The Hindu Business Line : ISB launches fifth centre of excellence

Though millions of Indians have made a name for themselves as hardworking, committed and skilled workers in the West, they are not known for their leadership qualities. However, the rapid rise of people such as Indra Nooyi, Rajat Gupta, and now Vikram Pandit, has shown that Indians also possess leadership material.

The Centre for Leadership, Innovation and Change (CLIC) at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, which was opened on February 1, will work to create a better understanding of the basic qualities that spur Indian and Asian workers on to leadership roles and unlock their true potential. The New Manager conducted an e-mail interview with Prasad Kaipa, Director of the centre, the fifth centre of excellence at ISB, to find out more about its mission.

What are the circumstances that lead ISB to set up this centre of excellence?

As we all know, the world around us is going through a leadership crisis. Employee engagement, ambiguity, globalisation and diversity are on the top of the minds of business leaders and organisations because they affect change management initiatives, risk-taking and hence innovation and personal leadership.

We have been discussing about setting up a centre for leadership and change from the beginning and now is the time to get it going.

Finally, there is much interest in India and China right now and if we can find a way to understand the Indian mindset and what makes Indians such as Indra Nooyi or Rajat Gupta or Vikram Pandit global leaders – then we will be able to help many others learn those best practices and build global organisations.

What is special about this field of learning and do you see a lot of demand for it?

We will use the integral approach to research and development, integrating lessons from wisdom traditions and lessons from scientific research with traditional management research that has been done in the West. We believe that the myths that Indians or Asians carry are different from those of Westerners. For example, in the West, entrepreneurship brings images of start-ups that grew from a garage andended up like an HP or Apple. On the other hand, in India or Asia, entrepreneurships might be connected with family business dynasties such as the Tatas, Ambanis or Birlas.

Similarly, in the past 20 years, we have learned a lot about how the brain works, how technology impacts our attention, how quantum approaches differ from Newtonian approaches, and they have not yet been integrated in management literature.

By doing further research into the ‘Indian mindset’ with special attention paid to developing global leaders, we might be able to come up with principles, cases, stories, processes and best practices that Indian (and Asian) companies and leaders could adopt to accelerate their movement towards global leadership.

In terms of demand, yes, there is a lot of demand. Many MNCs as well as Indian companies are recognising that Indians get motivated for different reasons, their retention, change, innovation are ignited differently and would like to find a way to leverage the talent that we have.

What is the profile of students who will benefit from this subject?

We will work with executives as well as with students of ISB. First, we plan to work with companies; let them identify executives that they want us to work with.

How can a company partner with CLIC?

We are exploring various ways and here are some that we already identified as win-win propositions.

Our first focus would be applied research projects with organisations — both commercial and non-commercial like Government education, NGOs, etc. The research project could be to understand how to provoke innovation in their employees, study how change affects them or how to evoke personal leadership, etc.

We are also setting up leadership circles around certain areas such as family business, women’s leadership, employee engagement, personal leadership, innovation initiative, etc. For example, we will work with up to 20 medium to large family businesses in a single family business leadership circle and with their inputs, identify various themes of interest to that community and provide education, mentoring and opportunities for networking through monthly meetings.

Other ways could be for us to work with an industry or a group of companies with similar objectives and take on research study on how they developed certain capabilities and how they became leaders in the global market place.

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