WHO CREATES EXCELLENCE AT IIMA
T. V. Rao
“IIMA tops in Indian B-school rankings
and continues winning more recognition and accolades as a Global B-School.””
IIMA in Top 10 position: Financial
Times Masters in Management 2012 Ranking “
IIMA’s PGPX maintains top position with
FT Global MBA Rankings 2012
IIMA moves ahead in The Economist MBA
Ranking 2012 IIMA PGP-ABM retains number 1 Rank
The above
rankings are one of the indicators of IIMA’s excellence. I am associated with
the Institute for the last forty years. When I ask myself this question the
first answer that comes to my mind are its Founders- not those founders who financed
it: They certainly deserve credit- Government of India, Government of Gujarat, Ford
Foundation, a few Industrialists who contributed to its funding and a few others Industrialists who took risks
in employing their graduates of first few years. While each one of them had a role they are not
responsible for Excellence. It is those Founders who created the Culture of Excellence
at IIMA from day one: Dr Sarabhai along with his team of Faculty, Ravi Matthai
and his team of Faculty, Samuel Paul and his team of faculty and I can go on
naming all the Directors. But my list will stop with the first two Directors
but continues with the Faculty. The first symbol of Faculty that comes to my
mind is Professor Madhavan a silent Professor who devoted his life to teaching
at IIMA. To me he symbolises IIMA. He remained bachelor all through his life,
and even today you can find him in the corridors of IIMA walking silently and
always in a reflective mood, smiling and wishing back if you wish him.
Dr. C Rangarajan,
Prof. V. L. Mote, S. K. Bhattacharya, S C Kuchhal, M N Vora, Samuel Paul, G S Gupta,
Dwijendra Tripathi, G. B. Shah, Amar Kalro, Sasi Misra, Pradip Khandwalla, V S
Vyas, Girija Sharan, Labdhi Bhandari, Pulin Garg, Udai Pareek, Ishwar Dayal,
Kamla Chowdhury, John Camillus, C K Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, K K Anand, Taren Sheth, N R Sheth, Bakul
Dholakia, Arun Monappa, Mirza Saiyaddain, T P Rama Rao, Prof Sreenivasa Rao of
WAIC fame, A. K. Jain, J L Saha, Meenakshi Malya, K Balakrishnan, Mohan Kaul, V
S Vyas, C Gopinath, P S George, Nitin Patel, Jaikumar, Gaikwad, Shingi, Ranjit Gupta, V K Gupta, Nitin Patel, Paul Mompilly, Subhash Mehta, J. K. Satia, K R S Murthy,
Subash Bhatnagar... and the names go on of faculty of yester years . A few of
them continue to be associated. The current faculty great teachers like , Prof.
Jazoo, Mukand Dixit, V V Rao, Rekha Jain, Deepti Bhatnagar, Neharika Vohra, Abraham
Koshy, Mukund Dixit, Prof. Jazoo, Ravi
Dholakia, Sebastian Morris, Anil Gupta, J L Verma, Samir Barua, Manikutty, ..
and so on I can put every single faculty member who is currently teaching and
many visiting faulty who occasionally come and teach a course or two connecting
the students with Industry. Perhaps IIMA is the only Institute where most
of its Faculty if you include the ex-faculty have got Padma awards (there are around half a
dozen of them). Excellence was not possible but for the culture created by
these faculty in a culture of excellence conceptualised by Sarabhai along with
his Faculty and nurtured by the early leaders like Matthai and Paul along with
their faculty teams. The next that comes to my mind is the able staff specially
the Secretaries and Officers that keep supporting the faculty to do their work
well- categorised as administration. People like R C Chib, Rajagopalan,
Ganapathy, Santhanam, Ravi Acharya, N V Pillai, Partha sarathy, Kuppuswamy,
Gurumurthy, Bhaskaran, Ravi Kumar, Revathy, Harindran etc to name a few. The next
in line is always the current students who follow the culture and norms of IIMA
without protesting and use the IIMA platform to learn and nurture themselves
and grow alter as great managers and keep visiting the Institute to pay their
tributes along with a little Bonn homie. The fourth in the list are those
alumni who have made a mark in the place of their work by virtue of what they have
done and accomplished. Recently IIMA recognised about forty of them and these
are just symbols. There are perhaps a
few thousands of them. Not all have brought excellence label but most of them
by their conduct and accomplishments. After this comes in my list the Industry
who dared to recruit IIMA graduates and offered them roles with tremendous
faith in professional management. People like Prahalad and Govindarajan have
got credit to the Institute not as alumni of it but more as Faculty of it. Both
of them served on the faculty and VG was not even an alumnus. Both were sent to
Harvard by IIMA under Faculty Development grant. Also those who get credit to
IIMA are the large number of IIMA Faculty who head other Business schools and make
success out of it: KRS Murthy, Amar Kalro, Devi Singh, D Nagabrahmam, Pankaj
Chandra, Shekhar Chowdhary, Ravichandran, etc. and the alumni from the Fellow
program who teach at other business schools.
Where does
the Board come in and where does the IIMA Society come in and where does the
Government of India come in. Government
of India contributes to IIMA excellence it is through their financial support
and encouragement of autonomy by letting it govern itself. Letting the faculty
decide their own curriculum, research, teaching methods, admissions,
recruitment processes, performance evaluation, etc. and lay its own learning culture.
The Board
comes into picture by periodically reviewing its activities and continuously
supporting its work by way of ensuring that autonomy is protected and right
kind of leadership is made available and the institute is protected to manage
its financial autonomy. In early years Ravi used to use the Board to raise finances.
Later years as IIMA achieved self sufficiency the Board’s role has become
either one of protecting its autonomy and at times negotiating with MHRD to
have polices that support excellence.
The IIMA
Society has been less of a significant player. The only function it served is
by supplying some sensible members to be on the Board and reviewing the activities
once a year and approving the audited statement of accounts and budget.
Thus in my
rankings of contributions to Excellence at IIMA my ranking goes as follows:
1.
Leadership
and Culture built by the Founding Directors and their Faculty and their support
teams
2.
Competent Faculty who designed new courses and taught courses,
offered consultancy, published, and administered various programs and nurtured
the culture of academic excellence at IIMA
3.
Directors,
Deans and Academic Administrators and the Institutional processes that governed
IIMA. These also came largely from Faculty and staff.
4.
Current
students
5.
Alumni who conducted
themselves so well and proved their competence at every step added to the IIMA
Brand by their own successes. It took over the first two decades to have known
Alumni who made a mark. It is only in early nineties Alumni started adding to
the Brand IIMA. Several faculty like Mote, Ishwar Dayal, Kamla, S K
Bhattacharya, Paul, Vyas, Rangarajan, Murthy,
Pathak, GB Shah, Kalro, Bala, Udai Pareek, Pulin, Mohan Kaul, Shukla, Khandwalla, Satia, Gunvant Desai, D K Desai, Bhandari, Vora have made a mark in India and
also globally and built IIMA Brand even in seventies and eighties.
6.
Industry that
employed IIMA Graduates and provided them opportunity to experiment and use
their talent.
7.
IIMA Board for
reviewing Institutes activities periodically, providing linkages with the
environment, influencing its priorities in academic programs, protecting its autonomy
and getting best people to Lead the Institute through a good search process and guiding them to be
good Directors.
8.
Ministry of
HRD by supporting financially and protecting the autonomy
9.
IIMA Society by providing the support to the Board and
providing the legal cover the Board requires
Structurally the MHRD and the Board may be on the top. Their main responsibility is to create conditions for excellence and make the actors of excellence attain excellence. In terms of the time and real responsibility for excellence it is the Faculty and staff who make it happen. They are workers, they pilot the aircraft and through accountable self governance they reduce the burden on MHRD and Board to govern. If any of them falter the other party has to raise their voice. In institutiosn like the IIMA, B and C which have a long history and Alumni base, the alumni start playing a positive support role to maintain excellence. It is also in their interest to protect Brand IIM.
Conclusion:
If excellence
has to be continued each of the above stake holders need to continue to play
their role extremely well. There is no need to redefine the roles and interfere
with one another. An overplay of their roles may endanger the autonomy of the Institute.
For example if the Alumni wish to take over the appointment of the Director or
decide the course curriculum at the Institute or the Board wants to decide what
programs to offer and the Ministry decides to override on the autonomy
and self governance norms developed at the Institute excellence may suffer in the
years to come. If the players also don’t play their roles well the excellence may
be affected. For example if the Board does not respect the culture developed over
the last few decades and tries to overrun, or neglect its role of timely
appointment of the Director by extending the search process, or communicate to
faculty in any way that it does not respect its internal talent, excellence is bound to suffer. If the MHRD or
the Government of India does not respect the excellence built over the years
and brings a new bill and changes the rule of the game midway after
establishing excellence, the excellence may suffer. Similarly if the faculty
start sharing their discomfort with some of the internal processes with the
press the excellence may suffer. The alumni don’t conduct themselves as they
took oath t the time they took their degrees excellence may suffer over a
period of time.
Annexure 1.
“IIMA tops in Indian B-school rankings
and continues winning more recognition and accolades as a Global B-School. IIMA builds on over fifty years of leadership in
management education. Having consistently remained the premier business school
in India, IIMA has also grown to be one of the leaders of applied management
education and development in Asia, and one of the finest institutions for
management education in the world.
International Rankings:
IIMA in Top 10 position: Financial Times Masters in Management 2012 Ranking The
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), has been ranked 10th in the
Financial Times (FT) Masters in Management 2012 Rankings. The FT report ranks
the top 70 programmes in general management that do not require students to
have prior work experience for admission to the masters programme
(pre-experience Masters Degrees). IIMA is the only Business School from India
to feature in the ranking once again this year. After creating its place in the
reputed international FT ranking, and maintaining its top 10 position, IIMA
continues to be a part of the distinguished top group of Masters in Management
providers globally. In addition, in Placement Success Rank IIMA is at number
one position and at number five position in Careers Rank.
For full ranking details, please visit: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/masters-inmanagement-2012
IIMA’s PGPX maintains top position with
FT Global MBA Rankings 2012
The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), has been ranked at the
11th position in the FT (Financial Times) Global MBA Ranking 2012 in its top
100 list of B- Schools. IIMA’s rank once again establishes its position as the
top rated global business management Institute as its One Year Post Graduate
Programme for Executives (PGPX) maintains its international rank. For full
ranking details, please visit: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mbarankings-2012
IIMA moves ahead in The Economist MBA
Ranking 2012
The Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad (IIMA) has been ranked 56th globally in The Economist full-time MBA
programmes ranking 2012 (moving up from 78th position last year). The Institute
has made it to the 5th position in the Asia and Australasia 2012 regional
rankings moving up from its 9th position in the previous year.
IIMA is the only Indian B-school to get
ranked in the Economist full-time MBA programmes ranking since the last three
years. The Economist reports, "The Indian Institute of Management at
Ahmedabad- IIMA (there are several other IIMs at various locations around
India) is reckoned to be the leading business school in the subcontinent and
also the toughest in the world to get into".
IIMA PGP-ABM retains number 1 Rank
The Post-Graduate Programme in Agri-Business Management (PGP-ABM) of Indian
Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) has retained its Number 1 rank in the
Eduniversal Best Master's Ranking in Agribusiness/ Food Industry Management for
2012-13. It was ranked Number 1 in 2011-12 as well.
IIMA’s PGP-ABM finds a prominent place
among other globally renowned programmes like Cornell University’s -Master of
Science in Food Industry Management, University of California- Berkeley’s
-Graduate Programme and PhD Agribusiness Programme, University of British
Columbia’s -Master of Food and Resource Economics, to name a few.