US Colleges Learn Business Mantra from Indian Gurus

IN A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

US Colleges Learn Business Mantra from Indian Gurus

When Soumitra Dutta was appointed as the Dean of Ivy League Cornell University earlier this month, he joined a small, influential and growing club of Indian-origin professors heading American business schools. Among them, five have risen to top jobs in the US management education circuit in the last four years.

A year-and-a-half ago, Harvard Business School appointed Professor Nitin Nohria as its dean.

Forty three-year-old Sunil Kumar took the dean’s chair at Chicago’s Booth School of Business, another top US B-school, early last year. And now, 48-year-old Dutta, from France’s top business school INSEAD, is at the helm at Cornell.

SHOWING THE WAY

There are other Indian Americans too who run B-schools in the US: 46-year-old Jaishankar Ganesh at Rutgers School of Business-Camden and Anand Anandalingam at the Robert H Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. The spate of appointments signals few changes. First, Indians are finally breaking through the glass ceiling in global management education. And secondly these highly influential men will now exercise India’s ‘soft power’ over swathes of global B-school students.

Top management thinker and professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Vijay Govindarajan, agreed that Indian management professors have an edge in being educated in English and well versed in western pedagogies. “We are masters of data and facts,” he said.

THREE-LETTER KEY

Another reason behind this success is a three-letter word — IIT. Many of the stars at management schools in the US come from the Indian Institutes of Technology.

“The IIT system is about the best people,” said Dutta. “While the professors and faculty members, who helped in creating the foundation for research, innovation and entrepreneurship, remain an important part of my life, the competition with peers always motivated me to do better.”

Till recently, Indians were finding it hard to crack the top job in US Bschools. Dipak C Jain was the first when he became the dean of the prestigious Kellogg School of Management in 2001. Yash P Gupta, who was the first permanent dean at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School from 2008 to 2011, before quitting to take up a CEO job, is another. But there were not too many names beyond them. Many like the late Dr CK Prahalad of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business achieved great recognition in management classrooms and corporate boardrooms, but didn’t make it to senior positions of deans or presidents. Dipak Jain, who is now the dean of INSEAD, attributes the success of Indian educationists to a number of factors. Business as Usual for IITians

“Of all the BRIC nations, India alone counts English as its lingua franca and is well-grounded in Western administration and business. Also, in India one learns flexibility and how to achieve goals in an environment that is less than organised,” he said.Former IITian and Indian-American entrepreneur Vinod Gupta, who set up the first business school within the IIT system at Kharagpur, believes that the advantage for IITians as business school professors comes from their problem solving abilities.

Though they have made their mark as undergrad engineering colleges, the IIT experience is also about high standards in teaching and research, as many former IITians have found out. “You want to put emphasis on academic excellence, you take pride in setting a high bar for teaching and research, you want students to have a transformative and career path-changing experience – that is what IIT did for me,” said Pramath Sinha, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus and the first dean of India’s global B-school, ISB, Hyderabad.

He points out that IITians became deans at the top US technology colleges long before they gained visibility at the B-schools. “Subra Suresh was dean at MIT’s engineering school before he was appointed as head of the US National Science Foundation while S Shankar Sastry is dean of engineering at Berkeley. Last year, Pradeep K Khosla was appointed dean of the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering. All of them are IITians,” said Sinha. For now, however, it’sB-schools where Indians are making their presence felt. Last week, the president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, announced the appointment of Krishna G Palepu, who has taught at the HBS for almost three decades, to the position of her senior adviser for global strategy.

It’s never easy to break the glass ceiling, as Renu Khator, the president and chancellor of the University of Houston since January 2008, found out. “With my appointment, three ceilings were broken; the curry ceiling (first Indiaborn to head a research university in the US), glass ceiling (first woman to become chancellor in Texas), and passport ceiling (first foreign born to head the University of Houston),” Khator told ET.
( ISHANI DUTTAGUPTA ET23J0112)