Halfway through my fourth meeting of the day I realise that I am right in the middle of yet another turnaround story. I've had words like customer-feedback and market dominance thrown at me several times. A business process re-engineering (BPR) exercise is in progress. As is a scenario-planning one. One group of executives is indulging in some blue-sky thinking about going global. Another is looking at how the organisation's service-offering can be web-enabled. These could be scenes from any forward-thinking Indian company. Only, they aren't. The background against which these events are being played out is the lush 100-odd acre campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B). And they're probably why an institution once perceived as a hunting ground for recruiters from state-owned enterprises is, circa 2000, the best business school in the country, according to the biennial rating of B-schools by Business Today and the Hyderabad-based education- and management-research firm Cosmode.

Text by R. Sukumar

It isn't as if IIM-B achieved this status overnight; it takes a few years for the impact of turnaround efforts to show. Most people attribute IIM-B's revival to efforts initiated by former Director K.R.S. Murthy and continued by the incumbent, M. Rammohan Rao. As Ganesh Shermon, Chairman of consulting firm hrfolks.com puts it: ''Murthy and, now, Rao, have set, through their vision and ambition, an aggressive learning and growth path for the school.''

The specifics are impressive. In 1998, IIM-B launched a post-graduate programme in Software Enterprise Management for software professionals. It boasts (MBA) student exchange programmes with more than 10 international B-schools (28 second-year students are, even as you read this, spending a term abroad) and partnerships for executive education programmes with companies like Reliance, Siemens, and BPL. And on the anvil is an Advanced Leadership Programme that the school will launch soon in association with the likes of Insead, Singapore, and McGill University, Canada. Rao, a quiet-spoken academic who's just won the Fulkerson Prize for a paper he authored on discrete math claims: ''All these feed into our post-graduate programming in management.''

And then there are the research centres. Some of these like the Unit Trust of India-sponsored Centre of Capital Management (1992), and the Wipro-Silicon Automation-Siemens-Motorola-sponsored Centre for Software Enterprise Management (1998) are not very recent. Others like the N.S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (established 1999, and NSR is one of Infosys' founders who retired last year), which will be holding its first business plan competition this December, and the Global Internet Ventures-funded Incubation Centre (established in 2000) are. Rounding off the list are a Centre for Insurance Research, launched in association with the Insurance Regulation and Development Authority (IRDA), and the Government of India-funded Centre for Public Policy (both established in 2000).

But mere facts do not capture the obvious passion that has driven IIM-B to the top. J. Ramachandran, the BOC Professor of Business Policy at the school, and a former Vice-President of Corporate Strategy at Reliance Industries (''He's the highest paid independent consultant in India,'' boasts the student guiding me to his room) sums it up best: ''We are number 1 because we wanted to be.''

We were number 2; we tried harder

That's the story emerging from IIM-B. ''They've managed to leverage Bangalore's IT-led boom. And business hasn't really thrived at Ahmedabad, Lucknow, and Calcutta,'' says the head of the HR department of a city-based software biggie. ''Many of us who came to IIM-bangalore in the last seven, eight years,'' points out one professor at the school, ''were products of IIM-Ahmedabad, and that could have helped.'' Both are plausible theories, as also is the one that the school now has enough professors involved in active consulting work to feed the consulting-research-education cycle.

What probably makes IIM-B unique is not the issues it has chosen to address but the way it has decided to go about the process-a technique Rao terms ''practicing what we preach''. In lay-speak this means professors doubling up as managers. Thus, V. Nagadevara, a professor who teaches statistics and information systems, is in charge of the BPR exercise; B. Mahadevan, an associate professor who offers a course on business models for e-commerce, has been asked to draft a blueprint for the school's distance-learning efforts; and Shyamal Roy, a professor who teaches economics, heads a committee involved in a scenario-planning exercise on what partial or total autonomy will mean for IIM-B. ''We have to see how we can become self-sufficient,'' says Rao. ''In money terms, we'll need to raise $30 million over the next three years to do this.''

Only self-sufficiency can help the school attract and retain teaching talent: as long as it is a Government-institution, it will have to follow antiquated compensation norms and consulting guidelines (not more than 52 days a year to be spent on consulting assignments, and 40 per cent of the fee goes to the school). The school did generate enough income on its own (Rs 16.7 crore) in 1999-2000 to cover its expenses (Rs 14.92 crore), and its reserves (read: corpus) stood at a respectable Rs 44 crore, but Rao wants to be sure he has enough to burn on capital expenditure.

It's the curriculum, stupid

Macro-concerns haven't caused Rao and his colleagues to lose sight of the most critical thing that goes into the making of a MBA: the curriculum. When a team headed by Janat Shah, an associate professor of operations who doubles up as chairperson of the post-graduate programme, benchmarked the school's curriculum to those of leading international B-schools, it realised that the number of courses and classes (credits) was much higher in IIM-Bangalore. ''When we do too many credits, students do not get time to go into a subject in depth, and we practically leave no space for activities outside the curriculum,'' details Shah. The result? At the start of this academic year, IIM-B cut the number of its credits by 13 per cent. ''All IIMs have been talking about this. But no one (else) has acted on it,'' says Shah. And apart from introducing a clutch of electives dealing with issues and concepts relevant in the New Economy, the school has tried to integrate the impact of the internet and internet-enabled technologies on various aspects of running a business into core courses.

The methodology of instruction (what B-school brochures term 'pedagogy') at IIM-b is no different from that at the other IIMs: case studies. And (again like the better B-schools in the country and elsewhere) instructors have the freedom to liven things up through innovation-like the accounting professor who taught his class management accounting by having them play a term-long game of monopoly and maintain the books for their transactions-and industry-interaction. Y.L.R. Moorthi, an associate professor who offers a course on brand management points to a bunch of assignments on his table: ''I am sending them to the heads of marketing of the respective companies for feedback.'' And when another class discussed a case on the business strategy of on-line retailer Fabmart, the company's chief executive V.S. Sudhakar was there to offer his perspective.

The voice of the customer

The impact of IIM-B's turnaround efforts are just beginning to manifest themselves. Eight of the 10 students selected for the Aditya Birla Scholarships are from IIM-B (the other two are from IIM-A). And recruiters, who once shunned the school, can't get enough. Last placement season, 40 of the school's students received offers to work abroad (74 in IIM-A and 60 IIM-C did). Says R. Suresh, CEO of hr consulting firm Stanton Chase: ''IIM-B guys are probably more structured, sound, and sober in their approach. In the current scenario of technology-led businesses, I guess you need to be lot more circumspect than merely flamboyant, which is why IIM-B students may be successful.''

The average IIM-B alum's sobriety, clearly, is a selling point. Explains Ganesh Natarajan, CEO, Aptech: ''(The IIM-B people I have worked with) are all outstanding human beings, mature in their thinking and excellent in their understanding of both business and technology. The fact that they are willing to stick to organisations and learn speaks volumes for the learning that the Institute has obviously instilled in them.''

Despite opinions like these, there may not be much difference in terms of the quality of outgoing students, between IIMs B, C, and A. As Ralph Heuwing, Managing Director of Boston Consulting Group's India operations, says: ''Personally, I do not differentiate between the three. But in Bangalore, we found the graduates to be more it-oriented. Since it professionals are becoming more important for both the it industry and regular companies that colours the assessment in favour of Bangalore.'' Indeed, this perception may well be what has worked to Bangalore's advantage just as the one that the school was the perfect hunting ground for PSU recruiters worked to its disadvantage in the past.

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