Ajit Rangnekar, Dean of Hyderabad-based Indian School of the Business, has been associated with the B-school for close to a decade, and has been instrumental in strengthening the school’s relationships with external stakeholders — industry, policy-makers and entrepreneurs. The school has come a long way since it launched its first one-year post-graduate programme in management in 2001 with a batch of 128 students. Now spread across two campuses, the other one in Mohali, ISB has a batch size of 770 students who will pass out in 2014.

Rangnekar has been over 30 years in consulting across different countries in Asia. An IIT-Mumbai graduate, he holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In an interview to Business Line , Rangnekar spoke of ISB’s journey, its industry readiness and placements. Excerpts:

Looking back, what have you done differently?

Our programmes have always been innovative. We created the trend for one-year MBAs. Now, almost every top-tier business school in India has an executive PGP. With ‘PGP Max’ we again pioneered the part-time MBA for senior industry executives with 15-20 years of experience. Until then there was really no one; there had never been a high-quality part-time executive MBA. More recently, we started MFAB, a programme for family business scions.

There is this debate now about ethics and values, but is that something which can be taught at B-school?

If one doesn’t have the right early upbringing, there is little that an institution of higher learning can do.

But to some extent it can show young managers the cause and benefits of good action. It’s not that people don’t know, but with greed, fear, anxiety and with time, it’s something we forget. So how do you recreate that, how do you give them adequate support and how do we show them?

Today, an unfortunate perception is that everyone is corrupt and that without being corrupt you can’t do anything.

Can we show students enough examples of how people have actually succeeded? What have they actually done? What are the tools they have used? Right To Information is a tool, for example. How do you create a body of people who can support each other in some of these cases? It’s a big challenge, and there is a lot still to be done.

Was the school impacted by all that has happened to your founder, Rajat Gupta?

Interestingly, the school did not feel the impact. I look at the three parameters : my admission numbers are not affected, companies coming for placements are not affected, and the number of faculty who joined me or wanted to join me are not affected. Those are the only three parameters that I look at. For all of us who have been close to Rajat, of course, it’s not been happy… this institution would not be what it is today without his foresight.

With a much larger base of studentsand a downturn in the economy, is placement getting to be a bigger task for you?

If we had 500 students instead of 800, I would have cut our cost and efforts in placements by 90 per cent. At 500 students, we would have had to be the gatekeeper to allow a few companies to come in and recruit.

Surprisingly, in this weak market, we increased our class size by 200 students last year and placed them faster than we had done in the previous year. But all schools are feeling the pinch. We had to make sure that the industry comes to us, and in the process, a lot of good came through. We significantly increased our outreach, established better contact with the industry, and developed greater sensitivity to their needs. We became highly customer- focussed.

Where does ISB feature in research?

We started with a significant focus on research. And to be successful at that, one has to attract the right kind of faculty with strong research credentials. Faculty recruitment is a big challenge because we do not have a pool of research in our country which does that quality kind of research. So a significant portion of my time goes in attracting and convincing leading faculty in the US or other developed marketsto come to India.

We have over the years, invested a lot in creating a strong research culture, and it is now beginning to show results. Today, we have about 50 of our own faculty with a consistent track record of publishing in top academic journals. We are beginning to see faculty writing to us on their own saying they would like to join us. So, should we have achieved this in 10-12 years? I don’t know. Would we have liked to do much more? Absolutely!

Now, many Indian companies are going abroad, so does that change the paradigm of teaching?

Originally, the plan was that multinationals would come in and there would be talent here for them. Now the talent is going with the Indian companies which are going abroad. This is ok.

Now that ISB is entering its teens, has it completed the agenda it set for itself?

The agenda was never meant to be achieved in ten years. Educational institutions last decades, if not centuries. So the agenda was to be among the top in the world and in some aspects I think we have achieved it. But I don’t think anyone of us ever expected that in ten years we would say that our job is done. I think in many parameters we have done much better than what we had originally expected. But we still have a long way to go.

In what aspect do you think your original plans have been surpassed?

Nobody would have expected us to have two campuses and 800 students in just 10-11 years. We actually took a very different approach to many other institutions. We have always believed in creating talent capacity before the market demand is reached.

My alma mater , IIM-A, had 120 students for a very long time, then they increased it to 180, and then to 240 or so. If you keep aside the recent increase in IIM capacities because of reservation, they have grown less than one per cent per annum, whereas the industry, even in the worst of times, has grown 3-5 per cent per annum. Therefore, we created an automatic market for talent. We will have students ready for the market so that the market expands.

What that does is it creates a lot more pressure for you to reach out to the industry to ensure that students get placed. But it has been worthwhile. By this April we will have over 6,000 alumni. Today, I find my alumni practically in every company I go to. The industry, I believe, has benefited. Hopefully we are doing something that is impacting the industry; all those recruiters are coming back enthusiastically year after year.

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