India-born Nitin Nohria was named the 10th Dean of Harvard Business School. Since he took office this July, he has been meeting faculty members and visiting several research centres of the Business School across the globe. India is the second stop for Nohria, after meeting the faculty of its European centre in London. He will next visit Hong Kong, Shanghai and San Francisco. Nohria feels the trip will help him expand the geographical horizons of Harvard Business School. Edited excerpts of his interaction with select Indian media:
What do you plan to achieve from this trip?
We have been committed to making sure that as the locus of economic activity becomes widely distributed across the world – since businesses are no longer concentrated in the US and the West – our Business School will have to understand and interpret these changes. This is what this trip is all about. When I was told about my appointment, I was certainly surprised. But what surprised me more was the response I received from India, especially from small villages. My own belief is that it has less to do with me and more to do with where India finds itself in the global economy. So, when it finds that one of its own has made a place in the global economy, it is a moment of hope and expectations.
What are your plans for India?
We have been in India for a few years. A lot of people think we are not doing enough in India. While we have a very small physical footprint in India, we have a large intellectual footprint here. Last year, we distributed 429,000 cases here. We are involved with 16 B-schools, and are training their professors to become better teachers with the help of case studies. We have developed 80 cases on Indian companies which are used across B-schools. Our strategy in India will be asset light. We are not in the business of chasing demand in India but chasing knowledge. We want to do more case studies with more executive education participants next year. However, we never aim to compete with other B-Schools in India. We, in fact, try and develop Indian institutes to meet that demand.
Is there an Indian way of doing business?
Wharton Business School has come out with a book, ‘The India Way’. I think that book does try to answer this question. One of the most amazing things is that Indian businesses now teach or it’s a management quality that is yet to be tagged — i.e. there is a radical re-engineering being done to the business model and allows them to produce products at a price point that was earlier never thought of. This capacity to break the price point and deliver functionality at a dramatically lower price point are far and more coming out of India than compared to any other part of world. This type of innovation, where business models are being changed in a radically imaginative way to create products of certain base functionalities at low price points, is a practice that the rest of the world will have to come to India and learn.
Kindly share your thoughts on today’s management education programmes.
We are at a time when management education is in a flux. For the longest time the image of a management programme was pretty well-established. It was a two-year programme, students would take a summer job and then went on to jobs. But now there are more one-year programmes than the two-year ones — there are programmes like online, eMBA, weekend, etc. This raises a question for the field as a whole — what is the value-proposition of an MBA programme? We, at HBS, and at several B-schools in the US, strongly believe the two-year MBA programme is the best.
Harvard Business School has a 100-year-old history. What changes would you like to see?
I think any person who has studied leadership would say, be careful about trying to make any changes too quickly or rapidly in an institution as old as ours. It is a school that enjoys a great reputation, but that does not mean there is no room for important changes. But I am going about it cautiously by consulting all of my colleagues; by talking to people all around the world. That’s why the first step that I took when I took charge was to meet each and every faculty member of school. I have already spoken to 30-40 key alumni. And now I have taken this trip, again trying to understand and listen to people and come to term with what needs to be changed at this glorious institute. I can assure you that there are some changes that need to be changed. In fact, as a dean of the HBS I would like to usher in the ‘next century of innovation’ at the school.
How do you plan to go about this task?
We have been doing that for the last 8-10 years. When I started teaching at HBS in 1988, it was difficult to find Indian or Chinese case studies or that from emerging markets. Today, we have 80 cases on Indian companies. Last year, 50 per cent of the new cases developed at the school were from international companies. This is impacting our curriculum as well.
You had proposed an MBA oath. Has it had an impact?
I do not think it is a guarantee. I had proposed the MBA oath in a simple way, which makes an MBA manager think hard about what their responsibilities are. Through this oath, my purpose has been to force a dialogue and debate that forces us to think what are the responsibilities that go along with the privileges of you being a manager. Last year, half of the students at HBS took the oath. Of 200 schools, about 5,000 students signed and took the oath at different campuses. There are young global leaders who are spreading this oath, and there are companies that are thinking whether employees should take this oath.
