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INTERVIEW "ISB
will be guided by the belief in Pluralism" He's worked with the Indian Oil Corporation, taught at INSEAD in France, the MIT's Sloan School of Management and the London Business School. He's authored nine books, including The Individualized Corporation and Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution which has been listed by the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential books. The Economist describes him as the Euro Guru. Now in India as founding dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad — set up by some Indian corporates, the Kellogg School of Management and Wharton School — Professor Sumantra Ghoshal spoke to INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar. Excerpts from the exclusive interview: Q. How
do you feel about the task in hand at ISB? A. This digital recorder you are using is a Samsung. A classmate of mine at MIT was the son-in-law of the founder of Samsung. I was at Seoul for research and staying with the family when they showed me a rare gem-studded porcelain antique. My fear as I held it was that it was going to slip and break into pieces. If it fell, no amount of money or effort could replace it. It is that kind of fear I am facing now. If you see the quality of people around ... Indians and non-Indians who have come together to make ISB possible, it is a very precious thing. I believe given our current lives, individuals, like companies, have to find ways to renew, re-invent themselves. This is an opportunity for self-renewal. There will be many mistakes. But out of all that will come learning, self-renewal. Q. What
would be the biggest challenge in terms of making ISB happen. Logistics,
faculty, talent? A. You named them all. A school is as good as its students. We think of buildings, resources, governing boards and faculties. They are just facilitating conditions. The first challenge is to convince students in India and around the world, 'if you have talent to realise, here is a place for you.' I would want students in India and abroad to understand that ISB will not sit back and wait for students to come. It will compete for the best talent, be proactive. As for faculty, we know what is best: Wharton, NorthWestern, MIT, LBS ...We must leverage that strength. At the same time we know that the really great institution of the next century will be different from the really best ones of the last century. So there has to be a mix of adopting/adapting the best of the present with the courage to violate some of the rules of the present to build for the future. Then comes what I call the smell of the place. ISB will not succeed unless it creates a spirit which engulfs anyone coming there. Call it culture, call it spirit, call it space. I went to HBS. Beyond the classrooms there is a particular spirit that great academic institutions create. Q. In
terms of preparing for the challenges, how far have we travelled? A. Very few business schools which have opened in the past 50 years have hit the top. In Europe it would be INSEAD and LBS. In the US, I think NorthWestern has been a marvellous success story under Dean Jacob's leadership. If I take all these institutions I do not believe any one of them started with better resources than ISB. Look at the governing board, it has the best. Look at India, in terms of talent I think anybody will acknowledge the availability of talent. Then you leverage that to get talent from abroad. Financially, it starts with very good infrastructure. It has a better starting point than any other business school, but then at the end just starting points do not define success. So far the progress has been fantastic. I had nothing to do with it. This is where the fear comes in again. Look at what Rajat (Gupta, McKinsey head) has achieved. Can you believe building this coalition? It has been an amazing feat. It is more than money, formality and obligations. There is a great personal commitment, they would all like it to work. Q. Each
school has its brand of teaching. What are you looking at in terms of
a menu card for ISB? A. There are three values that lie at the core of ISB. One is the force for good. I borrow this term from British Petroleum's Sir John Brown. He says that if you look at the modern world, business is the primary engine of progress. Yes, governments and politicians create the context and yes, poets and philosophers are very important. In terms of creating wealth and improving economic circumstances it is business, whether it is entrepreneurs or managers. History tells us that when leaders of institutions do not understand their role, the institutions decline. Leaders of business must understand this role and prepare themselves for the role. And that's a major part of ISB's commitment. We are not talking about social responsibility, business is itself a force for good. You are a primary architect in value creation in the modern world. Second is the value that, for want of a better word, we are calling pluralism. Pluralism is more than international sensitivity, gender sensitivity or cross-cultural sensitivity. It is a fundamental belief that says an organisation, a society, the world becomes a better place when diverse, moral, intellectual, ideological beliefs can flourish. Each able to talk to the other and benefit from the other. ISB will be guided by this belief in pluralism. I think Harvard's case study method has great benefits. At the same time Chicago's approach is that there is a theory of management and we will tell you the theory ... there is a rigour, an academic discipline, and that is a great approach too. ISB will put together a truly world class faculty derived from a diverse approaches, beliefs, research and pedagogical styles. Q. So
although it is called the Indian School Business, there is no attempt
to Indianise. Global, but located in India. Your theme suggests it will
be kind of new world in its approach... A. It's a new world. But at the same time we must recognise that India is beginning to play and will increasingly play an important role in that new world. To that extent something that builds to the new world counts India as a location as an asset. In that pedagogical process there will be things that are about India, that draws on the historical, cultural, spiritual roots of India. In the design of the pedagogy there will approaches that are influenced by the fact that the school is in India and a lot of support for it that is of Indian origin. We are in the process of designing some special courses and process for that. It is not located in India as an American suburb. It is located in India in its full flow of Indianness. But at the same time it is not an Indian ghetto. I hope that conveys the spirit. Again here, I am an Indian lower middle-class Bengali at the end of the day, comfortable in London and Boston. I think there is nothing odd. Q. Perhaps
that is the beauty of the bhadralok ... A. We under-emphasise that there is something important about Indianness that is actually cosmopolitan. I grew up in India, worked in Indian Oil, in Salem, Nagpur, Bombay, Madura, and Guwahati ... amidst multiple languages, multiple psyches. And in that sense the Indian psyche is cosmopolitan. Q. You
have just put out a book, Managing Radical Change. Do you think
Indian business is ready for the post-WTO era, for globalisation? A. When we started research for Managing Radical Change seven years ago, the change in language then and now is amazing. The progress in the past five years towards technology, in terms of productivity, in terms of an orientation towards variety and customers, there has been a huge progress. In Indian companies—the few that I know of—functional competencies are pretty good. Manufacturing management, marketing management, financial management, they are in good shape. The weakness is in leadership development or genuine business responsibility development, historically called general managers and now entrepreneurs, business leaders. Build it, expand it, leverage it and manage it. Because the structure of Indian business historically was such that the entrepreneurial responsibility was only at the top. These people never had that responsibility and grew in their functional chimneys. The real challenge is to build leadership capability, entrepreneurial capability. And part of it is knowledge but it also has to do with things like courage, that entrepreneurial nose, things like opportunity sensing, which is different from teaching them derivatives or TQM. Q. Do
you see a change in the pyramid structures in Indian management? A. I don't know if there is such a thing as an Indian structure. Take Infosys or HDFC where things are different from other traditional Indian companies. But even in traditional companies there is an effort to decentralise through creation of small business units. Take the millennium project in Hindustan Lever or what is happening in the Birla group under Kumarmangalam Birla. I see all of that as positive as a much broader scale is developing. They are putting the structure of things in place. That is the hardware. If I were in prison for 30 years I would not be used to sunlight. So I think there is need now for developing leadership capability in organisations. And even if it sounds self-serving, the executive programmes of ISB will focus on this aspect. I sincerely hope that ISB will be an important provider to meet that requirement. Company-specific programmes will be designed to meet this. Executive education will be as essential as MBA and will be a very important part of ISB. |
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