Edge over others

Some top business schools that are not on the list tell their story.

ISB: A cut above the rest
The Indian School of Business (ISB) was established in 2001 with the launch of its flagship programme, the Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGPM). From an initial class of 126 students, the school currently has 571 students in the class of 2011. Within a short span of ten years, ISB has made a mark for itself as a premier B-school in India. The multiple learning opportunities during its one-year programme, the unique portfolio model of faculty, accepting diverse mix of students from different industries and backgrounds, the GMAT score as a selection criterion, lateral placements, international quality research, are a few firsts at ISB.

The curriculum for PGPM is structured in a manner that suits the students’ academic background, career aspirations and work experience. It is a blend of insights from the East and West, and enables a coherent understanding of the new and emerging economies of the world. The curriculum is reviewed, and upgraded every year for its theoretical rigour and its practical relevance.

The method of teaching changes according to the need and the requirement of a particular course. The one-year PGPM starts with the pre-term and orientation courses followed by eight terms of six weeks each. The first four terms cover the core courses, laying the foundation for the advanced elective courses in later terms. To specialise in one area, a student has to take a minimum of six electives from that area. Students can choose a maximum of two specialisations. Students also have the option of enrolling in two additional electives.

In addition to the classes, ISB provides experiential learning opportunities for students in practical courses and projects including providing support and mentoring. The Experiential Learning Programme offers students an opportunity to apply their in-class learning to address live business issues. Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture is a practical designed to enable students to develop their own business ideas. The Wharton Global Consulting Practicum is a collaborative consulting assignment that is taken up jointly by student teams from the Wharton and ISB. It addresses entry and growth strategies in new geographies.

The ISB campus lies on a beautiful site, with large boulders, open fields and clusters of large trees. Ecological balance is maintained on the campus by a large artificial lake which collects rainwater from the roadways, parking lots and rooftops.

The academic centre is the heart of the campus and houses the Learning Resource Centre, the knowledge hub of the institution. This centre holds the library and the IT facilities. The courtyard is the social hub of the campus, providing space for service outlets, facilities and leisure. The student villages form the four cornerstones of the campus, each accommodating 130 to 210 students in a mix of four-bedroom apartments and studio apartments.

The faculty at ISB includes eminent management intellectuals with research and teaching experience from the best B-schools in the world. “The distinctive research of our faculty members ensures that our programmes offer content that is contemporary and global in its perspective,” says an ISB functionary. The faculty’s research papers are consistently published by top international journals. ISB is among the few schools in the world that undertakes research with a focus on emerging and transition economies, striving to create synergies between India, Asia and the global business environment. Over 105 visiting faculty from the best B-schools in the USA, Europe, Australia and various Asian countries complement the expertise of our resident faculty. “In addition, under the Professors of Management practice, we get corporate leaders and acclaimed academicians to share their experiences with students,” the functionary adds.

ISB has established research centres in various areas. These centres of excellence provide a forum where knowledge and understanding of business can be exchanged between the academic and the corporate worlds.

IIM Lucknow lets its record do the talking
The Indian Institute of Management Lucknow claims it is not too keen to participate in business school surveys to spread the good word around; it would rather like the facts to speak for themselves. IIM Lucknow, which placed the largest-ever graduating batch of 315 students across all the IIMs this year, follows a set of rules. As a matter of policy, it also does not reveal the salary package offered to its students during placements unlike its peers.

IIM Lucknow Director Devi Singh says that a visit to the campus for a first person account of the infrastructure and the congenial learning environment would be more relevant. IIM Lucknow also has a satellite campus at Noida for working executives. “Our faculty size is almost 80, and we have been upgrading our curriculum regularly in sync with the changing times,” Singh says. “Among the IIMs, we were the only institute to place all the graduating students, while others had placement figures of 60-70 per cent.” The curriculum was reviewed only last year, he says, adding that some more management programmes will soon be added.

IIM Lucknow offers its flagship two-year Post Graduate Programme in Management, besides Post Graduate Programme in Agribusiness Management. It also offers Fellow Programme in Management - a doctoral level programme whose 11th batch is currently on. The Noida campus offers one-year full-time International Programme in Management for executives and Post Graduate Programme in Management for working executives which is a part-time three-year programme. “The institute will soon add a major finance programme titled the International Programme in Finance for the executives at its Noida campus,” Singh informs. This will be a full-time, one-year residential dual-degree post-graduate programme for advanced careers in finance with the emphasis on Indian and international business environments.

“Although, we do not get any grant, our revenues this fiscal are likely to touch Rs 80 crore,” Singh says. For multi-dimensional growth of students, IIM-L has alliances with prestigious institutions across the globe spread across four continents and 22 universities for knowledge sharing. It runs one of the largest student-exchange programmes in the country. This year, 53 students are heading for foreign universities. The institute will also play host to 30 students from other countries.

Narsee Monjee moves with the times
The Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) spoke to its alumni and industry players to evolve a curriculum that meets the industry needs and trends. It has incorporated business analytics, skill integration, consulting and social sensitivity skills in the curriculum too. The institute has brought in SAS business analytics software to support business analytics. The institute has incorporated communication and leadership and team building exercises. “We are using business simulations also to develop skill sets of the students. We have created new electives like world economy in transition and also incorporating issues which are unique to India,” says a functionary of the Mumbai-based business school.

The institute has 65 faculty members at present. Every year, NMIMS spends around Rs 30 lakh in training its faculty members for various programmes. While around 10 faculty members are sent for international training at the Harvard Business School, at the local level the faculty members participate in various training programmes at the Indian Institute of Managament Ahmedabad and the Indian School of Business Hyderabad. The institute says such training has changed the entire culture at the institute. NMIMS will also be forging tie ups with other institutes for future teacher- training programmes. The institute is also recruiting full-time international faculty members from the US.

NMIMS has a new 350,000 square feet campus coming in the Juhu Scheme in the western suburb of Mumbai. The campus would be running in the next two years. The institute says placements have always been good, and participating employers have been supportive even during the slowdown. The institute plans to invite more number of companies to its campus this year.

IIM Bangalore’s search for global acceptance
The post-graduate executive programmes are turning out to be the cash cow for the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. These programmes, which now number 36, help cross-subsidise the post-graduate programmes (PGPs) of the institute. PGPs of the institute, like most other management institutes, are loss makers as far as the cost of infrastructure is concerned.

With its 111-strong faculty IIM Bangalore is moving ahead with its plans for introducing new and innovative programmes, and even introducing programmes seeking to tap the global market. The institute, which has 675 PGP students, including 325 in the second year and 350 in the first year, also has 110 PhD scholars. Meanwhile, 330 students are enrolled for its post-graduate programme in Software Enterprise Management, a three-year part-time management programme.

The executive management programmes now help the institute earn 25-30 per cent of its revenues, and they earn the institute better margins. IIM Bangalore runs 36 open programmes today, and numerous other customised management programmes. The open programmes are developed by the faculty of the institute and many a company uses that as a reference point to request customised executive management programmes.

These include short programmes, which are of three to five days, or long programmes of nine to 12 months. The long programme has 30-40 contact classes. As of now, over 50 companies, both global corporations and Indian companies, have got their staff to do a course at the institute. Some of the companies that have had their staff take up the programmes include the Murugappa Group, ONGC, Oracle, Power Grid Corporation and SAP, among others. In addition to these, IIM-B has developed customised programmes for students and alumni to help them develop their own entrepreneurial ventures.

IIM-B Director Pankaj Chandra, who has taught at the Wharton School of Business for about a decade and also at IIM Ahmedabad, has brought in a global perspective to the institute. “Our mission is to prepare leaders for the new world. We will increasingly develop deeper knowledge base on emerging markets, countries which are repositories of traditional wealth and knowledge juxtaposed with elements of the new economy. This offers unique opportunities, for us, at IIM Bangalore to do research, and offer courses that would significantly enhance the knowledge and perspectives of participants in this new world,” says Chandra. The institute also runs a programme for the senior management of companies outside India. This programme, called DBI or Doing Business in India, has been introduced because there is an increasing interest of the rest of the world that wants to do business in India.

FMS Delhi blazes its own trail
The Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, feels that certain rankings do not take into account its unique inherent strengths. “We feel that our unique University-business school interface with all the benefits of the diverse faculty and other resources provided by the University of Delhi, our superior return on investment for an individual student and also our high teacher-student ratio is not highlighted by the ranking methodology used by most ranking agencies,” says a senior functionary.

What sets FMS apart? Students at FMS are involved in a number of activities which are organised by the various societies run by students themselves. That the batch size at FMS is relatively smaller compared to other B-Schools has its own advantages. The student teacher ratio and the gender ratio at FMS (33.33 per cent women in the 2012 batch) are both extremely favourable. “At the end of the day placements are what contributes significantly to the reputation of a business school, and for years students of FMS have been consistently recruited by top companies in every domain such as Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble, CitiBank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Accenture, Arthur D Little, Infosys and Wipro, to name only a few.

Over 50 live projects with major companies like Cisco, Bajaj Capital, Axis Bank, PVR, 20-20 Social, J&J, Diageo, AkzoNobel, Make My Trip, Afaqs, Tag Heuer, KPMG, Globus Spirits, GrowX, Q-Equip, Jaquar etc have also been carried out. The FMS Alumni Association, established in 1998, is a formally registered body of FMS graduates of all long term programmes. It has over 5,000 members worldwide.

IRMA stays focused on rural sectors
Established in 1979 with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the Government of India, the Government of Gujarat, erstwhile Indian Dairy Corporation and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) was borne out by Verghese Kurien’s work in the dairy co-operatives and its aim was to provide management education, training, research and consultancy support to co-operatives and rural development organisations in India.

In a bid to bridge the rural-urban divide, IRMA set off to train and generate ‘rural managers’ through its flagship two-year post-graduate programme in rural management (PRM), which now has a student strength of 110 for the 2010-12 batch. PRM is a two-year residential programme comprising four different segments - classroom, fieldwork, organisational understanding and management training.

A few years ago the institute launched a doctoral level residential programme called Fellow Programme in Rural Management (FPRM) with a focus on specialised knowledge, skills and attitudes for positions requiring conceptual and visioning skills in the co-operatives and developmental organisations. With an aim to strengthen the dairy sector not only in and around Anand, which houses the likes of Amul and NDDB, but also across the country, IRMA also introduced a one-year certificate programme in dairy management (CPDM) which offers six months of classroom experience and six months of industry exposure to students. Currently, the CPDM 2010 batch has 17 students.

During the placements for PRM 2008-10, participants received an average annual salary of Rs 6.00 lakh (the highest being Rs 9.45 lakh), and there was 100 per cent placement. Moreover, some participants prefer to join grass-roots organisations with low salaries over high-paying jobs for greater challenges, innovative experimentation and higher autonomy. The one-week long campus recruitment programme organised by the placement office is held during January-February of the second year of PRM. IRMA has enlisted over 650 organisations, which are designated for the purpose of placement of its graduates.

Spread across an area of 60 acres, the IRMA campus houses nine blocks as hostel, each with 24 rooms, along with a reading room on each floor of eight rooms. Its faculty comprises 28 resident members as well as four to five visiting members.

Prashanth Reddy in Hyderabad, Praveen Bose in Bangalore, Virendra Singh Rawat in Lucknow, Kalpana Pathak in Mumbai, Kirtika Suneja in Delhi and Vinay Umarji in Ahmedabad contributed to this article.