next two years, and he mapped a multiyear path for bringing AI into the firm. He led both efforts the same way: set the direction, then give people room to move. The frameworks came from the classroom. The willingness to step back came from everything else.

At 62, with a long career behind him and, he is quick to add, plenty still ahead, Virkar has one regret about the AMP: “I wish I had done it 20 years sooner.”

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