The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIMA) celebrated a somewhat low-key golden jubilee in December 2011. Three books on the making of the institution came out during the year. The first, Nurturing Institutional Excellence, was a collection of essays written by past and present faculty members and, given that it was written by a diverse set of people with differing styles and perspectives, it provided an anecdotal look at the institute. This was followed by a book written by T T Ram Mohan, Brick by Red Brick, which examined the history of IIMA, but largely from the lens of the first full-time director, Ravi Matthai.
Prafull Anubhai’s book provides a history of the institute from a different perspective. He has been associated with IIMA for many years — as a board member, a visiting faculty who took up a substantial teaching load, and as a participant in multiple committees that are set up once a decade to plan and set goals for the institution. He has a better view of IIMA and a sense of history for having been there. Therefore, his version of the story should have been exciting and readable.
Unfortunately, Anubhai’s version does not engage the reader’s attention. This is because his book falls between two stools: it does not locate itself in the larger paradigm of IIMA as a good case in managing higher/professional education. That approach would have highlighted the challenges of the funding, structure, alumni relations, curriculum design and delivery, and new programmes in a different light. Given that Anubhai is chairman of the board of management of Ahmedabad University, which has ambitious plans to set up a large campus with multiple disciplines, he was eminently suited to undertake such an effort.
For instance, Anubhai does not bring out the fundamental differences between IIMA and IIM, Kolkata (the only difference he mentions is that Kolkata campus was built by the public works department whereas an architect designed the Ahmedabad one). Both were set up around the same time, but took significantly different growth trajectories and were managed differently. The involvement of the local industrial houses in Kolkata and the state government was not as deep as in the case of Ahmedabad. It would have been interesting to analyse how or whether this mattered.
Alternately, given his involvement, Anubhai could have taken the memoir approach with a range of anecdotes to make the story engaging. Instead, he takes a “case analysis” approach. He uses correspondence, facts and some personal experiences to provide an inward-looking analysis of IIMA. It is also somewhat board- and Ahmedabad-centric with little engagement with the processes within the faculty body, the alumni, industry and so on.
Mention IIMA and the association is strongly with Vikram Sarabhai and Ravi Matthai. Anubhai, however, highlights the role of Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and his contribution to building IIMA. This is an important part of the narrative. Sarabhai and Matthai set up the internal processes; Matthai cut out organisational hierarchies and brought in functional hierarchies. However, Lalbhai’s role in managing the external environment, his contribution to the hardware of the institute, the fact that he was on the building committee and persuaded Louis Kahn to design the campus are usually missed in most IIMA narratives, and Anubhai fills in the gap.
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Anubhai tells us that Lalbhai refused to be chairman of the institute’s board of governors even when he was offered the position more than once and though he accepted chairmanship of IIT Mumbai. The reason: he wanted IIMA to be perceived as a national institute so assuming chairmanship could have sent out the signal that it was a very Ahmedabad-based institute.
Ahmedabad as a city has a tradition of nurturing institutions of excellence and it takes pride in the fact that these institutions are part of its urban life. Though the intellectual power for sustaining the institution comes from across the country and is cosmopolitan, the support structures for it come wholeheartedly from the local community. This aspect of Ahmedabadi pride in national institutions is effectively captured in The IIMA Story.
To understand the elephant called IIM, we now have multiple descriptions. Apart from the books named in the opening paragraph, there is Chetan Bhagat’s Two States to get one perspective of student life, or Prashant John’s Second Degree for yet another. Anubhai’s narrative style is flat and bereft of emotion, a difficult feat indeed for somebody so closely associated with IIMA. He tries to use numbers to justify his arguments. He uses bullets to summarise something that he has narrated and that makes the book look like a long presentation. Some insider perspectives would have been useful plus a chapter on the management of higher education. But in Anubhai’s hands the story of IIMA remains just the story of IIM of Ahmedabad. Given the visibility and size of the institute, the story could have been much broader. It remains an interesting book for what it is, but it disappoints when we consider what it could have been!
The reviewer, a former IIMA professor, is an independent researcher and consultant
THE IIMA STORY
The DNA of an Institution
Prafull Anubhai
Random House India
269 pages; Rs 599