The Indian School of Business has campuses in Mohali, India (above) and Hyderabad. ISB photo
It’s a business school with extensive links in both East and West, and one of the youngest elite schools in the world. In many ways, the Indian School of Business is arguably the most interesting business school in the world.
Founded in 2001 with help from Northwestern Kellogg, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, London Business School, and MIT Sloan, ISB offers the equivalent of an MBA, a part-time MBA, and an executive MBA — though for regulatory reasons their programs have different names: the PGP (post-graduate program in management), the PGP for working professionals, and the PGP Max. ISB has other courses in family business and various advanced and exec ed options. The flagship PGP admits around 900 students a year.
ISB has two campuses, a 600-acre site in the south of the Subcontinent at Hyderabad and a 275-acre one in the north in Mohali. Many students live on campus, a practice that the school encourages for the purposes of building team spirit. They are certainly doing something right: This year ISB reached 28th in the Financial Times global MBA rankings.
Other numbers are also impressive. The average ISB alumnus sees a salary increase of 164%, putting ISB fifth in the world on that metric, behind four Chinese schools. ISB also ranked 26th on the FT’s list of the best MBAs for women, of which its student population comprises between 31% and 35%, a level in line with most European business schools. ISB has a phenomenal 97% rate of employment three months after graduation, and its students have the startup bug, too, having launched nearly 500 companies. However, not all is perfect in Hyderabad: in a problem keenly felt by B-schools across the Subcontinent, just 3% of ISB students are international.
That’s a problem the school is actively confronting, says Dean Rajendra Srivastava, who joined ISB as dean and professor of marketing strategy and innovation in 2015. Before that he spent 25 years at the University of Texas-Austin, five years at Emory University in Atlanta, and seven years as provost and deputy president of academic affairs at Singapore Management University. He has taught at LBS and Wharton, among other leading B-schools.
Poets&Quants caught up with Srivastava to get the lowdown on ISB. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
P&Q: What is special about ISB?
Rajendra Srivastava. ISB photo
RS: I joined as dean three years ago, and at that time if somebody had asked me to describe what ISB graduates can do in one sentence, I would have said: “They know how to get things done.” That’s what people would say to me when I told them I was at ISB: “We love your students, they can really move things around and get things done.”
Why is that? Partly because we started out as a very entrepreneurial school. There are few mid-career business education programs in India, so relative to the pre-experience programs we had students with pretty good experience and we had a lot of diversity in the classroom. While 70-75% of the students had an engineering background, they come to ISB having worked in entertainment, infrastructure, FMCG — you name it — and sometimes having worked abroad.
Of the first cohort, somewhere between 20% to 25% have started companies. Conservatively, I’d calculate our students have started between 450 to 500 companies. So now when people ask me what makes the school special, I add, “ISB is incredibly entrepreneurial.” We do well in the rankings, but I always think that you should be judged not on the salary increases, but on the number of jobs you have created.
P&Q: How do ISB’s courses differ from Western business schools’?
RS: What we teach is based specifically on what is happening in India. For example, the first story is growth. The airline sector we grew 24% last year. The automotive sector grew about 15%. FMCG is growing about 15% a year. That means we talk about making decisions quickly. What is the opportunity cost of gazing at your neighbor?
Another thread is the role of digital in growth. Just to give an example of what this means, the government has recently created the Aadhaar ID card for 1.25 billion people using fingerprint and retina recognition. An ISB alum just started a company offering ambulance services to hospitals, and because of this Aadhaar card, within seconds they can identify the insurance coverage for that individual and which hospital will cover them. This has increased hospitals’ productivity hugely.
We are writing our own case studies about these sorts of stories. This year we will hit 75 and next year 100. About 80% are Indian and the remaining 20% about emerging markets in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and so on.
The United States’ ambassador to India, Kenneth I. Juster, visited the Mohali campus of the Indian School of Business in August. ISB photo
P&Q: You started off with help from Western business schools, but it seems that these days you are looking East just as much as West.
RS: We started with American schools, but we are making more connections in the East, yes. A few months ago, three of us were in Taiwan. In areas like supply chain management, we can learn from businesses like Foxconn. Now 40 Taiwanese academics from there are coming here. We are driving the integration of insights from the East and the West.
We ask, if things were done differently in the West compared to the East, why is that? For example, if you take a company like Tata or you take the keiretsu in Japan and the chaebols in Korea, these were clusters that provided capital because capital isn’t diverted in the East, and also management talent to the smaller companies. We have to explain: How it is different? But also: Why it is different? That is the new learning we are working on.
P&Q: Ninety-seven percent of your students are Indian. Do you encourage them to gain an international outlook?
RS: Many already have it. About 25% of our students are Indians who have worked abroad and come here to study, sometimes because they want to move back. When I was a student, we moved abroad and wanted to stay there. But there are opportunities in India now. Hyderabad is Deloitte’s headquarters. They are growing from about 30,000 to 50,000 over the next 18 months. Deloitte made about 70 offers to ISB last year, and 56 accepted.
Salary growth is up to 15% a year, and if you join a fast-growing young company rather than an established one with saturation above you, you can rise faster. I now have students from the U.S. universities I worked in asking me if I can find them an internship in India.
Many of the multinationals are actually shopping at ISB for their global needs. An alum from the 2008 class is the new chief product officer for Uber. Another is the chief strategy officer for WhatsApp. About 18% of our alumni are abroad, often in clusters like Silicon Valley, New York, Singapore, the UK, or the Toronto area.
But yes, we have several mechanisms to expand students’ horizons. One is exchange programs with our 40 partner schools. Another is a joint program about innovating in emerging markets run with Tsinghua Business School in Beijing and the National University of Singapore.
P&Q: Are you aiming to attract more international students?
RS: Yes, but India is just not currently a destination for education. It used to be, 70 years ago, but now we have 400,000 Indians studying abroad. The government is trying to push a program called Study in India, and we are part of it, but that program has to pick up. Also, the options aren’t well-known. The best-known, like the Indian Institute for Technology, are so hard to get into that people used to joke, “If you don’t get into the IIT you can always apply to MIT.”
The other issue was that these are government-supported institutions that were not reserving any slots for foreign students, but now they’re beginning to do that. For a while ISB has been the only one openly looking for foreign students. We are working now to get a UK school or for a U.S. school to send their MBAs and executive MBAs on a learning mission to India.
We’re talking with the alums and Silicon Valley in the Bay Area to see if we can run a program in San Francisco to start driving awareness. At the moment most of the people who know about us tend to be of Indian origin, although we do get some others. One selling point is cost. A quality education costs $120,000 in the U.S., but about $40,000 here.
P&Q: You have a lot of success getting more women onto the PGP especially. How has that happened?
RS: At the moment our gender diversity is about 35% women, it has gone up from about 25 to 35 in the last three years and we are aiming for 40%. It may be easy in the UK to reach 40%, but in India it’s really hard work.
We’ve done it by identifying markets where you will find the women. It turns out that India has a reasonable number of women engineers, but you have to look for them. As an example, there is an organization called Teach for India, the equivalent of Teach for America. They have very able people, and they have a high percentage of women. We are trying to work with organizations such as that.
P&Q: What do you look for in a student?
RS: We look at multiple dimensions. For screening purposes we look at GMAT and GPA. The average GMAT is about 710, which has been our average right from the beginning. We have kept it 710 but we have regularly turned down people with 750 because they didn’t have the communication skills.
We interview everybody that we admit. What we’re looking for is team-building attitudes. We’re looking for communication skills. We’re looking for leadership skills. Increasingly, we are looking beyond IQ and EQ to HQ: heart quotient. For example, we were talking about Teach for India. If somebody has committed two years of their life right out of undergraduate school to teach young kids, we know they have a heart. We love to hire people who are really smart and who have an ethical center, commitment to society, and commitment to the nation.
We are also looking for entrepreneurship. I was just at a dinner with a bunch of alums in Hyderabad last night and they were arguing that we ought to give extra weight to people who already started a company. In the early cohorts we had a higher percentage of people who had already started a company before they came to school. We will look at how do we bring in this kind of mix as well. We’re also looking for global diversity.
Rajendra Srivastava, dean of the Indian School of Business. ISB photo
P&Q: How is the PGP program evolving?
RS: We are working with the corporate sector to see which new career trajectories are emerging. For example, in India e-commerce, supply chain management, and related issues like procurement, manufacturing, channel management, pricing to advertising — all are trending. So is fintech. We are creating specializations based on these, among others, incorporating insights from our research centers into the curriculum.
The second change is that we’re shrinking the core of required subjects because we can move some of the content online and free up time for the electives. The third thing that is we’re building in more experiential learning. There are internships for less-experienced students; we have Experiential Learning Projects; we have another program where you work on a project for three months and then you pass through a filter and we can take you directly to an incubator.
Overall there’s more digital focus today, and more specialization. For example, we are working with businesses and the stock exchange on a heavy-duty finance program, to be launched in Mumbai in mid-2019, targeted at professionals already in that sector. A lot of financial firms hire very bright, analytic graduates from engineering schools, but they often don’t have specific financial knowledge.
P&Q: And more long-term? How do you see ISB changing?
RS: I like to talk about ISB 2.0. Where do we go? Of course, we’re bringing in more analytics and data science into our programs, but there are things that happen in this part of the world that need to be incorporated.
For example, we are going to build a program in corporate governance with some elements of law such as intellectual property law, because to do business in India you really, really need to focus on compliance issues and things of that nature. That’s equally an issue if you’re doing business in China and India or Indonesia, so that is an area that we need to cover. Also, there’s is a big shortage of folks here who can serve as independent board members. We hope to make ISB the hub for training people to be on boards of directors.
Another big area is looking at the big media companies. Amazon may have started in retailing but then they used that platform to get into cloud computing. Now they are becoming a major player in India in entertainment, finance, and healthcare. We need to look at the newer business models and understand, for example, what Alipay and Tencent are doing in China.
Related to all of this is going to be, how do we work more closely with the government and in particular when we start globalizing a brand? That is a big challenge and we are putting together plans for topics such as the importance of diplomacy in business. This is the sort of multidisciplinary thinking we need to start pushing in business schools.
ISB photo
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