The Hindu Business Line : Call to IIMs: ‘Base teaching material on the Indian experience’

New Delhi, Nov. 5 The Chairman of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Mr R.C. Bhargava, has lamented the preponderance of ‘Harvard and other western-based’ case studies being taught in Indian management schools and the inability to generate sufficient material from the domestic experience.

“Experience proves that the only successful multinationals in India are those having Indian managers. Companies that do it with all expats don’t usually do well. The management environment here is different, which is why a good manager in Singapore, Japan or Korea will go wrong applying the same techniques here,” he noted.

Despite this, a large percentage of case studies taught in the premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) come from Harvard.

“India is a big enough country. So why are we not creating material out of the Indian experience? If there are no sufficient Indian case studies, how do you teach and create managers who are relevant to our business context?” Mr Bhargava, who headed a recent IIM Review Committee set up by the Centre, told Business Line here.

According to him, not a single “really good” case study of even Maruti had emanated from the IIMs. “Somebody has done a little bit here and somebody a little bit there. That’s all,” Mr Bhargava quipped.

So strong is the obsession with teaching western business models in B-schools here that nobody even mentions, let alone teaches a course, about Japanese management practices. “Students aren’t really told how the Japanese built up their industry after the war and the management systems developed by their firms. Only when the West adopts these, some of it comes back here,” he claimed.

Mr Bhargava felt the basic problem with the IIMs lay in their being unable to attract good faculty, particularly in functional areas such as finance, marketing, organisational behaviour and strategy. The IIMs, apart from running post-graduate management programmes, were set up to also do research and create knowledge that would in turn improve teaching.

“But the IIMs produce very few PhDs and very few students find it attractive to come back as faculty,” he noted. As a result, Brand IIM had probably more to do with the quality of the students who enter through a ruthless process of selection.

“In a country of 1.1 billion people, you are taking in less than 2,000 admissions and that too the brightest in the land. Somebody can always question how much value is added by teachers and how much comes from the genes of the students,” Mr Bhargava added.

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