Gen-X Business School

Even in a world used to pre-release hype (p-r h) surrounding anything from colognes and cars to books and motion pictures, encountering p-r h around a business school comes as a bit of a surprise. But the Indian School of Business, as anyone associated with it takes pains to point out, isn't just another B-school. Even a cursory look at the school's provenance at http://www.isbindia.org should suffice the most die-hard of cynics that this is the real thing: partnerships with Wharton (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu) and Kellogg (http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu); an academic council that lists the likes of:

Bala V. Balachandran (http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/bio/Balachan.htm),

Philip Kotler (http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/bio/Kotler.htm);

Jitendra V. Singh (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/singhj.html), and

Krishna Palepu (http://www.people.hbs.edu/kpalepu/bio.html); and a governing board that's a veritable who's who of corporate India--Anil Ambani, Rahul Bajaj, K.M. Birla, Y.G. Deveshwar, K.V. Kamath, N.R. Narayanamurthy, Deepak Parekh, among others--with the odd global CEO--Cor Boonstra, Victor Menezes, L.N. Mittal, Martin Sorrell, and Rana Talwar, again, among others--thrown in.

Thus, when the school, which is to offer three programmes--a one-year MBA programme for students with `significant work experience, a stream of short-term, executive education courses, and a doctoral programme--starting 2001, announced the curriculum (http://www.isbindia.org/currfrm.htm) for its MBA programme it was, to resort to an Americanism, a big deal. This, after all, was what they would teach at the school hyped as the B-school of the future. (for Business Today's own take on B-schools of the future, albeit a 2-year old one, May 7-21, 1998).

The Course Design The next few sentences are for those who have an abiding interest in the way MBA programmes are designed and run. Those who don't can skip to the next paragraph without fearing that they're missing something. The ISB one-year programme is broken up into eight terms of six weeks each, with four courses per term for the first four terms and eight (including electives) in the subsequent four, and 20 contact hours per course. That works out to 680 contact hours. The number of contact hours offered by two-year MBA programmes at some of the world's best business schools are: Wharton (629); Kellogg (767); and Stanford (893). The courses are the mix of the usual--financial accounting for decision-making and statistical methods for managing decisions--to the unusual: the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum, where a batch of ISB and Wharton students will play consultants to real-life firms facing real-life problems, and New Business Development Project, where a group of students will identify, evaluate, and research an idea and develop it into a business plan. Which isn't the kind of thing you typically get to do in other Indian B-schools including the IIMs.

Equally innovative are the specialisations offered by the school: entrepreneurship; t-commerce (impact of technology on commerce); analytical finance; and strategic marketing. For instance, a student specialising in t-commerce could choose from courses on intellectual property, and Net business models, among others. Again, this isn't the kind of thing one normally learns at B-school.

Our verdict
Purely on the basis of curriculum, the ISB will perhaps be India's most contemporary B-school. This, as any one who's passed out from even one of the IIMs will tell you, isn't what they teach at Ahmedabad, Calcutta, or Bangalore. As for whether the Indian School of Business will fulfil its inherent promise, and not go the way of other corporate B-school initiatives that promise much but deliver little, one can't do better than paraphrase McKinsey & Company CEO, Rajat Gupta, who believes, things are on course, but just a third of the way there.

Read excerpts from an exclusive interview with Rajat Gupta, McKinsey & Company CEO.

Issue Contents Write to us Subscriptions Syndication