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On 250 acres of land in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, the foundation of the India School of Business has just been laid, with plans for completion by July 1 of next year. The first batch of MBAs should graduate in 2002. The school is an unusual endeavor -- a collaboration between University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Northwestern's Kellogg School. And it will be supported financially by India's top companies and by multinational corporations.
It's goals: to teach management techniques for rapidly globalizing, transitional economies like India and China, to be the premier institute of business studies in India, and eventually, to count itself among the top 10 B-schools in the world.
The $130 million school is the brainchild of Rajat Gupta, worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Co., who has made over a dozen trips to India in the last three years to promote ISB. Gupta has a special interest in education. He sits on the boards of several U.S. business schools -- including Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton, and MIT -- and often visits campuses himself, hiring for McKinsey. For Gupta, this school is a labor of love, where he can give something back both to his native India and to his profession.
In Bombay recently for the school's annual governing-body meeting, the hard-driving Gupta spoke with Business Week India Bureau Chief Manjeet Kripalani about the school and the role it will play in India's future. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:
Q: The school was your idea?
A: Yes, I came up with the initial idea. But what it looks like, the concept of the school and what it is today, has evolved much. Very early on, there was involvement and ownership by a broad set of people -- those on the board, all of whom have been very active in shaping the concept of the school and played an ongoing role in the execution of ideas.
Q: What has been your role, then?
A: Mostly, I've created an inclusive environment, an inclusive board, to make sure that people who really wanted to contribute got an opportunity to do so. I knew nothing about operating in India and other people are pros at it, thinking through what will or not work here.
I've been involved in B-schools in the U.S., so I took the leadership role in making sure that Kellogg and Wharton came in. So we did the classic thing, where you contribute where your network and strengths are, and it's a collective effort. The school is not sponsored by any group. It's a broad-based leadership. It's nobody's school, it's everybody's institution. It'll go on just fine without me.
Q: What's your contribution, your motivation?
A: You think about what you can contribute back to India within the constraints of a very demanding job like mine, with limited resources and time. While India has many opportunities and challenges, it was easy for me to make a contribution in this area, because I've been involved in B-schools for a while. This is not the most important issue facing India -- not like public health care and primary education -- but this is something I could do.
Q: What will the curriculum of the school be?
A: There will be three areas of emphasis: Entrepreneurship, the impact of technology on commerce, and lastly -- we're still seeking a management name for it -- fast-growing and evolving transitional economies that are globalizing rapidly like India, China, all of south Asia. Economies that are leapfrogging. It's a forward-looking curriculum, a blueprint for molding business leaders who thrive on change.
Q: The school was originally supposed to be set up in Bombay, but the politicians insisted on reserving 20% of the seats for locals, so you moved the school to more welcoming Hyderabad. How did you manage this?
A: [The pols here] weren't really hard to deal with, because we set the tone early on. We said this would be a meritocratic school. You put your foot down the minute something otherwise is desired. We simply walked out of some meetings. And no, we never gave up. If anything, we became more aggressive.
We're not out of the woods yet, but we're definitely running swiftly and on schedule now. We're humming along. We all know this is a journey, and it takes 10 years before it's there and self-sustaining. We're a third of the way there.
Q: How different is the school from other business schools.
A: It's not fundamentally different, but three themes are important. First, the school is not started by academics but by industry. It's truly connected with industry. Second, it relies on a model of a mix between permanent and visiting faculty. The typical ratio is five visiting faculty to 95 permanent. Here, we are 50-50, unlike anywhere else. We will get the best faculty from many institutions. There's enormous enthusiasm. Lots of faculty around the world are prepared to come here and give their time in perpetuity.
[Third,] with the visiting faculty, we will have much smaller module courses -- six-week terms vs. the normal 10-week terms. The courses will be shorter and more intense. We'll have a general management core program, but this theme will create a certain type of research and seminars, etc. In fact, the only way to attract visiting faculty is to offer research intensity and have significant doctoral and post-doctoral research and professorships.
How do you attract world-class faculty to India? It's not easy, so we have this module. We will collaborate with Harvard on the executive MBA course and with other schools. We will use information technology, streaming video, have virtual programs. We're trying to innovate.
Q: What kind of student body are you looking for?
A: A very diverse group of people, from India and abroad, from the private sector, the state sector. We'll start now. We've officially announced we're open for admission, and forms can be downloaded from the Net. Apart from that, we're getting 20 requests a day for applications to be mailed to students all over the world.
Q: You'll be filling a vital need for India, especially if the country is to become a powerhouse and nurturer of knowledge workers in the future.
A: A recent study we did with Nasscom, India's software association, says that one of the constraints to India's future growth is education -- there's not enough being done, and it really has to gear up. This school will help with the leadership aspect of India.
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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