‘We Have Labelled Ourselves an Institute of Management, Not Business Management’

OVER THE YEARS, MANAGEMENT education has mirrored societal upheavals and economic pressures. If the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 was an indicator, the thrust on no-holds-barred profiteering is now tempered with environmental, societal and governance con­cerns across prominent management institutions the world over. IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) is no exception. Speaking to Open, Pradyumana Khokle, Dean (Programme), IIMA highlights the substantive changes now in place to groom future business ex­ecutives and make them more ‘responsible’ and ‘contextual’ to the world around them.

What makes IIMA retain the top slot in various B-School surveys year after year?

The quest for excellence. We keep reviewing some of our things and improving on them. For example, the electives in the courses that we offer, changing the syllabus every term, not even each year. It keeps us current in several ways. The re­search, too, evolves. The second part is the way we do it. If you look at executive education, digital marketing programme or senior management programme, they connect very well with the world of practice. It’s a combination of content, approach, review and processes that makes us who we are.

And if you were to rank IIMA globally, where do you think it would stand and why?

In our 2-year MBA programme, Financial Times ranked us 26th. In the 1-year PGPX programme, we were 48th to 62nd. This has been varying over the last three years owing to Covid. Global rankings have parameters on teaching, its effectiveness, the composition of the cohort, how much research gets done in the institute and the profile of the institute itself. Particularly with regard to programmes, there are parameters on the number of electives, foreign nationals, benefits to students before and after the programme by way of career profiles, or plain salary num­bers. There are a bunch of parameters with different weightages. One place where we do take a hit is that our number of appli­cants is large. Typically, therefore, an international applicant would not stand a very good chance of getting in as compared to, say, Harvard Business School. For instance, in our 2-year MBA, there are two lakh applicants for some 400-odd seats. That ratio is unheard of internationally. It affects our rankings since we don’t get international students that easily. If you have cohorts of a certain level, you cannot get international students for that level such easily. Again, if we recruit foreign faculty, the dollar conversion rate is a challenge. We’ve been actually faring well in the benefits of the programme—pre- and post-salary—par­ticularly the PGPX programme, where we’ve been ranked No 1 on the benefits from the programme. But we have been trying to shift the focus away from salaries to profiles. More than a decade ago, we introduced the Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS). It is a placement report that gives in-depth information on the candidate to the recruiter in a standard format, allowing for direct comparisons. It captures data like what is the student’s contribution, whether he likes what he’s learnt, etc.

There seems to be growing appreciation for a 1-year MBA programme rather than a 2-year one.

Management education includes practising managers wherein people are looking for outcome-driven education. Management education is the right place to talk about it. They are asking that if in a particular area they want to specialise, why should they be doing other things that they learn by compulsion in B-Schools? That is where the 1-year MBA evolved. In India, in particular, a fresher joins a 2-year MBA. In most parts of the world, people come with 2-3 years of experience. There is a trend to 1-year MBA worldwide, and it is continuing. Also, the executive edu­cation flavour is changing. Earlier, executive education was one in which the candidate would attend classes and return to the workplace. But now a lot of companies are asking their candidates what they have learnt after they have returned. The companies have given the task of evaluation to the trainers themselves. Therefore, certification-based or evaluation-based executive programmes have picked up the world over. They could be anything from a 3-day specialised certification course to a 2-week one or, in some cases, a 1-year general management programme. They lead to more focused outcomes.

Is a tech degree a must for management education consid­ering how businesses have become technology-focused? What does the talent pool at IIMA look like today?

Frankly, having an Engineering Bachelor’s makes no difference. Where do the best students go after Class 12? They go to tech disciplines, though in the last five years, there has been somewhat of a shift. In our 2-year MBA today, the percentage of engineers is in the mid-60 per cent bracket. Since the last 20 years, this is a noticeable change because it had interim risen to about 85-90 per cent. We get people from disciplines other than science, and also many medicine stu­dents in our 2-year MBA programme. But that changes in the PGPX programme because an MBBS doctor will never take the course and claim he wants to get into financial services.

IIMA is known for its case study approach in imparting management education. Is that the best way out?

We like the case study approach because it brings real life into the classroom in a documented way. My personal bias is for case studies that are long. There are all kinds of data avail­able out there and you have to learn how to glean that data and do the analyses. Sometimes, the case study approach is confused with a case being used as an illustration. That is not a true case study. That is an illustra­tion. In a case study, you’re asking a question wherein the candidate has to pull out the relevant information and take a decision to arrive at a so­lution. But an illustration would be like working on a formula. In a case study, you don’t know the pa­rameters, to begin with.

What is the entrepreneurship quotient of IIMA today? Are there enough startups being incubated in the institute? How does IIMA monitor their growth and catalyse them?

If one were to look at the 2-year MBA programme, immedi­ately after the course, hardly anyone would go in for startups. But since we have an incubation centre, many come back after two, three, five years. There are several activities around entre­preneurship at IIMA. Our incubation centre so far has men­tored more than 5,000 entrepreneurs, supported more than 600 enterprises, and seed-funded more than 212 of them. It is more than 10 years old. Razorpay, Travelyaari and Transerve are examples. Interestingly, a lot of them are in the sustain­able sector. It covers a whole gamut of things that are useful for society, including in waste processing, energy sector, water conservation. Again, during the programmes here, about 20 students are taken by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for an entrepreneurship “adventure”. That is the Maver­ick’s programme, where CII provides space and basic funding. After graduation, they are given a stipend for 1-2 years to work on their startups. CII also has tie-ups with the National Innova­tion Foundation and other national initiatives.

To what extent is IIMA research-focused today? Which are the areas of management research specialisation?

Research has been an ongoing process at IIMA. Only the intensity of research has increased in recent years. Part of it is also because the publications where we choose to publish have changed. So, more visible journals are being chosen. We’ve had research centres over time whose aim is to fo­cus on research around a certain domain and get a group of people together for conversations. Today, we have about 11 research centres, stretching from leadership to ESG (Envi­ronmental, Societal and Governance) to financial services to neuroscience to gold policy to transportation and logis­tics to digital transformation. We started our e-governance centre long before people had heard of e-governance. It is no longer required today and so it doesn’t exist. We had a centre on telecom policy which actually contributed a lot to the country’s telecom policy. Today, it is no longer con­sidered that relevant. Students are not members of the centres but in the projects which happen through them, students are able to participate. Each centre has 7-20 faculty members.

How does the institution retain top faculty?

There is no dearth of funds for faculty to pursue research. That is what keeps them going.

Name some top IIMA alumni. In what ways do the alumni give back to their alma mater?

Our alumni bring in a lot of connect. Now, we have labelled ourselves an institute of management rather than one of business management. We are the only IIM which has done significant work in non-business areas, like agriculture, telecom, health services, e-governance. Partly, that is also reflected in the alumni. We have illustri­ous alumni like the current dean of Harvard Business School Shrikant Datar, former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, former Unilever president of Global Foods MS Banga, former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, dancer and activist Mallika Sarabhai, co-founder of Make­MyTrip.com Deep Kalra, TCS CEO Rajesh Gopi­nathan, former CEO and chairman of ICICI Bank KV Kamath. On the other hand, we have Bhushan Punani of the Blind People’s Association, Vivek Mahajan—presi­dent of the Microfinance Institutions Network of India. Our ESG centre has been sponsored by former Bank of America CEO in India Arun Duggal who is also on the board of sev­eral companies and a serial investor; our leadership centre has been sponsored by Mastek founder Ashank Desai.

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