However, competition is about to explode. Top management schools of the world will soon be in India, many are already here in some form or other. Singapore, China and Dubai are aggressively attracting campuses of the world’s best management schools. The IIMs, with their current level of wide ranging government control and interference on their operations and very limited degrees of strategic freedom could end up being marginalized. The poor pay scales and continuous attempts to “regulate” faculty activities, lead to difficulty in attracting high caliber new faculty. The poor quality of infrastructure relative to the newcomers, the severe controls and constraints in internationalizing their footprint of knowledge etc., needs to be addressed. This report focuses on each of these problems and suggests a way forward.
On autonomy and accountability The best way to enable the IIMs to survive and seize the opportunity ahead is, to empower their present boards further, give the institution freedom from “off-board” government control, and put in place stringent measures of accountability. Boards must agree with ‘management’ to targets and undertake a formal, documented evaluation each year, on the following dimensions, further broken up into sub dimensions, using the prescribed metrics: (1) academic excellence, knowledge creation, thought leadership and impact on India and the world through teaching, research, consulting activity (2) institution development and growth in scale, scope and stature (3) social obligations, social contribution and good citizenry (4) quality of governance structures and processes including at the board level (5) performance in balancing financial health, accessibility and encouragement to economically weaker sections of the society.
On research, consulting, teaching: Research does not happen out of thin air. It requires active intellectual networks to be nurtured between academics around the world, between industry and academia, flexible administrative systems that assign travel budgets, infrastructure etc. where needed. Consulting is good, not bad – there cannot be good management school teachers who are out of tune with the fast changing world outside. Every faculty member must be made to do a minimum number of teaching, research and consulting hours. If courses are to be updated every year, new ones created, then we must be realistic about the nature of effort required to offer a single credit course.
On mentoring newer IIMs Mentoring is not a turnkey job where one IIM sets up another, transplants courses, transfers or loans faculty and clones itself. Mentoring must result in building new, strong, independent thinking institutions where faculties shape it in a market focused manner. Director and boards of new IIMs must be appointed from a search process from within the IIM group, as well as outside. Resources and business plans must be identified and approved by them. All knowledge material, seminars and other faculty development activity is made available to them, free of cost for a certain number of years from all other IIMs in the system.