I pushed myself awake. It was still dark outside. I could feel the chill of a December Calcutta morning. I glanced at my room-mate huddled on his bed with his blanket wrapped tightly over his head. I stumbled over my mud-caked football boots in the dark and I hoped the clattering sound would not disturb my room mate. I switched on my desk lamp and settled down to read the MIT economist Paul Samuelson's chapter on price elasticity of demand, when the shot rang out.

The sound was so loud that my room-mate jumped out from under blanket.

"That’s gunfire", he said.

We ran out to investigate. In the middle of the football field was a body and at its edge we could see a group of young men running away.

"Let’s go see what's happening", I said

When we got to the body, there was an absolute stillness to it. We were management student’s not medical students. We had no idea whether the body had life in it or what we ought to do to save it. We didn’t have long to worry; a police jeep came screaming to the middle of the football field.

"Go back to your hostel rooms," said the policeman. "Don’t get involved in these Naxalite incidents. You will have to come to court as witnesses many times a month. It will be a waste of your time."

I trudged back to my IIM room and Samuelson's Economics.

It was 1971, Calcutta was burning and there was revolution in the air. Talented young men and women were abandoning their education at Calcutta University fired by Charu Majumdar's exhortation to bring social justice. The Indian economy had collapsed in the wake of the first oil price hike. Nehru's and India's independence era hopes had evaporated with the failure of the 2nd Five Year Plan and the border wars with China and Pakistan.

Soon afterward, the Indian Army moved into Bengal, mowed down the young idealists and locked up in jail whoever survived that brutal onslaught. The country collectively heaved a sigh of relief- social justice could wait for the future, what was important right then was preservation of social order. I left all such issues behind, graduating from IIM Calcutta, taking a flight to Bombay, setting out on a course that would lead to my joining two other young men in founding Rediffusion. Bringing a revolution to Indian industry seemed a more practical bet.

IIM Calcutta too, like other management institutions, has left such troubling concerns far behind. Social revolutions are decidedly unfashionable in this era of globalization. And what better proof do we need that the choices we made are right and that the system works than the astounding starting salaries of IIM graduates? If the likes of Goldman Sachs , who surely know what they are doing, are prepared to pay Rupees twenty lacs a year or more for a freshly minted IIM graduate, surely we must be doing a great job running these institutions.

However, management institutes, unlike medical and engineering ones, have the suffer the annual embarrassing reality check of rankings issued by business newspapers and magazines in India and abroad. In this era where all our eyes are turned towards international success, the methodology used for ranking by the Financial Times London is instructive. While it does assign the single highest weight age (40%) to the starting salaries commanded by the MBA's a school produces, substantial weight age (20% each) is placed on factors such as quality of thought leadership by the faculty and diversity - the number of women and international presence at the faculty, student and board levels. And in the Financial Times list last year, no Indian management institute figured.

The success of the IIMs (for that matter higher education institutions in medicine, engineering and the social sciences in India) is predicated as much on the highly selective entrance process- less than 1% of applicants make it into these institutions- as on the value that is added during the students’ tenure at these institutions.

The true driver of the value added by educational institutions like the IIMs is the thought leadership they provide.The objective measure of thought leadership is the number of research articles published in high quality international management journals. Such high quality research is normally the outcome of consulting assignments with real life businesses. And both such linkages with industry and research output are woefully inadequate at present at present.

Management science works off the theoretical foundations laid by its more mature cousins: economics, psychology, sociology, mathematics. Where it adds value is by creating 'theories' – schema that operating managers can use in their daily work; instead of looking at each problem as a new one and using trial and error, such theories save time and effort. And since such theories often tend to be specific to economic and social situations it’s not as easy as prescribing Harvard Business School cases to Indian management students.

Today, ensconced in their secure world, do IIMs hear the distant but troubling social and economic gunfire of battles Indian companies fight? WTO intellectual property battles, the fight to build a world scale services industry, the battle to make Indian manufacturing competitive…

Do they have the luxury of merely observing these battles from the safe confines of academia?

END
( This was published in India Today some time ago)