Description
The elements essential for institution building are among the best-known secrets—freedom, sensitivity to the environment, humanity
and discrimination*—yet most do not get the formula right. In this exclusive with The Smart Manager, Dr T T Ram Mohan talks about how each of these elements were incorporated into the building blocks of IIM Ahmedabad’s culture to help it create a sustaining legacy.
Start your Gold Membership to enjoy the full value of The Smart Manager.
Check http://www.thesmartmanager.com/goldmember.aspx for more information.
smart leader india comes to IIM
28 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
smart leader
india comes to IIM
a fine balance india comes to iim
brick by red brick
pp 36–40
dr tt ram mohan, iim ahmedabad
illustration by: nilesh juvalekar
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 29
smart leader india comes to IIM
The third fastest growing city in the world1 A tiny city in the
households in India3 A city at the center of the ‘rice bowl’ of India4
‘land of gods’2 The city with the highest number of SEC A
juggling the feudal with the modern8 The sixth fastest job-creating city in
India9 A city best known for rolling hills and rock and roll10 The second best city to
reside in India11 A city switching from tanneries to technology12 A city of lakes and palaces13 1 Ahmedabad 2Kashipur 3Bangalore 4Raipur 5 Calcutta 6Ranchi 7Indore 8Rohtak 9Lucknow 10 Shillong 11 Kozhikode 12Tiruchirappalli 13Udaipur
India comes to IIM
30 www.thesmartmanager.com The Smart Manager Sep-Oct 2011
tribal movement6 The Commercial Capital of Central India7 A city
The city with the second-largest bourse in India5 A city at the heart of a
smart leader
IIM Ahmedabad
Ram Mohan is Professor in the Finance & Accounting area at IIM Ahmedabad.
brick by red brick
? dr tt ram mohan in conversation with poornima subramanian
SMART SUMMARY The elements essential for institution building are among the best-known secrets—freedom, sensitivity to the environment, humanity and discrimination*—yet most do not get the formula right. In this exclusive with The Smart Manager, Dr T T Ram Mohan talks about how each of these elements were incorporated into the building blocks of IIM Ahmedabad’s culture to help it create a sustaining legacy.
Founder-Director Ravi Matthai put in place a structure and strategy that resulted in the creation of an enduring institution—IIM A. In your view, what factors have contributed to the institution sustaining its legacy? Q I would say ‘culture, processes and mission’ instead of ‘structure and strategy’. Matthai’s approach was to get the culture and values right at IIM A— he called it ‘a tradition of attitudes’. He believed that once an institution, in its nascent stages, got these right, things like structure and strategy would evolve naturally in response to the needs of a given situation. In my book Brick by Red Brick, I dwell on various elements of the culture that Dr Vikram Sarabhai and
36 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
Ravi Matthai created and that have sustained IIM A over the past five decades. The starting point was the belief that academic institutions can flourish only in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Academics must experience that freedom in their everyday activities, they must given every opportunity to grow and flower instead of being trampled upon by authority or by tightly run systems. Only then would quality people be attracted to an academic institution and stay for long. In this, Sarabhai and Matthai have been proved right. They were able to attract to Ahmedabad, a smallish town at the time, academics of high caliber. A large number stayed on until retirement and many have even settled down in Ahmedabad after retirement. Sarabhai and Matthai focused on three key elements—autonomy, freedom of expression and faculty governance. Autonomy is operational freedom for the Institute. Autonomy was sought to be fostered by creating IIM A as a society instead of making it an institution governed by an Act of Parliament; this helped create a certain distance between the Institute and the government and minimized interference from politicians and bureaucrats. Freedom of expression is the right of the faculty to express themselves on matters of public policy as well as on internal matters. This too was sedulously fostered by both Sarabhai and Matthai. In addition, the faculty were given complete freedom in academic matters— the design and content of courses, the pedagogy, the evaluation scheme, etc. Then, there is faculty governance, which is the participation of faculty in all important decisions related to the Institute. This was not a matter of simply going along with faculty sentiment on all matters or counting votes on a given issue. Not at all. It was more a matter of giving the faculty a sense of ownership. It was about giving them a sense that they were being consulted on all matters, that their views were being taken into account. There were other elements as well in the culture at IIM A. I mention in the book how Matthai chose not
to have rules for various matters and to deny activity heads any authority to take decisions. He did so in order to ensure that faculty did not feel imposed upon. He wanted all activities and decisions to be informed by a culture of discussion and deliberation and a desire to take people along. In addition to these, Matthai created important damage-containment mechanisms. One was the convention of the director vacating office after one term. Matthai walked away from the director’s job after seven years at the helm and when he was at the peak of his achievements. His contract did not stipulate any term and he could have stayed on as director until retirement. (He was only 45 when he stepped down as director.) He chose not to do so. One of the reasons behind this was his belief that every institution needs change at the top and no leader should perpetuate his style of leadership for too long. I am inclined to believe that he also saw the potential for damage in anybody occupying the post for too long—as there is so much concentration of power in the office of the director. Another important mechanism is the committee system for taking decisions. No individual at any level could take decisions by himself. He had to get peers to agree. This helped ensure acceptance of decisions and it also gave the faculty an enormous sense of ownership in the Institution. Finally, there was a clear sense of mission, namely, the use of management principles not only for the benefit of the corporate sector but for agriculture and other under-managed sectors of the economy. This mission was to be realized through three inter-related activities: teaching, research and consulting.
Matthai walked away from the director’s job after seven years at the helm and when he was at the peak of his achievements.
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 37
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
We need to ask whether it is good to deny those in administrative positions minimum authority, including financial authority.
Both before and after joining IIM A, I was curious to know how the Institute had managed to remain at the top for so long. In the course of writing the book, I was able to make the link between the extraordinary outcome we see today—an institution that has remained vibrant for fifty years—and the extraordinary effort and quality of thought that went into the making of IIM A. The Institute’s success has broader lessons not only for other academic institutions but for all institutions, including corporations that have a large number of ‘knowledge workers’. For any institution to stay relevant, it needs to constantly innovate. In the book you have explained how some processes—faculty governance, decentralized structure—were put in place right from its inception. Most institutions struggle to find the right balance between preserving the old and adopting new. Either they completely lose a sense of the past or stay firmly entrenched in it. How does IIM A walk this tightrope. Q First, I would make a clear distinction between values on the one hand and processes, systems and products on the other. An academic institution cannot compromise on certain values—there is no question of discarding the core values and hence of innovating in respect of these. When it comes to processes, systems and products, however, an institution needs to innovate. Innovation arises from many things. All of us recognize that a sense of freedom is an essential requirement. You have to be free to experiment, and, of course, you must have the resources to experiment. But you also need a demanding environment, you need competition. Otherwise, even the best of institutions may not have enough motivation to innovate. IIM A has been good at product innovation. It has been good at coming up with new courses, new longduration programs, new executive programs in response to market needs. However, systems and processes may not have kept pace with the needs of the situation. One of the challenges for IIM A is to innovate without damaging the culture that has sustained it for so long. For instance, faculty governance is a force for good but it must not result in a slowing down of decisionmaking or responsiveness to market need. Similarly, we need to ask whether it is good to deny those in administrative positions minimum authority including financial authority—even in the smallest matters, the area chairman requires approval from the dean or the director, and this can be quite irksome at times. Then again, autonomy has been enormously helpful to the Institute, but the outside world today demands greater standards of accountability as well. You are right, every institution needs change with continuity. In some matters, we have got the balance right, in others, it’s a bit of a struggle. One interesting aspect is that even today IIM A does not have a written and printed handbook of rules. Instead, as you write in your book, “norms were allowed to evolve from within the community.” How has this contributed to IIM’s culture? And secondly, such a culture can also result in complacency and ineffectiveness. How does IIM A overcome these pitfalls? Q Yes, the culture has been one of peer review, peer pressure and norms being agreed upon by common consent instead of written rules to cover everything under the sun. For example, you could have rules
38 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
mandating that faculty show up on time for classes. Or you could have the faculty body agreeing that this was a sensible thing to happen. At IIM A, the preference was for the latter. The absence of written rules for various matters was not a problem in the early years and indeed it served the Institute well because it made for flexibility and improvisation. Moreover, Ravi Matthai could be inconsistent in his decisions across people and yet command enormous moral authority because his commitment to the larger good of the Institution was so transparent. He was fair and perceived to be fair, so people were willing to grant him a large measure of discretion. Matthai believed that an absence of rules was desirable in the early years of institution building because it was good for people not to have the rule book thrown at them at every turn. Individuals had different needs and capabilities and it was important, at that stage of the institution, to respond specifically to each situation. But I don’t believe that Matthai ever intended this as a permanent feature. Indeed, it was precisely because he believed that the Institute needed new processes and a new style of leadership that he chose to step down. However, the Institute has persisted with the aversion to having clearly defined rules for far too long. As I state in my book, this was partly on account on inertia but also partly because the absence of rules confers enormous discretionary powers on the director. In any institution,
the absence of transparent rules, if it continues for too long, can lead to perceptions of arbitrariness and people gaming the system for their own benefit. You have said that “to avoid government aid, IIM-A has been heavily relying on in-company training conducted Q by its faculty for the corporate world. This activity has been helping the institute generate a significant portion it’s annual revenue. “It thus sees such revenues as crucial to its autonomy... Institutions that rely entirely on internally generated revenues end up as teaching shops.” Several institutes abroad have demonstrated that it is possible to impart quality management education while generating revenues through executive education. So what is the basis of your objection? The quote you refer to is from my book. True, many b-schools use executive education to augment their revenues. The question is: to what extent should they do so? If you look at the top universities in the US, a big chunk of their revenues arises from returns on their endowment corpus, which is built out of philanthropy. Quality institutions do not generally sustain themselves solely through revenues generated by teaching and consulting. There is a role for executive training programs but it would not be desirable to rely excessively on them for generating revenues. There has to be a mix of incomegenerating activities and a subsidy which comes either
The Institute has persisted with the aversion to having clearly defined rules for far too long.
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 39
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
There are several NRI faculty who are looking for opportunities...in India. Some of the newer IITs have had some success in attracting them.
out of private philanthropy (as in the US) or from the government (as in Europe). Recently, seven new IIMs have been established across the country and most of them are being guided by the other older and established IIMs. What are your views on such brand extensions? Q It may not be entirely correct to think of the new IIMs as brand extensions. Although there may be such a thing as an IIM brand, each IIM has its own brand value. This is especially true of the older IIMs. So, the question of IIM A’s brand being diluted by the setting up of IIM Ranchi or IIM Rohtak does not arise. Similarly, several new IITs have been set up, but in no way are the brand values of IIT Bombay or IIT Madras impaired. I believe that the creation of new IIMs and IITs is a healthy development, given the demand for quality education in the country. One has to remember that every IIT and IIM entails a substantial commitment of resources. There are, of course, the challenges of getting faculty and maintaining quality. But these are not insuperable. After all, today’s older IIMs also started from scratch and they did not even know whether there would be a market for MBAs! Today, there are several NRI faculty who are looking for opportunities to return to India. Some of the newer IITs have had some success in attracting them. One must hope that the newer IIMs will do likewise. I am all for new institutions because older institutions do tend to get ossified and lose some of their nimbleness. New institutions have something to prove, so they are capable of great energy. Some of the newer IIMs are collaborating on procuring materials and on conducting the CAT so that they can save on costs. One or two of them are talking of using technology to scale up. IIM Indore is the first IIM to venture into undergraduate education. These are all good signs. What are the most important factors that these IIMs have to put in place for growing into an ‘institution’? Q Some of it is the nitty-gritty of academic work—a rigorous and fair admissions process, good infrastructure, quality materials, placement, all the details that go with running the two year program. International exposure is important—faculty must be given international exposure through visits of various durations to quality schools. It’s also important to have a doctoral program; for this, collaborations with other schools can be worked out. Every IIM must find its niche, some domain in which it has unique expertise. Perhaps one way to do so is to become an expert in the region or state in which the IIM operates. Impact on management practice is important. Any of the newer IIM that is able to achieve such an impact will quickly make a mark for itself. But, above all, the great lesson from IIM A and Ravi Matthai is the creation of the right culture within the institution. For what is required is not performance today or tomorrow but the ability to keep performing and improving over a long period. ?
Please turn to page 101 to read an extract from Dr TT Ram Mohan’s book Brick by Red Brick. * Ravi Matthai’s speech when he stepped down as director; source: Brick by Red Brick, page 177
40 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
doc_185726421.pdf
The elements essential for institution building are among the best-known secrets—freedom, sensitivity to the environment, humanity
and discrimination*—yet most do not get the formula right. In this exclusive with The Smart Manager, Dr T T Ram Mohan talks about how each of these elements were incorporated into the building blocks of IIM Ahmedabad’s culture to help it create a sustaining legacy.
Start your Gold Membership to enjoy the full value of The Smart Manager.
Check http://www.thesmartmanager.com/goldmember.aspx for more information.
smart leader india comes to IIM
28 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
smart leader
india comes to IIM
a fine balance india comes to iim
brick by red brick
pp 36–40
dr tt ram mohan, iim ahmedabad
illustration by: nilesh juvalekar
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 29
smart leader india comes to IIM
The third fastest growing city in the world1 A tiny city in the
households in India3 A city at the center of the ‘rice bowl’ of India4
‘land of gods’2 The city with the highest number of SEC A
juggling the feudal with the modern8 The sixth fastest job-creating city in
India9 A city best known for rolling hills and rock and roll10 The second best city to
reside in India11 A city switching from tanneries to technology12 A city of lakes and palaces13 1 Ahmedabad 2Kashipur 3Bangalore 4Raipur 5 Calcutta 6Ranchi 7Indore 8Rohtak 9Lucknow 10 Shillong 11 Kozhikode 12Tiruchirappalli 13Udaipur
India comes to IIM
30 www.thesmartmanager.com The Smart Manager Sep-Oct 2011
tribal movement6 The Commercial Capital of Central India7 A city
The city with the second-largest bourse in India5 A city at the heart of a
smart leader
IIM Ahmedabad
Ram Mohan is Professor in the Finance & Accounting area at IIM Ahmedabad.
brick by red brick
? dr tt ram mohan in conversation with poornima subramanian
SMART SUMMARY The elements essential for institution building are among the best-known secrets—freedom, sensitivity to the environment, humanity and discrimination*—yet most do not get the formula right. In this exclusive with The Smart Manager, Dr T T Ram Mohan talks about how each of these elements were incorporated into the building blocks of IIM Ahmedabad’s culture to help it create a sustaining legacy.
Founder-Director Ravi Matthai put in place a structure and strategy that resulted in the creation of an enduring institution—IIM A. In your view, what factors have contributed to the institution sustaining its legacy? Q I would say ‘culture, processes and mission’ instead of ‘structure and strategy’. Matthai’s approach was to get the culture and values right at IIM A— he called it ‘a tradition of attitudes’. He believed that once an institution, in its nascent stages, got these right, things like structure and strategy would evolve naturally in response to the needs of a given situation. In my book Brick by Red Brick, I dwell on various elements of the culture that Dr Vikram Sarabhai and
36 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
Ravi Matthai created and that have sustained IIM A over the past five decades. The starting point was the belief that academic institutions can flourish only in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Academics must experience that freedom in their everyday activities, they must given every opportunity to grow and flower instead of being trampled upon by authority or by tightly run systems. Only then would quality people be attracted to an academic institution and stay for long. In this, Sarabhai and Matthai have been proved right. They were able to attract to Ahmedabad, a smallish town at the time, academics of high caliber. A large number stayed on until retirement and many have even settled down in Ahmedabad after retirement. Sarabhai and Matthai focused on three key elements—autonomy, freedom of expression and faculty governance. Autonomy is operational freedom for the Institute. Autonomy was sought to be fostered by creating IIM A as a society instead of making it an institution governed by an Act of Parliament; this helped create a certain distance between the Institute and the government and minimized interference from politicians and bureaucrats. Freedom of expression is the right of the faculty to express themselves on matters of public policy as well as on internal matters. This too was sedulously fostered by both Sarabhai and Matthai. In addition, the faculty were given complete freedom in academic matters— the design and content of courses, the pedagogy, the evaluation scheme, etc. Then, there is faculty governance, which is the participation of faculty in all important decisions related to the Institute. This was not a matter of simply going along with faculty sentiment on all matters or counting votes on a given issue. Not at all. It was more a matter of giving the faculty a sense of ownership. It was about giving them a sense that they were being consulted on all matters, that their views were being taken into account. There were other elements as well in the culture at IIM A. I mention in the book how Matthai chose not
to have rules for various matters and to deny activity heads any authority to take decisions. He did so in order to ensure that faculty did not feel imposed upon. He wanted all activities and decisions to be informed by a culture of discussion and deliberation and a desire to take people along. In addition to these, Matthai created important damage-containment mechanisms. One was the convention of the director vacating office after one term. Matthai walked away from the director’s job after seven years at the helm and when he was at the peak of his achievements. His contract did not stipulate any term and he could have stayed on as director until retirement. (He was only 45 when he stepped down as director.) He chose not to do so. One of the reasons behind this was his belief that every institution needs change at the top and no leader should perpetuate his style of leadership for too long. I am inclined to believe that he also saw the potential for damage in anybody occupying the post for too long—as there is so much concentration of power in the office of the director. Another important mechanism is the committee system for taking decisions. No individual at any level could take decisions by himself. He had to get peers to agree. This helped ensure acceptance of decisions and it also gave the faculty an enormous sense of ownership in the Institution. Finally, there was a clear sense of mission, namely, the use of management principles not only for the benefit of the corporate sector but for agriculture and other under-managed sectors of the economy. This mission was to be realized through three inter-related activities: teaching, research and consulting.
Matthai walked away from the director’s job after seven years at the helm and when he was at the peak of his achievements.
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 37
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
We need to ask whether it is good to deny those in administrative positions minimum authority, including financial authority.
Both before and after joining IIM A, I was curious to know how the Institute had managed to remain at the top for so long. In the course of writing the book, I was able to make the link between the extraordinary outcome we see today—an institution that has remained vibrant for fifty years—and the extraordinary effort and quality of thought that went into the making of IIM A. The Institute’s success has broader lessons not only for other academic institutions but for all institutions, including corporations that have a large number of ‘knowledge workers’. For any institution to stay relevant, it needs to constantly innovate. In the book you have explained how some processes—faculty governance, decentralized structure—were put in place right from its inception. Most institutions struggle to find the right balance between preserving the old and adopting new. Either they completely lose a sense of the past or stay firmly entrenched in it. How does IIM A walk this tightrope. Q First, I would make a clear distinction between values on the one hand and processes, systems and products on the other. An academic institution cannot compromise on certain values—there is no question of discarding the core values and hence of innovating in respect of these. When it comes to processes, systems and products, however, an institution needs to innovate. Innovation arises from many things. All of us recognize that a sense of freedom is an essential requirement. You have to be free to experiment, and, of course, you must have the resources to experiment. But you also need a demanding environment, you need competition. Otherwise, even the best of institutions may not have enough motivation to innovate. IIM A has been good at product innovation. It has been good at coming up with new courses, new longduration programs, new executive programs in response to market needs. However, systems and processes may not have kept pace with the needs of the situation. One of the challenges for IIM A is to innovate without damaging the culture that has sustained it for so long. For instance, faculty governance is a force for good but it must not result in a slowing down of decisionmaking or responsiveness to market need. Similarly, we need to ask whether it is good to deny those in administrative positions minimum authority including financial authority—even in the smallest matters, the area chairman requires approval from the dean or the director, and this can be quite irksome at times. Then again, autonomy has been enormously helpful to the Institute, but the outside world today demands greater standards of accountability as well. You are right, every institution needs change with continuity. In some matters, we have got the balance right, in others, it’s a bit of a struggle. One interesting aspect is that even today IIM A does not have a written and printed handbook of rules. Instead, as you write in your book, “norms were allowed to evolve from within the community.” How has this contributed to IIM’s culture? And secondly, such a culture can also result in complacency and ineffectiveness. How does IIM A overcome these pitfalls? Q Yes, the culture has been one of peer review, peer pressure and norms being agreed upon by common consent instead of written rules to cover everything under the sun. For example, you could have rules
38 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
mandating that faculty show up on time for classes. Or you could have the faculty body agreeing that this was a sensible thing to happen. At IIM A, the preference was for the latter. The absence of written rules for various matters was not a problem in the early years and indeed it served the Institute well because it made for flexibility and improvisation. Moreover, Ravi Matthai could be inconsistent in his decisions across people and yet command enormous moral authority because his commitment to the larger good of the Institution was so transparent. He was fair and perceived to be fair, so people were willing to grant him a large measure of discretion. Matthai believed that an absence of rules was desirable in the early years of institution building because it was good for people not to have the rule book thrown at them at every turn. Individuals had different needs and capabilities and it was important, at that stage of the institution, to respond specifically to each situation. But I don’t believe that Matthai ever intended this as a permanent feature. Indeed, it was precisely because he believed that the Institute needed new processes and a new style of leadership that he chose to step down. However, the Institute has persisted with the aversion to having clearly defined rules for far too long. As I state in my book, this was partly on account on inertia but also partly because the absence of rules confers enormous discretionary powers on the director. In any institution,
the absence of transparent rules, if it continues for too long, can lead to perceptions of arbitrariness and people gaming the system for their own benefit. You have said that “to avoid government aid, IIM-A has been heavily relying on in-company training conducted Q by its faculty for the corporate world. This activity has been helping the institute generate a significant portion it’s annual revenue. “It thus sees such revenues as crucial to its autonomy... Institutions that rely entirely on internally generated revenues end up as teaching shops.” Several institutes abroad have demonstrated that it is possible to impart quality management education while generating revenues through executive education. So what is the basis of your objection? The quote you refer to is from my book. True, many b-schools use executive education to augment their revenues. The question is: to what extent should they do so? If you look at the top universities in the US, a big chunk of their revenues arises from returns on their endowment corpus, which is built out of philanthropy. Quality institutions do not generally sustain themselves solely through revenues generated by teaching and consulting. There is a role for executive training programs but it would not be desirable to rely excessively on them for generating revenues. There has to be a mix of incomegenerating activities and a subsidy which comes either
The Institute has persisted with the aversion to having clearly defined rules for far too long.
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
www.thesmartmanager.com 39
brick by red brick
by ram mohan
There are several NRI faculty who are looking for opportunities...in India. Some of the newer IITs have had some success in attracting them.
out of private philanthropy (as in the US) or from the government (as in Europe). Recently, seven new IIMs have been established across the country and most of them are being guided by the other older and established IIMs. What are your views on such brand extensions? Q It may not be entirely correct to think of the new IIMs as brand extensions. Although there may be such a thing as an IIM brand, each IIM has its own brand value. This is especially true of the older IIMs. So, the question of IIM A’s brand being diluted by the setting up of IIM Ranchi or IIM Rohtak does not arise. Similarly, several new IITs have been set up, but in no way are the brand values of IIT Bombay or IIT Madras impaired. I believe that the creation of new IIMs and IITs is a healthy development, given the demand for quality education in the country. One has to remember that every IIT and IIM entails a substantial commitment of resources. There are, of course, the challenges of getting faculty and maintaining quality. But these are not insuperable. After all, today’s older IIMs also started from scratch and they did not even know whether there would be a market for MBAs! Today, there are several NRI faculty who are looking for opportunities to return to India. Some of the newer IITs have had some success in attracting them. One must hope that the newer IIMs will do likewise. I am all for new institutions because older institutions do tend to get ossified and lose some of their nimbleness. New institutions have something to prove, so they are capable of great energy. Some of the newer IIMs are collaborating on procuring materials and on conducting the CAT so that they can save on costs. One or two of them are talking of using technology to scale up. IIM Indore is the first IIM to venture into undergraduate education. These are all good signs. What are the most important factors that these IIMs have to put in place for growing into an ‘institution’? Q Some of it is the nitty-gritty of academic work—a rigorous and fair admissions process, good infrastructure, quality materials, placement, all the details that go with running the two year program. International exposure is important—faculty must be given international exposure through visits of various durations to quality schools. It’s also important to have a doctoral program; for this, collaborations with other schools can be worked out. Every IIM must find its niche, some domain in which it has unique expertise. Perhaps one way to do so is to become an expert in the region or state in which the IIM operates. Impact on management practice is important. Any of the newer IIM that is able to achieve such an impact will quickly make a mark for itself. But, above all, the great lesson from IIM A and Ravi Matthai is the creation of the right culture within the institution. For what is required is not performance today or tomorrow but the ability to keep performing and improving over a long period. ?
Please turn to page 101 to read an extract from Dr TT Ram Mohan’s book Brick by Red Brick. * Ravi Matthai’s speech when he stepped down as director; source: Brick by Red Brick, page 177
40 www.thesmartmanager.com
The Smart Manager
Sep-Oct 2011
doc_185726421.pdf