The professor who propelled SP Jain Institute of Management to top ten

Manesh Shrikant, who recently stepped down as Dean of SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai passed away on Friday morning. The institute is ranked among the top ten best B-schools in the country, even making it to the top five in some lists. I write this piece to recognise, relate, and celebrate the contribution that Shrikant made to management education.

Apart from being among the finest strategy management professors in the country (I have seen him holding his own in jugalbandis with Harvard’s best professors), he was a true pioneer in establishing what management education ought to be.

Shrikant had an MBA from Cornell University, an Ivy League college in the US (a feat he managed at the age of 36, after having been CEO of Mukand Iron and Steel, a one of India’s top five companies in those days) and got a doctorate from Harvard Business School when he was 42. Being a Gujarati bania, business was in his blood. His thoughts on management education were unparalleled and I had the opportunity of watching them being implemented during my years at SP Jain Institute, Mumbai.

When I joined in 1990, the institute was not even among the top three business schools in Mumbai. Back then, JBIMS, NMIMS (my alma mater) and Sydenham used to rule the roost, in that order. By the late 1990s, SPJIMR was consistently among the top B-schools in the country. The man who made that happen was Dr Shrikant.

Key contributions

He had an unusual take on management education. He believed that the objective of management education was to produce ‘practitioners’ and not ‘scholars’. His ideas on how to teach management were creative and insightful. His key contributions in shaping SPJIMR were:

1. Admissions based not just on entrance marks (he always had a strong suspicion that high IQ as tested by entrance tests, was inversely correlated to high managerial success), but also on judgement, managerial traits, and leadership qualities that the candidates displayed. Of course, this is common knowledge today, but not so in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

2. A curriculum that places emphasis on outside class-room activities that helped students get their hands dirty in peer group situations.

3. Inculcating a sensitivity to real social issues by making students do a full-time social project instead of a corporate summer project. This practice was later followed by many other schools.

4. His insistence that faculty would have to be good teachers, not just researchers, and making student feedback a critical component. Every faculty member would have to contribute in at least three of four areas: teaching, research, consulting, or training. This ensured that faculty also had a ‘practice’ orientation.

Transformative Times

The early-to-mid 1990s were exciting times. We were part of this transformative approach to management education.

Dr Srikant Datar of Harvard Business School wrote a book on management education being at the crossroads, for which he researched the top 100 business schools in the world. Some 75 per cent of what the book talked of were things Dr Shrikant used to emphasise in the early 1990s. That’s one of the main reasons why he can be called a giant when it comes to defining management education.

Unreasonable bosses

He was a tough man to work for and those who survived the initial phase went on to do very well in their career. I worked under him for 21 long years. He once told me that it was the lucky few who get very unreasonable bosses at the beginning of their career. I look back and realise how lucky I have been. SP Jain Institute has given the world of business many good directors and leaders, if that is any evidence of his achievement. He was the man who taught many of us that a business school ought to run with business-like efficiency and as a not-for-profit.

Dr Manesh Shrikant may be gone, but his teachings still resonate in our minds and his words reverberate in our hearts.

The writer Founding Director, Cloudcherry, a Customer Experience Measurement and feedback firm. Advisor and Head - Academics, HCL TalentCare. Founding Executive Director (Emeritus) Great Lakes institute of Management.

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