Robert Dolan, Dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, tells a funny story about when he, a freshly minted PhD in Operations Research, was assigned to teach a course in marketing at the Chicago School of Business.
He didn’t know much about marketing , so he decided he would visit the offices of Proctor & Gamble to find out what it was all about: “I put on my suit and was making my way out of the campus when the dean spotted me and asked me where I was going, all dressed up.
When I told him I was going to Proctor & Gamble to learn about marketing, he asked me, ‘Do they have any Nobel Laureates in Proctor & Gamble?’ When I said ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘Well, we’ve got dozens of Nobel Laureates. So you just stay right here’” .
You might want to take the story with a pinch of salt, the way the dean tells it, but it certainly does serve to reinforce that old notion of academia as an ivory tower. Especially since it’s set in the University of Chicago, which indeed prides itself on the number of Nobel Laureates it has on the faculty and more specifically, at the Chicago School of Business, which has always put theory ahead of application (at the other extreme from Harvard, which holds up its case study method as the most effective pedagogy).
Nearly 30 years have gone by since Dolan tried to visit Proctor & Gamble. Today, his counterpart might consider hopping on a plane and coming to India or China instead . Would the dean stop him? The present dean of Chicago School of Business is the enlightened Ted Snyder and he probably would not.
At the same time, Snyder is unstinting in his criticism of how business school faculty have coped with the phenomenon of globlaisation: “If you look at how industries and organisations have responded to globalisation , you’ll find business schools have responded less than anyone else,“ he says. “It must be asked: do our faculty understand globalisation ? Do they understand emerging markets?”
The way the dean leaves the question hanging while adressing the audience of academicians, students and corporate CEOs at the recent Strategic Management Society (SMS) conference at the Indian School of Business (ISB), the answer seems to be ‘no.’ The reason is not hard to find. “Faculty don’t get around much,” says Snyder. “Bschools tend to be location specific and the faculty like to be rooted in one place for their research.”
No wonder then that the faculty of IIM-Ahmedabad has produced a surfeit of research on companies headquatered in Ahmedabad and ISB Hyderbad has tended to give undue importance to the now discredited Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computers, who was invited to address not one, but two plenary sessions at the SMS conference.
At the Ivy League American b-schools , which are supposed to be more global in their outlook, research on emerging markets has come into vogue only in the last decade. Not surprisingly, faculty of Indian and Chinese origin, who happily find themselves in the right place at the right time, have taken the lead in publishing books and papers.
CK Prahalad, the prime mover of the SMS India Conference at ISB, plans to push the trend. “We have to ask ourselves , how can emerging markets be a source of inspiration for scholars?” he says. “The general view is that there’s nothing to learn from emerging markets, that innovation always flows from developed economies to developing economies. We have to challenge the tyranny of this dominant logic.”
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He didn’t know much about marketing , so he decided he would visit the offices of Proctor & Gamble to find out what it was all about: “I put on my suit and was making my way out of the campus when the dean spotted me and asked me where I was going, all dressed up.
When I told him I was going to Proctor & Gamble to learn about marketing, he asked me, ‘Do they have any Nobel Laureates in Proctor & Gamble?’ When I said ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘Well, we’ve got dozens of Nobel Laureates. So you just stay right here’” .
You might want to take the story with a pinch of salt, the way the dean tells it, but it certainly does serve to reinforce that old notion of academia as an ivory tower. Especially since it’s set in the University of Chicago, which indeed prides itself on the number of Nobel Laureates it has on the faculty and more specifically, at the Chicago School of Business, which has always put theory ahead of application (at the other extreme from Harvard, which holds up its case study method as the most effective pedagogy).
Nearly 30 years have gone by since Dolan tried to visit Proctor & Gamble. Today, his counterpart might consider hopping on a plane and coming to India or China instead . Would the dean stop him? The present dean of Chicago School of Business is the enlightened Ted Snyder and he probably would not.
At the same time, Snyder is unstinting in his criticism of how business school faculty have coped with the phenomenon of globlaisation: “If you look at how industries and organisations have responded to globalisation , you’ll find business schools have responded less than anyone else,“ he says. “It must be asked: do our faculty understand globalisation ? Do they understand emerging markets?”
The way the dean leaves the question hanging while adressing the audience of academicians, students and corporate CEOs at the recent Strategic Management Society (SMS) conference at the Indian School of Business (ISB), the answer seems to be ‘no.’ The reason is not hard to find. “Faculty don’t get around much,” says Snyder. “Bschools tend to be location specific and the faculty like to be rooted in one place for their research.”
No wonder then that the faculty of IIM-Ahmedabad has produced a surfeit of research on companies headquatered in Ahmedabad and ISB Hyderbad has tended to give undue importance to the now discredited Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computers, who was invited to address not one, but two plenary sessions at the SMS conference.
At the Ivy League American b-schools , which are supposed to be more global in their outlook, research on emerging markets has come into vogue only in the last decade. Not surprisingly, faculty of Indian and Chinese origin, who happily find themselves in the right place at the right time, have taken the lead in publishing books and papers.
CK Prahalad, the prime mover of the SMS India Conference at ISB, plans to push the trend. “We have to ask ourselves , how can emerging markets be a source of inspiration for scholars?” he says. “The general view is that there’s nothing to learn from emerging markets, that innovation always flows from developed economies to developing economies. We have to challenge the tyranny of this dominant logic.”
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