Boards of IIMs

Boards of IIMs: Roles and Responsibilities

T. V. Rao

The Board of IIMs are the Chief custodians of the Management of these Institutions. The vision, mission, goals and objectives of IIMs are well set.  It is the Faculty and staff that make sure that the Institution strives to achieve its vision, mission and goals under the leadership of its Director. The Chairman and Board are non-executive Governors of the Board. They don’t execute though they are termed as having the role of executive body. They enable the Director and his/her team to execute and carry out various activities.  They meet once a quarter and at best for a day each time. With four days on inputs in a year we don’t expect the Board to make the institute achieve its goals. They are not comparable to the Boards of Directors of companies. There is a lot of difference between the way corporate Boards function and the Boards of Educational Institutes function.  The Board provides  linkages between the Institute and the environment or the society at large, interprets the environmental needs and opportunities and provide direction for the Institute and its faculty to review, launch and re-launch their programs including teaching, research, dissemination or change management  activities. They also review the performance of the Institute and its Director from time to time and approve the budgets and balance sheets.

The Boards are normally thought fully constituted to represent the outside society or environment so that the IIM can have maximum impact and achieve the purposes for which they are set up.  The members of the Board normally include representatives of the Government, Industry, other stakeholders and the Society at large. For example there are normally one representative of the MHRD and one of the State Government and in addition one each nominated by the Centre and the State. In addition two eminent people to be nominated by the Board from Alumni and three to nominated by the Government to represent different sections of society (education, industry, government and or special groups that need attention). Two represent the faculty, and four members representing the Registered Society if the Institute is a registered Society under the Societies Registration Act like the one at IIMA.

The Board members have both an individual and collective role. Individually each member has a role to play to represent the interests of the group for which he/she has been nominated/appointed.

Individual Responsibility:

For example the Faculty members on the Board are the active voice of the Institute and ensure that the other members are informed about various activities and concerns of the Institute, its needs, accomplishments, challenges etc. and seek solutions or give policy inputs.

The members representing the Registered Society(under 1860 Societies Registration act)  has the responsibility to represent the society’ views to faculty, build bridges between the Institute and Society members, expand membership, collect views and inputs from the Society and present the same to the Board to be translated into policies and practices. For this they should be constantly in touch with the other members of the Society.

The MHRD or Central Government and State Government representatives have the role to play of informing the National and local priorities and guide the Institute to serve the National and local (State) level needs and interests.

The Alumni have the responsibility to represent the alumni interests and ensure that feedback is available to the Institute from alumni so that changes that help the institute move towards better curricula and better programs can be made available and also ensure that the alumni contribute to the financial health of the Institution.

The other members representing special interest groups like Industry including women, SC/ ST, or sectoral groups like Banking, petroleum, education etc. depending on the reasons for their appointment) should draw attention of the Board and Institute to National concerns of the groups as and when an opportunity arises.

Collective responsibility:

The Board should normally transcend their individual points of view and collectively work for the good of the Institution all the time. Sometimes there could be conflict and in resolving the conflicts they should be able to rise above the specific individual interests and work for the good of the Institution. Team work is the most essential part of the Board. If the Board’s divided view gets communicated to faculty, it affects the excellence and does not give right direction to faculty. It may leads to politicization of the issues. The Board is there to support faculty, lay down broad policies and guide the faculty to govern themselves well. The Board is not an Executive Board. It is also not an Advisory Board. It is a mixture of both and in Academic Institutions the Board should remember that they are helping a group of highly knowledgeable scholars who get disturbed and de-motivated if they are not given proper support for their teaching, research and other academic work. The Board therefore does not get into individual cases and does not also get into decision making as far as possible. The only time they get to play active role in decision making is when they appoint the Director to lead the Institute or establishment of new centres which require big funding and their interventions. Other times include some exceptional cases of termination of faculty services or some financial norms, incentives have to be fixed, or big funds are to be accepted   etc. They could direct the faculty to start certain type programs or step up certain types of activities or scale down others etc. so as to serve the purpose for which the Institute is set up.

By virtue of its constitution the Board members may have different points of view. It is the role of the Director to present the Institute views and interest and take the help of the Board. The Chairperson has a very significant role to play in harnessing the different points of view and driving the Board to consensus make intelligent decisions or formulate policies. He should ensure that no vested interests develop nor any one section by virtue of its roots or origins dominate and twist the discussions.

During Mr. Naryana Murthy’s time at IIMA he had to play a very significant role when some differences arose with the government and the Alumni representatives played even a significant role to sort out the matters.

Chairman, Board and the Director:

These three play a keep role and their chemistry decides a lot of how the Institute develops. Their interrelationship should be one of trust and mutual respect. Trust can be built through continuous communication. Such communications from the Chair should not be seen as interference on the part of the Director and the Chairman could set a positive and non-threatening agenda for such communications.

A very significant role gets played by the Board at the time of selecting the Director. Normally it is good for the Chairman to keep himself out of Search Committee as he always had a lot of say at any point. When the Search Committee is constituted consisting of eminent people, they are likely to be respected for their suggestions and also they do consult the Chairman.  Chairman taking active role in the Search creates some times gives wrong perceptions that he may be favouring some one or the other and leads to politicisation. Even if he/she is a part of the Search, if the Search Committee is constituted with people of stature, is above Board and does not have any interests or preferences for particular candidate, it creates a healthy atmosphere. They should have the single most important objective of finding a good leader of excellence who can help achieve the Objectives of the Institution and take it to newer heights.  

Director’s job is a bed of thorns. How so ever excellent he or she may be some negativism does get generated and academics are very expressive of their unhappiness. The Search Committee or the Board should be able to listen, decipher the reasons and guide the Director where necessary and provide healing touch where possible. I have recommended an annual 360 Degree feedback for IIM Directors initiated by themselves. I am yet to see any Institute implement this. Once when Mr. Narayana Murthy asked me about his role as Chairman of IIMA, I suggested that the most significant role he could play is that of guiding the leader through a 360 like he developed leaders at Infosys. A 360 feedback annually or at least once a while helps the Director to be sensitive to the impact he/she is making. A 360 taken in early years of tenure can save a lot of negative energies that get developed.

If the Board get into delays in decision making it leaves the faculty guessing and runs the risk of starting new politics of alignment and realignment. It disturbs the academic culture and diverts the attention to other issues. It happened once when one of the Director’s appointments was delayed. There were letters to MHRD and the Faculty got divided and ended up wasting their time. It also made the life of the Current as well as the newly appointed Director difficult. In my view it took a long time to heal the wounds generated by the delay. It made an excellent Director less effective as he had to spend his time undoing what has been done and in the process he ended up hurting many more people.

(The thoughts here are personal and based my own experiences and narrations by those like Ravi Matthai,  Udai Pareek and others from whom I learnt)

Nurturing Excellence with Stability and Change at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad: Who Creates Excellence at IIMs?

Nurturing Excellence with Stability and Change at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad: Who Creates Excellence at IIMs?: WHO CREATES EXCELLENCE AT IIMA T. V. Rao “IIMA tops in Indian B-school rankings and continues winning more recognition and accolades a...

Who Creates Excellence at IIMs?

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

Source: (http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/institute/about/external-ranking.html) downloaded on 27^th February, 2013 (details at thee end)

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".

Details can be found at: http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking

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.

For more details on the top 50 programmes, please visit: www.best-masters.com/ranking-master-agribusiness-food-industry-management.html

IIM Bill

IIM Bill: Should it be for All IIMs?

I think a lot has changed in recent years regarding the autonomy to IIMs than what Times of India reported today. To the best of my understanding the Ministry of HRD has already given a lot of autonomy to older IIMs and support to IIMs and particularly the new IIMs. They have encouraged the older IIMs to mentor the new ones and have supported the new ones with a large heart in terms of Infrastructure and other support. They also have a lot of freedom to make their own programs and courses and appoint faculty etc. This is largely due to the work done by Chairpersons of IIMs like Mr. Narayana Murthy, Ajit Balakrishnan, Mukesh Ambani etc and also due to the perceptive and forward thinking Ministers and Civil Servants in MHRD. The MHRD even allowed IIMA to have its Society and Board play a more significant role than before in the selection of the Director and other matters. The problem of MHRD interference that existed a decade ago does not exist to the best of my knowledge. When there was an attempt to interfere during Mr. Narayana Murthy's time a large number of Alumni and Faculty protested and a lot was written at that time about the interference by the Ministry. Consequently a lot more autonomy was earned by the IIMs.

However the fear that the new bill attempts to undo what good has been done in recent years is real. This is because with change in Ministers and Bureaucracy periodically, there is no guarantee that some of them could tamper with Institutions of Excellence. This is what needs to be protected. The bill legitimises the path to tamper with autonomy and kill it excellence.  The MHRD always has access to question the IIMs on matters of excellence. Every IIM has accountability to its stake holders. Such accountability has been amply demonstrated by institutions like IIMA, IIMB IIMC and IIML which have 25 to 50 years of existence. The other IIMs are also on way to the same as they are all emulating the experience of the older IIMs. 

The contributions of Dr Vikram Sarabahi and Ravi Matthai have been the guiding principles for accountable- autonomy in all these institutions. It is this self imposed accountability coupled with autonomy that increases excellence. The autonomy has been used so far in creating courses of excellence, programs of excellence and relevance not only to corporate sector but also to other sectors. For example over 8,000 research reports have been done at IIMA alone for the Agriculture field. Because a large percent of their research is in Agriculture and is meant for India's consumption it does not get published in foreign journals putting IIMA behind other International Institutions wrongly structured International ratings.   Autonomy was used by IIMs to have their own Personnel policies (not compensation), academic programs, administrative and governance structure and processes for faculty and academic culture that encourages innovations and relevance. There is a well designed and debated faculty work planning evaluation system in the IIMs. The price IIMs had to pay for this is not to have a Degree granting status.

Dr Sarabhai, Ravi Matthai and others at IIMC in mid 1960s have recognised this and promoted the PGDM as equivalent to MBA. IIMA resisted even Harvard’s attempt to call it a Indian Institute of Business Management as IIMs had larger vision. They carefully resisted the attempts of Government to give them a degree granting status as the price they had to pay is in terms of excellence. I am told once by Ravi Matthai that Pundit Nehru appreciated this and has not insisted on a bill to be passed in the Parliament. The PGDM has become such an acceptable thing in twenty years, thanks to IIMA, B and C; the new AICTE under the New Education Policy in 1986 had to mandated themselves as the agency to recognise the PGDM courses offered by all other institutions. Given this history it will be very unfortunate if MHRD takes a retrogressive step to get IIMs to give degrees and take away the route to excellence that has been built over the years. I hope good sense prevails among those who started this initiative. Of course on the part of IIMs they are required to demonstrate constantly that they are accountable. As Ravi Matthai said once autonomy has to be earned every day. So far IIMs  have done it well and that is what makes the bill redundant. 

Even if it has to be done for the sake of new IIMs why destroy the excellence of old IIMs. Most faculty there have joined them looking at the freedom to excel and it should not be disturbed by a few who don't seem to have an understanding of what it takes to build excellence in the country.