For the cult following that "excellence" enjoys among policy makers we have to thank Tom Peters and Bob Waterman and their 1982 book, "In Search of Excellence." They were consultants at McKinsey when they wrote this book which went on to sell 3 million copies in the first four years of its existence and is believed to be the most widely held book in libraries in the United States.

Peters and Waterman observed traits that successful companies had in common. Things like a readiness to take quick action (as opposed to procrastination), a willingness to listen carefully to customers (as opposed to a take-it-or-leave-it attitude), and the discipline to "stick to their knitting" (as opposed to venturing into unrelated businesses).

These ideas seemed so stunningly obvious and something that anybody could practice that the notion for striving for excellence quickly became a corner of management thinking. It soon found its way well beyond the business world and into areas like educational and government policy making. It mattered little that in a short few years after the book came out several of these "excellent" companies ( Atari, Data General, Wang, to name a few) had collapsed financially. The search for excellence marched forward among policy makers.

The idea of searching for excellence has been around in education for a while in an equally unquestioned way. In engineering education, for example, it led to the starting of a half dozen institutions, equipping them with more and better classrooms, more and better teachers and more and better labs and you now have a half-dozen IITs that meet the criteria of "excellence."

The search for excellence in management education led to the founding if another half dozen institutions , equipping them with more and better classrooms, more and better teachers and more and better libraries and you now have a half-dozen IIMs that meet the criteria of "excellence."

And this was repeated in medical studies, in Design education, in Architecture and many other fields..

All this is very comforting till you start counting the "others". The several thousand "other" engineering colleges, the two thousand "other" management schools, the several hundred "other" medical, Design and Architecture schools that have not been favored with these extra resources.

The theory of excellence works on the principle that if in a population of 100, five perform exceedingly well, the job is done. It does not pay attention to the other 95.

Maybe it is time that we set these excellence theories aside and look to the teachings of William Deming, a . philosophy that is exactly the opposite of the excellence theorists'. Up until then achieving manufacturing quality meant posting an inspector at the end of a production process to pick out the excellently produced items and send back the others to be reworked or discarded. Much like how we use tough entrance exams to select 0.5 to 1% of applicants to IITs and IIMs and forget the others.

Deming's view was that when a production system turns out items of varying quality, we must ask "what is the variation trying to tell us about the process?" There are two parts to this variation he pointed out. The first part is intrinsic to the process.. He called these the "common causes" of variation. And the second part is because of things like an operator falling asleep on his shift or a particularly poor batch of raw material. These he called the "special causes".

The "special causes" are relatively easy to fix and can often be fixed by the people directly involved in the production process: the worker who operates the machine needs to get a proper night sleep and not fall asleep at the machine, the man who buys the raw material needs to avoid poor batches.

The "common causes", he said is the more insidious part of the variation of quality. They are often outside the control of workers and others directly involved in the production process and can only be fixed by those in management positions. Perhaps the product design itself is defective, maybe the operating processes are poorly defined, and maybe the working conditions are too poor.

Using Deming's methods, Japanese auto and electronics companies learned to produce 100% of their output of high quality and with little or no rejects.

When we praise the excellence of our IITs and IIMs and a handful of other elite institutions we may merely be praising the work of pre-Deming quality control inspectors.

This is perfectly in keeping with the origins of the word "excellence." It originates from the 14^th century Anglo-French word "excellere" which means someone or something that is much better than others. Intrinsic to it is the idea of selecting a few and not worrying about the rest.

Is it time we abandoned this search of excellence, embrace the methods of Deming and identify the "common causes" that cause such quality variations in our education system?

END

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com

It was nearing nine that morning and everyone other a few stragglers had finished their morning exercise walk and gone. The few men and women still lounging around the benches strewn along the edge of the beach were, I guess, folks who had no particular place to go or nothing particularly important to do. On nearby Marine Drive, cars whizzed by in both directions, Mumbaites in their usual demonic hurry to get to work.

What I'd come to see was there alright, if anything taller than I remember- nearly ten feet tall and when you add another ten feet for the pedestal it rested on , it was not easy from nearby to take the whole picture in.

There he stood, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, veteran of many a battle, forever impatient to set his country free now caught in an unhurried pose. One hand clutching a book, perhaps the Bhagwad Gita commentary that he wrote when the British incarcerated him for six long years in a tiny cell in remote jail. The other held a walking stick lightly. One foot was slightly ahead of the other as if he was setting out on a march for one of the many causes he felt so passionate about. He stood there alert as if watching carefully all who entered Chowpatty Beach. On Ganesh Chaturti day, millions pour past his watchful eye to immerse the Ganesh idol into the sea here. And as every school boy in India is taught, it was Tilak who thought up the public version of what was till then a private festival to get around a fearful British colonial government prohibition of large numbers of Indian gathering at one place. Early Ganesh processions even carried pictures of Garibaldi the unfier of Italy.

I wonder whether school children get taught nowadays why Tilak was sent for his first spell in prison. It was nearing the end of the 19^th century, Mumbai and Poona were being ravaged by plague which had spread here through merchant ships that traded with Hong Kong. The British colonial administration started forcibly removing plague victims and isolating them in "plague hospitals". 19^th century science knew of no other solution to plague other than isolating people who already got it to prevent the disease from spreading to others. The high-handed way this isolation was done created an outcry among the population. Things came to a head when the British official in charge of this segregation effort was assassinated in Poona. Tilak was implicated, probably falsely, as a conspirator and sent to jail. All this may make Tilak look like an obscurantist who came in the way of medical progress he was far from that. In the middle of this turmoil, his newspapers in Poona were carrying up to date accounts of what Koch, the German scientist, was doing to isolate the plague virus. I wonder whether our school children are taught to make this distinction about Tilak's actions- the nationalist who objected to the way citizens were being herded into plague hospitals and the modernist who followed eagerly the progress that science was making in finding an answer to the plague problem.

From where I stood beside Tilak I could see that Tilak's gaze would have taken in the row of glitzy shops that have sprung up across the road on Marine Drive: a Levi jeans shop, a Renault car showroom, one for Arrow shirts, an immensely popular outlet of Café Coffee Day that is packed at all times of the day or night with young trendy, jeans-wearing college students. What would Tilak have made of all this? When he died, in 1920, it was far from clear whether or when India would wrest Independence and Tilak till his end was uncompromising in his demand for Swaraj. But he was also the man who in 1880 had co-founded an English medium school in Pune, "The New English School", and an English language newspaper, "The Maratha" .

For that matter what would Tilak have made of what some environmentalists say- that the immensely popular Ganesh festivities that culminate in thousands of Ganesh statues being immersed in the sea cause environmental damage. The Ganesh statues were, in Tilak's time, made of harmless clay and painted over with vegetable dyes, but present-day versions are made of plaster of paris that, environmentalists say, contains gypsum, sulphur, phosphorus and magnesium and are painted over with chemical paints that contain mercury, cadmium, lead and carbon.

Tilak, ever the modernist, would probably have led another movement, this time at the head of the environmentalists who suggest that permanent idols made of brass or stone be used, that a symbolic immersion be done so that the same idol could be used again the next year and oppose the use of thermocole and plastic in decorations. And, ever the great activist, he may have carefully watched the immersions from his vantage point at Chowpatty to make sure that these socially important directions are followed.

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com

It is early January here in New York and the weather had no right to be as warm and sunny as it is today. By any account it has to be freezing and below zero Celsius and the streets have to be speckled with dirty, melting snow puddles. These pigeons that we see hopping along in the square ought to be hiding from the cold in a warm nook of some building. The streets are bustling with people. This is not a sight for early January. People ought to be indoor and the streets ought to wear the deserted January look.

I find myself strolling back from lunch with a prominent technology guru of a prominent Wall Street bank.

"I have finally figured out what 'one lac' means," he had said to me.

"How come?" I asked, genuinely surprised. There have many things I have tried explaining about India to our western friends, but not our numerical system of 'lacs' and 'crores'. I thought we had left that safely behind in favour of 'hundreds of thousands' and 'millions'. The term 'lac' had seemed so archaic. But here it was, back in the world's headlines with the 'Rupees One Lac car" from the Tatas.

"I believe what the Tata's are unveiling today, their Rs one lac car, is going to change the way the world looks at Indian companies," my tech guru friend had said.

"When the Indian software industry, made its mark," he had continued, "the rest of the world had understood how they did it; Indian programmers were a tenth as expensive as programmers in the West. Then the Indian rupee steeply devalued from Rs 8 per dollar in the mid-1980's to Rs 45+ per dollar in the mid 1990's making the cost competitiveness case even more compelling. But the Rs 1 lac car is different. They will get to this target not by using cheaper labour or cheaper materials available only in India. They are going to get to this by bringing into play product design skills, consumer insights, management systems, perhaps even a new business design. In other words, they are going to compete on capabilities not resources. That's why it is sending a shudder down the spine of many Western executives, not just car industry executives."

As I walked back to my office my mind strayed to other such moments in industrial history.

Take, for instance, Richard Arkwright's successful effort in the early part of the 19^th century to make machines spin yarn of a quality equal to or better than that spun by skilled, hand spinners in India. His innovation made yarn cheaper and thus made cotton cloth woven from it affordable not merely by the very wealthy and it had been till then. What Arkwright did was not save labor costs by using machines instead of labour because any such savings were more than offset by the cost of equipment and factory buildings... His real innovation was in the design of work such that workers would all congregate at a fixed place of work (a "factory") and thus work for predictable hours and under tight supervision as opposed to working odd hours at home. Superior work organization allowed output to be dramatically increased and made cotton yarn widely available, a feat that home-based spinners could not achieve. The rise of the Western world was predicated first on this idea- the use machines to do at one central place what hitherto human muscle power had done in decentralized home based activity. Then came the use of chemistry to make synthetically and in plenty materials that had been hitherto available in nature in restricted quantities and in varying quality levels and consequentially at higher prices. Thus indigo from India was synthetically produced and became available in vast quantities and at a fraction of the price of natural indigo; aspirin, hitherto distilled from the bark of willow, was similarly synthesized and millions of ordinary citizens benefited.

Henry Ford created another revolution when he launched his Model T car and brought cars within the reach of ordinary people. He did this by deploying "mass production" techniques- a new system of arranging a sequence of metal working machine which did repetitive operations reliably and which could be supervised by the illiterate, unskilled immigrant labor coming off the impoverished farms of Ireland and Southern Italy- the only kind of labour available to him at that time. Ford's "big idea', mass production, then got deployed in a wide variety of metal working industries and made such objects like the sewing machine and bicycles affordable by all.

The "big idea" behind the Rs 1 Lac Tata car is this- an Indian company, has dreamt up a management system and a business design to build cars that are affordable by people who had never dared dream of owning a car..

The real message of the Rs 1 Lac car is that in one stroke, it is showing the way to Indian managements that a new era awaits- one where you compete on superior management capability leaving behind decades of attempting to compete on cheaper labour or cheaper natural resources.

Its like the early coming of spring after a long cold winter.

End

READERS WRITE

Ajit,

I read with great interest your article on whether IIM's are overly US looking. I strongly agree with your thoughts.

The US is head and shoulders above other countries in terms of management research output. Add to it the fact that business schools across the world have come to rely on textbooks written by American professors and you have an American focus on management education.

When I did an executive education program at IIM Ahmedabad in 2000, I remember a marketing professor taking us through an HBS case about the Suzuki Samurai. A group of people who had never been to the US, had little knowledge of the market environment were analyzing why a concept did not work. Obviously, the learning we derived from it was suboptimal. I am sure this situation is changing as the IIMs produce more case studies and research.

The graduates of 2009 should be exposed to the world order they will be function in (BRIC countries contributing disproportionately to world growth, shrinking populations & relative importance of Europe/Japan). In this regard, any steps taken by IIM Calcutta to modify the curriculum would benefit graduates tremendously.

I enjoy reading your notes about taking IIM C forward. Thank you for sharing them.

Krishna
Krishna Hegde krishna.hegde@gmail.com

Ajit:

Big fan of rediff and India Abroad. Congrats on building a great media business.

On your recent article about the philosophy of MBA programs, you had ended the article with a provocative question around whether our MBA programs need to be nourished like the Ganges and essentially saying we need to accommodate philosophies from multiple sources. I tend to cringe whenever I hear folks espousing multiplicity for multiplicity's sake. We need our MBA's programs to follow the "right" philosophy and if it does happen so that the "right" philosophy is an amalgam of various things from various cultures than we should do so. The idea of a global buffet based educational philosophy where you pick things just because they are different does not make sense to me.

Most MBA programs adopt an US centric view because the US centric view optimizes around capital and return on capital (not saying that this is a good or bad thing but just stating the fact). Optimizing around capital has many social and labor implications - the Japanese optimize around market share and maximum production even if it undermines return on capital. As a venture capitalist, there is no doubt which philosophy I believe in ;-) ;-). If your goal is to maximize wealth creation (again not saying that is a good or bad thing) then the US centric philosophy is the way to go.

Venky
Venky Ganesan vganesan@globespancapital.com
------------------------------------------
Dear Ajit,

I read your article in rediff.com with great relish. I admire the way you have steered rediff to become one of the foremost india based internet portals.

Regarding your article, while the argument is not very old that we are following US in terms of evrything we do, we will have to look at it from a different light. I feel that there is nothing wrong in accepting what is good from other cultures and countries. Looking at the specific aspect of curriculum, it is important to note that the number of electives offered by american graduate schools are far more than indian schools. Faculty shortage is one major concern, i agree.

You mentioned three different topics that was discussed, language course, ethics and more mathematical courses. I am especially keen that all bschools start full fledged course modules in ethics and CSR. These courses should be made mandatory and a clear expectation should be set as to what it means and how important these subjects are.

As such these are extremely important for any new bschool graduate, but there are some areas where i feel indian management schools should give more importance. For e.g it would be great if there is a course on new venture planning in indian context. This could include courses, workshops and meeting with people, like you for e.g., who have successfully established brands and companies in india and also india specific venture capitalists. This could also include how to deal with issues related to IP.

Another area is Knowledge Management. This century is touted as the knowledge century and the ability to develop, manage, dissiminate and profit from knowledge is of great importance. Again this is a concept that the japanese have used successfully to build their global dominance.

The internet has changed the world interacts and this has significant impact of business. You being the head of one of the leading global internet portal would vouch for that. The future business models would involve understand the social aspects of internet and how that can inspire and invigorate businesses. So the sociology of the internet and the concept of Web 2.0 should be made part of the tool set for future managers.

Finally i feel that project management should also become part of the new manager. With a lot of developments happening in the infrastructure development in india, it would be important for people to have a good grasp of the project management methodologies.

Knowledge mgmt and project mgmt are offered as part of the PGESM program at IIMB. but it is necessary to offer these courses as part fo the normal MBA as well. I feel that these courses would significantly help the young student become a better manager.

Sathya Pandalai spandalai@yahoo.com
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Dear Ajit

After reading, Are Our IIMs Over US-Centric, I thought our International Conference, " Expanding Horizons of Indian Business & Indian Management" would interest u. It is being organised by Indian Business Academy in association with WISDOM, Banasthali on Jan 15-16, at IBA Bangalore and Feb 19-20 at IBA Greater Noida. This would be a path breaking conf. like the earlier conferences that we had at IISc and WISDOM. The attached brochure provides the outline of the conference and its themes.

We look forward to your support for the conference and invite u to present ur views. Already leading academicans such as Prof S. K. Chakraborty, Dr M B Athreya, Dr Gustavsson from Swedish Business School, have confirmed their participation as key note speakers

Subhash Sharma
subhash sharma re_see@rediffmail.com
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Hi Ajit,

Here's what I feel about Ethics being "taught" being a "course" (as in, being part of syllabus).

We are a country of "moral science" classes being part of curriculum in schools. Colleges dont have them, coz.it is felt that the kids have got the foundation right already, based on which the next lessons are taught.

Times when ethics / corporate governance is taught in Company Secretaries / Chartered Accountants course; governed as clause 49 of listing agreement; or regulated, you would always see that the "words" are what is met, "spirit" is what a few follow (largely because of the person's values in life, upbringing and the eco-system that person is working in). Example, think of corporate governance in Real estate industry...

While the thought of the IIM Prof is laudable, I think his 'exploration' might remain a survey / research paper on the subject.

Sharda Balaji
Legal Counsel, corporate advisor, aspiring enterprenuer
sharda balaji <sharda_balaji@rediffmail.com>
-----------------------------------

Dear Shri Ajit Balakrishnan,

I am a regular reader of Business Standard and read your
article regularly.
I am eager to know:
"Were you born in a village? or do you have any ancestral village in India?
Have you ever solved one or two problems of the said village or town?
What were those problems?
How did you solve them?
Were the solutions economical?

With regards,
S.C. Aggarwal,
Founder, Poverty Trust,
aggarwal@indiainfo.com

----------------------------------

Dear Mr Balakrishnan,

I enjoyed reading your column today. It is most unusual for the chairman
of a board to make public any item discussed in a board meeting- excuses
for not parting with nformation are more common.

I had occasion to post a comment in my blog. The link is attached.

http://ttrammohan.blogspot.com/

regards,

Dr.T T Ram Mohan
Finance & Accounting Area
Indian Institute of Management
Vastrapur, Ahmedabad-380015

Across the road is a taxi stand where half a dozen taxis are lined up. The taxi drivers chew pan, gossip and share an easy camaraderie. They are refugees from the jobless small towns of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Baba, a tan dog w who they have commonly adopted lounges around too, waiting for scraps of food. On rainy nights, the taxi drivers let Baba sleep with them in their taxis. The taxis are their home too while they wait to earn enough to afford a share of a room in Murthy Nagar, the vast slum that is home to the drivers, shop boys and dhobis and domestic help who serve wealthy Colaba and Cuffe Parade.

This corner is a good place to observe the gigantic forces now sweeping through the world and being hotly debated in academia and halls of parliaments: globalization, privatization, digitization.
But if you asked the taxi drivers lounging here, or the ancient proprietors of Flashman Cleaners, or the two cousins who run Teenage Library or young Chetan Patel who manages Patel General Stores, you would probably be greeted with blank looks. They wouldn't even know what these words meant, let alone connect themselves to these waves of change.

Take the two cousins who run Teenage Library. When I first encountered them in the early 80's a fifty rupee deposit and a charge of a rupee or two per week you could borrow Mad Magazines or Archie comics while young neigbourhood housewives borrowed Mills and Boon novels. When the first whisper of media digitization arrived, Teenage Library was at its leading edge renting out video tapes of Bollywood movies and American shows like "Cheers". When satellite television came roaring in carrying "Cheers" and "Three's Company" on TV for free, they deftly switched to renting out DVDs of hard-to-get award winning movies. Now, video download services threaten but I am sure they will have a response for that too.

Or take Patel General Stores with its six feet wide front and that ten feet deep.. You stagger to the bathroom mirror one morning, reach out for your shaving cream and find that you cannot squeeze another drop out of it. That's when you call Chetan at Patel General Stores and before you have finished stroking your emerging double chin, the door bell will ring with a young boy carrying the shaving cream.

But this happy if subsistence-oriented economic system in this corner of Colaba has of late had to deal with an ominous move. A Sahakari Bandar outlet, a dozen doors away which had provided sleepy but manageable competition has suddenly sprung to second life. It's been acquired by a major business house, wiped of the dust from its shelves, dressed up its staff in new clothes and started aggressive price competition. Local customers have started switching their monthly purchases of rice and dal and salt and haldi already to them. Patel General Store's business model and that of 11 million other stores like them in India, is going to be even more reliant on fleet-footed young men dropping out of school in rural areas. What may be at stake here may also be a system that currently serves as our economy's shock absorber as farming families, unable to support themselves , take their young sons out of school and send them to earn a living in the retail trade in cities.

Its comforting to know that we are not the only country that has had to deal with this transition from small, labor intensive, high transaction-cost retailing to efficient, low transaction-cost, large scale operations, but we may be one of the few that's dealing with it simultaneously with some other mega transitions likethe one away from agriculture, the one away from small-scale industry.

At one extreme of the retailing transition is the United States with 80% of all retail now in the hands of large scale retailers. The pain of transition in their case was bearable partly because the growth of large scale retail in its first round happened in the newly booming suburbs of America in the 1950's and 60's. City retailers escaped these pressures for a long time. But even in America, the battles are far from over. When Wal-Mart attempted to open its first store in New York recently, a noisy coalition of corner stores, green activists, neighborhood groups, and labor unions thwarted them. So New York lives even today without a Wal-Mart store.

Then there is the case of France. In the 1970's, as the giant retail formats started becoming popular, the French parliament passed a law that required retail outlets with a sales area larger than 10,000 square feet in urban centers to get approvals from a local board of citizens Composed of self employed shop keepers, consumers and local politicians. Refusals can be appealed to a national level board. This is what has kept French cities so charming and perhaps also the reason why things cost so much in France.

Last week, we were strolling through this world when we noticed Chetan step out of his shop on a busy morning to feed a biscuit to Baba, the taxi-drivers' dog, who had been waiting hopefully with a mildly wagging tail for his morning meal.
END

I got out of the lift, gingerly stepping over stacked newspapers and wandered down a corridor to enter a room with personal computers lined up along its four walls. The lights in the room had been turned down, clearly to make the computer screens more visible. A dozen twenty-something men and women were sitting before these computer terminals with earphones attached, watching and listening intently and occasionally typing on the keyboards.

A young woman who was striding up and down the room with a managerial air noticed me hovering at the doorway and came forward, a welcoming smile on her face. She was expecting me.
"The class has already started," she said, leading me to a workstation and fitting me out with earphones. The computer screen in front of me was divided into three sections. Filling the right half of the screen was a power point presentation that was slowly rolling over with the words, "The debt to equity ratio of a company reveals." The left half of the screen was divided into two; the top half showed a live TV-like picture of a professor at his desk, explaining what was on the power-point screen. I could hear his clear, scholarly voice in my earphones. The lower left corner was like an Instant Messenger with many names listed, "Sneha- Coimbatore", "Divya- Delhi", "Karan- Calcutta", obviously the names of the other students who had logged on from throughout India to the same class as me. We were all at a management class at one of IIM Calcutta's many Long Distance Education Centres. The lectures were being beamed over satellite from IIMC's Calcutta studios.
An hour later, not only had my fading memory of the implications of debt-equity ratios been refreshed, but I also felt like a person who had seen the future revealed to him. Here was a high quality professor of finance, reaching out over the airwaves not just to a class of a few dozen but to a class of thousands! Had we at last a way figured out a way to leap over the faculty shortages that currently limits the growth of high quality higher education in our country?
I could barely wait for the class to finish to talk to some of the students. What makes them battle the rush-hour traffic of the evening hours after a long and exhausting day at work to spend another hour at these grueling management classes several times a week for a whole year?
"We get to learn management from the same high-quality professors who teach the two- year residential management programme at IIM Calcutta," said one student to me. "That's a great attraction".
"Isnt it tough to digest these management concepts sitting by yourself at a computer terminal?", I asked her, "after all, the students at the residential full-time programme can learn from each other through after-class discussions with each other.".

"We also meet in groups on some week-ends to share notes and help each other," she said.
"Do all the students attend these classes rigorously? I mean , do any of them miss classes or drop out?" I asked the manager of the Centre.

" I haven't seen many miss classes here. That's probably because they are all working people who have put in five to seven years already and are paying for the course from their own earnings. And I can see that there is a camaraderie they have built among themselves which carries them through the year that the class lasts. Anyway, even if you miss the occasional class, the lessons are posted online for them to download and catch-up "

Online education has it boosters and its detractors. Boosters see it as a way of making high quality education affordable and available to a mass audience in an era where faculty shortages are endemic. They also see it as a healthy move away from the current system which places the burden of imparting learning on the teacher to a new approach which makes the student more responsible for his own learning. Detractors, on the other hand, see online education as a "cheapening" of the educational process and, because online education often is often very profitable, an unhealthy pursuit of profit. While this debate goes on, almost all US Universities have taken some steps in online education.

"A student's university career.in the future, may no longer be through a particular place, time, or preselected body of academics, but through a network principally of students' own making", says George Keller former editor of the journal, "Planning for Higher Education". "Students could stay at home or travel, mix on-line and off-line education, work in classes or with mentors, and take their own time. Their college careers wouldn't begin at age eighteen and end at age twenty-two", but be a life-long process.
END

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Readers respones

Readers respones

Hi

I was thrilled to see an article on this course written by someone as eminent as you since I am doing this course myself ! Moreover since I work in Mahim I often go to the same Worli centre to attend these classes. I am nearing the end of the course and have thoroughly enjoyed the entire process of going back to school.

I totally agree with you that we may taken the first step, maybe not so consciously, towards ensuring top quality education to a much larger student community. Pursuit of profit? Well I would rather see institutions like IIM-C get financial independence through pursuit of profit than getting grants and being at the beck and call of ministers and bureaucrats.

Thanks again for the article.

Kind regards

Alok Tiwari
Alok Tiwari <alok.tiwari@bplmail.com>
-------------------------------------------------
read your piece -- IIM and IITs' class-less future -- with interest.

One more heartening aspect of India's evoluton-friendly higher education system is that it is proving not only popular overseas but giving other well-established global labels a run for their money, in more senses than one.

For instance, in Singapore where I live and work, S.P. Jain Institute of Management has carved a niche for itself in the business schools segment -- a 'market' where Big Boys such as INSEAD, SMU, Chicago School abound. So have other well-known Indian primary and high schools.

Indian academics, it seems, can not only teach thousands of fellow Indians in India online, but excel at teaching multi-national classrooms overseas. And, in the days to come, more and more of them will likely make waves outside of the US (which, for long, has been their traditional overseas destination).

Well, your piece may well infuse fresh life into many middle-aged NRIs' long-standing desire to pursue management education. How wonderful it would be then if IIM-C allows NRIs to enrol for courses at its Long Distance Education Centres in India.

If call centres could overcome the time-zone factor, so can LDECs, I'd reckon.

Best regards,
Siva
Siva <yssankar@rediffmail.com>
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Good article.
Not just the IIMs and the IITs........this model can be applied to even school education......only if our leaders have the vision and the will to make this happen.

Warm Regards,
C.B.Dubey

"Dubey,Chandra" <chandra.dubey@patni.com>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hi Ajit,

I think I am surprised by your article mainly because it seems that it has taken the institutions of higher education in India and eternity before they have started making their courses available online. Also, what is not covered in your article and one would need to worry about, is that in a world that has seen and recognized the value of blended learning; completing a management course, which challenging as it is on it's own, should have been developed as an extension of the classroom lectures without accounting for the infrastructure for pre and post class help/learning, growing student discussion bodies, FAQ boards, smoked filled cafes et al. It sounded from your article that this is left to the student's initiative, who if not competent in seeking these support aids is doomed to struggle through his eLearning modules.

Also, the greatest detractor of online education is not the quality of lectures delivered but the non customization of the content when delivered through new media. The greatest loss of classroom teaching is felt when it is delivered in an altered mode but with content customized in an attendant manner.

This article was particularly interesting to me as an instructional designer who worked in India many years ago at a job that then required me to "convert" existing classroom training to meaningful online learning and skill development. It seems, like a lot of other things, Indian educational institutions have allowed a new brain drain, where the services that were so superiorly developed in our own alley was not recognized, adopted and made available to our people first.

Random thoughts these...thank you for reading.

Piyali.
piyali.correya@teranet.ca
--------------------------------------
Dear Mr. Balakrishnan,

I went through your article on the distance education course and the future of learning with a lot of interest. I've recently joined the e-learning field, partly motivated by the power that it has to disseminate education and learning to the masses. The adoption rate is so high, that corporate spend on e-Learning is projected to grow at 40-50% yoy to reach USD 22 billion by year 2008 (gartner), and the K12 segment (US) is also a big consumer of e-learning courses.

As you would have found, online MBA is the most popular of all online courses (there are 130+ accredited e-Learning MBA courses from the US universities), and it's good to know that that IIM-C is also offering something similar.

Even though we have live interactions, the inherent problem with the present synchronous delivery model would be that it's the same as attending classes and doesn't allow full leverage of the 'anywhere anytime' advantage offered by e-Learning (courses specifically designed for self-paced learning). One doesn't need a 'live' prof to explain the debt-equity concepts, but his time is much better utilized clarifying doubts and discussing case studies with students, who already have gone through the concepts through a self-paced module online making it a variant of the standard blended learning program. Imagine someone who only gets free time late at night and on weekends.

Parts of the synchronous mode should, of course, be kept for other benefits like networking and motivation.

Subham L Chakravarty
Subham L Chakravarty <subham.chakravarty@astutix.com>
-------------------------------------
Good Morning Ajit,

Why am I writing to you? I am up early this morning to catch up with some
reading/studying for the IIMC's Long Distance Senior Management Program
under the aegis of NIIT-Imperia. As is my habit, I scroll through the news
portals as I have my morning coffee so that I am sufficient awake before I
get started. Today as I was doing this, your article on Rediff
(http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2007/aug/24ab.htm) caught my eye.

Just to say that our batch of 25+ in Mumbai (120+ across 5 centres in India)
is a motley crew ranging from 33-56 years in age; and a fair mix of senior
and middle management people from Indian Cos and MNCs. Why are we here? I
think because most of us have no formal or holistic mmgt training and that
is what we are looking for. And full-time courses, for one reason or
another, are not a feasible option.

Speaking for myself, I could have accomplished some of this one my own, but
preferred a structured approach. Do we truly learn? I think yes. The more
disciplined and dedicated among us read much beyond what the professors'
notes or suggested reading (which are just a starting point). More
importantly, we independently analyse cases and the discussions that we have
amongst ourselves are as educative.

And once we have lost our "stage fear" the interaction over the synchronous
platform is also enriching. Perhaps not as much as the classroom; we are
onsite at IIMC next week and may be this myth will be dispelled too :-)

Now that I am awake, it back to the grindstone...

Aruna

Aruna Panangipally <aruna@ibruk.in>
----------------------------------------------
Hi Ajit,

It is indeed a good article, however isnt it important to actually have the prof with rich industry experience to be right in front of u and share his part of experience along with the subject of topic. Doesnt that give much more value and a better understanding for the subject.

Coz just hearing someone give a lecture over an earphone, doesnt quite have that effect that the one in person gives u.

Darshan
Darshan Dodia <darshandodia@rediffmail.com>
---------------------------------------------------------
Hi Ajit:

I found this very interesting, especially because I have developed several online courses, including rarely found (in the USA, that is) online Market Research course for MBA students which I taught for the first time last year and about to start again on 8/27. I am also developing an undergraduate MR course that will debut in 2008. The online variation of a very unique course called Marketing and Money that I developed from scratch to strengthen the woefully weak marketing math skills of my American undergraduate business students won the AMA's annual award for Innovative Excellence in Marketing Education in 1995. I think the true potential of online education in India lies in its ability to revolutionize the quality of secondary education where millions of bright youngsters suffer from very mediocre infrastructure. A public/private partnership could result in the blossoming of hundreds of thousands of Internet education centers all across the country,
run/supervised by retired high caliber teachers. Cannot think of a better way for corporate sponsors to invest in society. Companies big and small can sponsor or become patrons for as many centers as their budgets permit, while the Central and State governments pay for or subsidize the Internet access of these places. One talented Maths teacher can, as you rightly point out, reach zillions of children. Mere clicks of online buttons could deliver content in all 15 languages of India. In addition, this would be a great resource to coach smart, but resource starved rural kids for IIT JEE etc. The point is India already is very conscious of and is spending big public bucks on education. The Net has the potential to multiply that many times over. This is certainly true of our common home state of Kerala. Hope the folks there catch on to this. I desperately hope they do! I have lots of fond ideas and dreams and am willing to help in any way I can from my
rather distant perch.

Best regards,

- gg
(BTech Mech IITM 1973, PGDBA IIMA 1975)

gopala "GG" ganesh, ph.d.
professor of marketing
university of north texas
----------------------------------------------------

Good article on distance education. This is what I suggested to IITK
and iisc to do jointly for M.Tech degree many years ago.
Perhaps the technology is better now.will send to friends again and
put on my soon to close web site. Instead they now spent Lakhs of
Rs and put the ppt slides on web site.
pai

M.A.Pai Professor Emeritus
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Univ of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign
S and T India Portal www.indusscitech.net
-------------------------------------------------------

Hi Ajit,

I read your article called 'IIM and IITs' class-less future' on rediff. This is really awesome. You know what I think is that online education has more advantages than disadvantages. This is proved by the very fact that you have already one such.

Bye the way, I was never aware that IIMs and IITs also distance learning courses. Can you please let me know if it is possible to pursue MBA from any of the IIMs by distance learning? If yes, what's the procedure for admission and attending the classes? This is because I'm a full time employed person and can't afford to study full time.

Rachna Bansal

"Bansal,Rachna IN GGN SISL" <Rachna.Bansal@siemens.com>
------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Sir

I am glad to see your article

My views/doubts/premature questions

Do we really want to make the education / "college education" a
life-long process. When will we start working to raise our families and
take better care of them. Will our standard of life improve by going to
college throughout life. The purpose of a college education is to
provide the students with some skills which are relevant and help them
help themselves and their families. A typical life would be office and
college and nothing more. Think what will happen if a father and a son
go to the same online class, there will be no clear demarcation of
authority and many more lines will vanish.

For the cost of education, it has to be always less than the benefits it
will give otherwise no one will join the class rooms, if i stretch my
education to a longer time period it is bound to cost me more ( money /
time or both (assuming i assign a relatively higher utility to time ))

I don't have any solutions of what seems to be a problem to me right now
but I guess this way we may derail from the underlying purpose of the
education.

~I am afraid what you said is right and I will see that sooner or later.
Guess I am ready for the new wave :)

Regards
Ruchir
PGDM IIMC
2009
-------------------------------------------------------------

I stared at the sheaf of photocopied reading material that the instructor had distributed to our class anger welling up inside me.

"Many years had passed during which nothing of Combray.had any existence for me.", said the opening line of the reading. What possible relevance could this reading in old fashioned, stilted English have to what I had joined this class to learn.

I glanced around at the rest of the class of two dozen or so New Yorkers who had committed to the grueling schedule of two hours of evening class after work every week to polish our creative non-fiction writing skills at the New School, New York. It was shortly after the dramatic events of 9/11 and everyone in New York was trying to find meaning to things through writing and reading and things like that. The Whoopi Goldberg look-alike African American woman who usually sat next to me seemed unperturbed. Was I the only one who found this old fashioned reading material irrelevant?

I took another shot at the reading: ".one day, in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, something that I did not ordinarily take." My sense of frustration only increased. Why didn't the instructor just give us a list of five things to do to improve our writing styles instead of making us wade through this kind of stuff?

I could barely wait for the class to end that day. As I stepped out into the cold, New York night on my trudge back home, I did not even stop to drop a coin , as I usually do, into the bowl of the man and his mangy dog huddled in one of the doorways on 10^th Street.

Later that night, with no deadlines to chase I decided to take another shot at the reading, picking up at the point where I had left off, the part where the narrator is in the French town of Combray and has just been offered tea by his mother.

".I declined at first, and then for particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for those short, plump little cakes called 'petite madeleines'."I found myself getting drawn into the reading now. When I looked up an hour had passed and I had unwittingly read several thousand words of the reading.

As many a reader may have guessed by now, the reading which I had found 'irrelevant' and caused me so much irritation but which I was now deeply engrossed in was the opening passage of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." Published in 1913, many consider it the first novel of the 20^th century setting the stage for the 'modern' novel. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date."

What had caused this intense sense of frustration and irritation in me when the young instructor at the New School in Manhattan first gave me this reading? Was it that I did not 'know' that Proust was such a great author or that "In Search of Lost Time" was such an epochal novel? If he had told me this, would I have then got to know something that I did not know- that Proust was such a great author?

Recognizing solutions to problems, both in science and management, often can be traced to a similar phenomenon- not knowing that we don't know something.

One of the instances of this proved to be a turning point for Ayurveda. Immunizing people against small-pox through 'variolation', a process where dried smallpox scabs were blown into the nose of an individual was known and practiced in parts of India as early as the 17^th century. But for this to be part of public health policy in India, it had to find its way first to the Ottoman Court in Istanbul, where a British diplomat's wife, Lady Montagu encountered it in 1717 and took the practice to England. There, it was realized that since variolation could lead to the small pox disease in a high proportion of cases, a safer version was needed. With this knowledge, the solution to small pox entered the zone where many knew that a solution was possible and all that was not known was how to make it safer. Edward Jenner, an English physician, saw that dairymaids infected with cowpox were immune to small-pox and hit on the safe solution in 1798. Vaccination as a public health measure that saved millions of lives in India had to wait for British public health policy to bring it back. And Ayurveda, missed a crucial breakthrough by not knowing that a nascent solution to small pox epidemics existed right here in India.

"And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of Madeleine", recounts Proust's narrator at the end of the famous passage, " . immediately the old grey house upon the street.rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden . and with the house the town. the square . the country roads . all the flowers in our garden.the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."

END

The picture gets even rosier at graduation time with employers scrambling for a chance to make their pitch to students. Starting salaries for MBAs from the top business schools in every country beat that of any other profession by miles and have been in an ever increasing spiral for the last few years. At the IIMs, during the last few years the placement "season" lasts less than a week during which the entire graduating class is snapped up. At the top international business schools like the Harvard Business School and INSEAD in Europe, the feeding frenzy is as much.

Why then, has there been a spate of articles in recent times from respected business school professors with titles like "How Business Schools Lost their Way", and "The End of Business Schools" and "Can American Business Schools Survive?" What trouble do these savants see in the future while the rest of the world continues besotted with an MBA degree?

To start with, when lists are drawn up of business leaders who really made a difference, people like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Dhirubhai Ambani closer home, MBAs don't figure in them. More embarrassing, many (as in these two cases) do not even have a college degree let alone an MBA.

When studies are done about the career progression after a few years of work, MBAs do not seem to have made significantly more progress than Non-MBAs.

An internal study done by the prestigious US management consulting firm, Monitor, found that "people hired from high-end business schools were no better at integrative thinking than undergraduates .hired from the top-notch liberal arts programs."

Some would-be reformers of the MBA programs, like Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford Business School, believe that much of what business schools teach: analytical tools like statistics and basic disciplines like economics and sociology are readily learned and imitated by any intelligent person. On the other hand, things like communication ability, interpersonal skills, leadership and, most importantly, "wisdom", the ability to weave together and make use of different kinds of knowledge, are less easily taught. Paradoxically, these are the very skills that lie at the heart of a leadership role in management.

Others like Warren Bennis and James OToole, (their article in the Harvard Business Review, "How Business Schools Lost their Way" is much quoted in this debate), say that there is actually a crisis in management education and trace this to business schools attempting to adopt a "scientific model." This model attempts to treat management education as if it was something like physics or chemistry or biology whereas it is, in their view, more a "profession" like medicine or law. They see this distinction between an academic discipline and a profession as the central issue.

Why have business schools adopted the scientific model of physicists and economists rather than the professional model of doctors and lawyers? They believe this arises from business schools attempting to gain scientific respectability and avoid the stigma of a vocational training centre. The scientific model, says Bennis, "advances the careers and satisfies the egos of the professoriate."

Business Schools have always had this conflict: is it their role to impart 'training' or is it to impart 'education'? This is not a trivial distinction. Training is aimed at equipping students with a set of tools that they can immediately apply in their very first job. For example, teaching students to do a discounted cash flow analysis, that trusty tool of financial analysts, would is "training". "Education", on the other hand, is supposed to be longer lasting. For example, understanding the nuances of the difference between the law of diminishing returns and the law of increasing returns and more importantly how these two different theories came about may not do much for a student in his first job but would perhaps equip him with a lifelong ability to understand the drivers of business success and failure.

The result of all this debate is a worldwide attempt to reform Business School curricula. One direction of this reform is to infuse more humanities in to the curriculum. James March of Stanford, is supposed to have taught his famous Behavioral Sciences course using novels like "War and Peace" as his textbook. There is more to learn about human behavior in these classical novels, he believed, than in articles in business journals.

"Business schools", says Bennis, "need a diverse faculty populated with professors who, collectively, hold a variety of skills and interests that cover territory as broad and as deep as business itself."

If paradise has to be regained in this age of specialization, is a broad-based humanities oriented curriculum the answer for business schools?

END

Respected sir,

I am a PGDM for XIMB Bhubneswar, I have carefully gone through your article, and agree to your points raised, about training & education, specialisation needs and humanities can't be taught & scientific model adopted by B-schools. I have certain other observations to make, which may arrest the trouble, or may be just my views for observation.

Most of the good MBA's especially one which have projects to be done in every subjects, do increase the confidence(some artificial component also)& vision of the student, their integrative thinking & work focus but often fresh students do adopt certain projective style, which management jargons used frequently at inappropriate places, this makes others averse to them, and their ability to work done suffers & gets highlighted with time. Many fresh students do/hope for a heaven at work place & are unable to cope with practical situation, THEY ONLY SEEK SUPPORT OF THEIR SUPERIORS, AND ADOPT HIGH HANDED/DEGRADED ATTITUDE WITH JUNIORS WHICH MAKE THE SITUATION WORSE, COUPLED WITH THEIR PROJECTIVE STYLE. two comnments I would like to make :

1. We should have two streams of MBA's (Like BE & AMIE).It is very important to distinguish between MBA's on doctor's/Lawyer's pattern with minimum 30% weightage in each subject for industry oriented application of the concepts taught-(also 3 months summer placement)& other MBA's who just have practical exposures through a single project.(I have given training to about 250 students in their projects-from various institutes of India) The abilities and skills & knowledge aquired are very much different, than those aquired based on case based & each subject project oriented one.Even the case studies should be based on indian context to a larger extent(70:30)for their corelation and properly structured with theory they emphasise to bring clarity.Only ranking & market viewpoint is not enough, it has to be done officially.

2.Its Time that MBA's develop their specilised USP's to be identified with, specially in finance area & HRD, Two of the area can be:

- Expertise in EXECUTION PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT through well developed model/indices developed logically. Recently with my involvement in SAP based ERP implementation, I realised that it is not only the integrated product but the methodology adopted to implement it, along with all the accompanied change management in MEASURABLE TERMS that is the key to success.If some of the govt. schemes deployment is improved, by stagewise performance measurement, it will go a long way for brandimage improvement of MBA's. Presently in most corporates(Govt.& pvt)MBA's are considered as projective,posing as high flyer with some jargons, and jack of few skills but MASTRY IN NONE, even in leadership ability & without support of other they tend to loose their integrative skills very fast, resting only on closeness with some superiors( who also misuse them to some extent)& job hopping for the rise in career.

-with all the streams of MBA's good in financial basics, VALUATION EXPERTISE, considering all tangible & untanglible benifits, if good institute can come together & build up brand image in this area for which the guidelines are being formed by Ministry of corporate affairs and suggestions asked till 8th of august on the paper concerning this aspect.

-DEPLOYMENT BASED ON STRATEGIC TIMEFRAME of some exremely practical oriented, integrative measurement tool like Balance Scorecard, Six sigma, lean manufacturing etc.and any other such tool(this aspect covered in point 1, but reiterated for emphasis on deployment aspect, rather being discarded as management jargons,to be used for posing off)

Ms.Gagan Goyal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Ajit

Just read your article in India Abroad about this topic around MBA schools and

I had always found this topic to be of personal interest. First, my

comments/questions and then I will provide you my background.

In your article you talk about the fundamental difference between teaching and

education (where education is more long term...I like to call it life-long

learning). However, in corporate America there is a big debate going on about

providing employees with readily applicable training skills to do their jobs

vs. giving them opportunities for education that may or may not pay off for the

corporation in the short run. With the average tenure of employees steadily

dropping, ROI is a very hot issue.

Question:

Which camp do you fall into on this topic (training or education) and how

should schools prepare the future workforce for this

Raj Ramachandran, Doctoral Student Candidate, UPenn

--------------------------------------------

Your point is well taken. The route of liberal education has been by and large diluted to imparting scientific and theoretical education at B schools.

But I have a point of disagreement with you on juxtaposing entrepreneurs with MBAs - entrepreneurship is certainly different from managing even though managers at the highest levels cannot survive without entrepreneurship.

Even if the MBAs can manage well - meaning using available resources creatively to achieve predetermined goals- we should be happy. This can happen only with broadbased education where a variety of people participate in teaching at B Schools/ Also, apart from the 'independent' B Schools, rest of them follow a university syllabus which is not dynamic at all - there is a huge disconnect between the syllabus and industry requirement.

Regards R Raghavendra Ravi

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello

Let me begin by giving an example. THough IIM is considered as the best management institution of the country, established way back in 60's , one question tht is in mind is that since its establishment, how many great leaders has the institution given? KV Kamath, Indira nooyi, Harsha Bhogle are just few and there might be a few more to name. At the max around 50 - 60 but not more than that. Most of the students end up taking lucrative jobs in financial services or consultancy. Enterprenuership is very rarely seen. I would say management instiutions should play a major role in creating more and more enterpreuners. Perhaps this is the only way to bridge the gap between rich and poors( Brands like AMUL & LIJJAT helps lots of household people to live their livelihood). Todays management education system needs diversity and discussions with enterpreuners. Most of the professors observed mainly have a Ph.D degree with a lot of talent but less risk taking factor.

kingaonkar_amol@rediffmail.com

-------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Neekunj Mehta"

I had read your article several times to understand what has gone wrong with the system.

I am certainly not an MBA and neither do I come for any education institute of higher pedigree.

Just as an interest, here are my thoughts.

I more or less agree to what you mentioned in this article. But I would like to go a step

further to see the other side of the picture. While it is true that MBA has evolved more

as scientific education, the reason of education institutes looking at it as academic or

professional discipline is one side of the story.

I see the students intake to be the central theme of all the issues pertaining management

education ( or if I may take the liberty, education in general ). At the end of the day they are

ones, who push the professors, the institute and the way courses are shaped.

Unfortunately, If you look at admissions procedures in MBA programs worldwide, it looks

more like an imitation and / or poor caricature of "some kind" of students that Institutes want.

They have more or less set points on the basis of which they admit students e.g.. being a typical

score, a typical extra curricular background, a typical kind of leadership skills demonstrated,

etc. etc. In short the institutes are telling the prospective students that they need to fulfill certain

criteria to be considered. I am not saying that you need a very specific profile but nevertheless

you certainly need to fill something in these columns. ( Though most institutes time and again

repeat they don't look at certain type of candidates, if you look at the class profile at the end

of admissions it reveals a different story )

Now the question is, with these procedures, institutes are by defaults attracting those students

who will have more scientific approach to education than wisdom oriented education. When these

students land in institute the vicious cycle sets off. I would quote an article, published in Outlook

recently, regarding the state of much glamorized IITs. The Professors of IITs had a consensus

on the point that the way of admitting students through JEE in last decade are giving them the

students who are mere caricatures good enough to the fight the competition, but they miss the spark

and eagerness to experiment and learn the broader sense of engineering. Mr. Muthuraman,head Tata Steel ,

shared similar sentiments during his speech at IIT convocation in Chennai recently.

Trust I was able to bring the essence of my point.

And for the IIMs least said the better. The very nature of admission procedure is something

that all the IIMs need to think of seriously. What CAT is telling 2 lac prospective students

every year is that - please pardon me for the slang - "Bloody crack our tough paper and be

counted in first 2000 before we consider you. Needless to mention the lopsidedness in favor

of English. I would like to ask : Does that mean only those who can crack in first 2000 are

the best management brains that deserved to be considered. Further the IIMs are giving the message

that only those convent educated people from big town and Metros have the business acumen

because 80 % of India's population is still Hindi speaking so by default they can't be good

managers ( though it's a different thing, as you rightly pointed, that Dhirubahi even didn't know English

earlier on, or if you see around the world most Prime ministers of the countries like Russia, most of

Europe, Japan, china etc. are native language speakers so do most of the CEOs of the MNCs from these

countries ). I don't expect an answer, because it could be painful and torturous for IIMs

to think about and who would want to get his hands dirty when hefty pay packages and media working

over time to glorify IIMs

This is the reason you don't get people who truly have the potential to develop the wisdom.

This is the reason MBAs world over are good in managing and administrating the processes

but one will have to scratch head to find out how many went ahead and created some thing

new ( though the irony is that Most MBA schools world over look for this very potential while admitting the students.)

Looking forward to hearing from you, if I may please.

With regards of highest consideration,

Neekunj Mehta

PS: I have highest respect for IITs and IIMs and other reputed schools world over. They have helped build things around us. The abovementioned sentiments were, in no way, to belittle the higher institutes of learning.It was an honest analysis of where we stand as we move forward and I could certainly be wrong on some of the points that I mentioned.

It was late night at the end of a long, long day at work. Even the lights in the fishing boats anchored in Bombay harbour for the night were out. I was fishing in another ocean that night, trawling the internet for any research paper that would provide us with a method to detect India-related content on the web.

There is a brute force way to do that - employ hundreds to check every major website in the world... But every time the content changed you'd have to go back and redo the work. Anyway, hiring that many people would cost too much. There had to be a more elegant way. For example, write a computer program to patiently check sites throughout the world and send back snippets of information that was of interest to Indians.

We understood the first steps in doing this. For instance you can easily get a computer program to tag an article as 'India interest' if it encounters the word "Gandhi" in an article. Generalizing from this rule you could make the program compare every word it encounters against a list of Indian pronouns to detect 'India interest content'. Even more generally you could make the program compare words it encounters with a corpus known to be relevant to Indians, for example the last five years of Business Standard articles.

This much we had figured out on our own. The trick was how to do this economically. Here again the brute force method is to crawl every single English language site in the world and look for words to compare with our chosen corpus. But the elegant way would be to devise a method of inspired guessing as to where to look for first and where to look for next.

That night I was trawling the internet for research papers that described methods of inspired guessing.

Here was one! Accelerated Focused Crawling through

Online Relevance Feedback. I skimmed through the paper; it pretty much dealt with the problem I had in mind.

It was past midnight in India, a good time to call the author and ask if he was willing to consult for us, I said to myself.

I ran my eyes back up to the start of the paper to check which American University the paper had came out of. Then came the shock! The research paper was from our own backyard- IIT Bombay. And the lead author was Soumen Chakravarty, a Professor of Computer Science there. I was astounded. Anything to do with web crawling was hot; that's the stuff Search Engines are built on. There was a person from India publishing on such a hot topic in a prestigious international journal?

I couldn't wait for the sun to rise to call him. The next day, I and some colleagues trudged to IIT Bombay to meet the professor. He was sitting at his computer in an ice cold room in a remote corner of the Computer Science Department which itself was in a remote corner of the IIT Bombay campus. He was very helpful and immediately gave us the computer code that we needed.

I was curious about how he got interested in this topic. He pulled out a book from the stack in his room: Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data.

"This is a textbook I have just finished writing for US computer science students", he said nonchalantly tossing it back into the stack. "It will be out in later this year in the US."

It turns out that he was at Stanford at the same time as Brin and Page, the Google founders; they went and found a venture capitalist to fund their search engine efforts and Soumen came back to India to work at IIT Bombay: "because my mother is old and does not want to leave India".

Landing the Soumen catch turned out to be the easy part. Getting to engage IIT Bombay in a commercial relationship was to be a near-impossible task. The process for such an engagement is unchartered territory for Indian academic institutions. We settled on a compromise: we hired two of his star graduate students (or more accurately he persuaded them to join us instead of doing what all their classmates did- immigrate to America). Since then, we have been happily working together; whenever we run into a really tough computer science problem, we could get to Soumen through his students.

I have ever since felt mildly guilty about this arrangement that gave us so much know-how for so little payment. Till I encountered the head of Sarnoff Labs at a conference in Beijing. Sarnoff Labs, based in Princeton New Jersey, is a haloed center for innovation since the 1940's and is responsible for bringing to the world, Colour Television and the Electron Microscope, among other inventions. He shocked the Beijing audience and me by asserting that "big corporations in the world maintain R&D departments mainly to impress Wall Street." He said that the era of corporations maintaining large central research labs staffed with Nobel Prize winners (Bell Labs symbolized this) is long gone. The locus of innovation has almost entirely moved to start-ups. These start-ups staff themselves with recent graduates of top institutions and the alumni who maintain close consultative links to their University professors.

I was much relieved to hear this. So, the arrangement we stumbled into: hiring a professor's top students and getting the professor for free seems to be the way R&D is done today. And the irony was that we found it in our own backyard.

END