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