Campus Diary

Having wasted a century in ideological globe-carving, the world must prepare for the forces of global trade "" and fierce competition for resources and markets. So said Jagdish Sheth, professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta B-school, invited for a guest lecture at Delhi's International Management Institute (IMI).

Australia's grabbing the world's wine market from France, or China's grabbing the consumer durables market (watch Haier) from Korea and Japan is only as unthinkable as Japan's grabbing the car market from America once was.

Is India going to grab the outsourced software market? It could, he said, if it devotes resources to high-value exports (not the voice service kind), and stays clued in globally. Do software majors know what's happening in Estonia and Iceland? The other opportunity that mustn't be missed: clothes and textiles.

IIT MUMBAI
Tech to Biz Brand

Having assumed charge as the head of IIT Mumbai's Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Mangesh Koregaonkar has set his mind to the task of leveraging IIT's "techie" brand to craft a global reputation for business education. How?

By prompting demand for "techno-managers""" people who can emerge from their cabins, loosen their ties and roll up their sleeves to get their hands dirty with, well, silicon dust.

To this end, IIT Mumbai offers its engineering grads special admission to the two-year Masters in Management programme. The other initiative: a duly tech-enabled focus on the manufacturing sector. This, according to Koregaonkar, will plug a big gap in the current market for high-expertise business education.

IIFT DELHI
Equanimity Talk

As part of its "Thought Leadership" series, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi, recently had Cummins India CEO Anant Talaulicar over for a talk. Leadership, to him, was about listening to other's views. And the message of equanimity from the Mahabharat, in particular, appealed strongly to him: of not becoming a prisoner to one's own desires.

IIFT was also witness to a banking symposium yesterday, focused largely on global financial strategies "" including issues of consolidation, Basel II prudential norms and dynamic risk management. The speakers' list was studded with high-profile bankers. Among them: AK Purwar of SBI, SS Kohli of PNB (formerly), Shekhar Sathe of Kotak Mahindra Bank and Makrand Pande of Deutsche Bank.

GOIZUETA B-SCHOOL, ATLANTA
Aye Aye To That, Sir

Meanwhile, what might Goizueta Business School be up to? Experimental reach-out efforts. Today, for instance, it has a PhD Web Seminar for anyone considering a Doctorate of Philosophy in business management and willing to log on to its website.

The actual PhD, of course, would need you to go to Atlanta, Georgia, where the B-school is located, and where people only half-joke that "energy security" is about a caramel coloured effervescent liquid (because it's about sugarcane too, you see).

That is not to rule out any form of higher-order education delivered via the internet in the future, though. As strategy guru Bhaskar Chakravorti observed in his book The Slow Pace of Fast Change, innovations often take time in dormancy before they spring forth.