US colleges learn business mantra from Indian gurus like Soumitra Dutta, Pradeep K Khosla and Dipak C Jain
Saturday, 28/01/2012
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/us-colleges-learn-business-mantra-from-indian-gurus-like-soumitra-dutta-pradeep-k-khosla-and-dipak-c-jain/articleshow/11594678.cms
When Soumitra Dutta was appointed as the Dean of Ivy League Cornell University earlier this month, he joined a small, influential and growing club of Indian-origin professors heading American business schools. Among them, five have risen to top jobs in the US management education circuit in the last four years.
A year-and-a-half ago, Harvard Business School appointed Professor Nitin Nohria as its dean. Forty three-year-old Sunil Kumar took the dean's chair at Chicago's Booth School of Business, another top US B-school, early last year. And now, 48-year-old Dutta, from France's top business school INSEAD, is at the helm at Cornell.
Showing the Way
There are other Indian Americans too who run B-schools in the US: 46-year-old Jaishankar Ganesh at Rutgers School of Business-Camden and Anand Anandalingam at the Robert H Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. The spate of appointments signals a few changes. First, Indians are finally breaking through the glass ceiling in global management education. And secondly these highly influential men will now exercise India's 'soft power' over swathes of global B-school students.
Top management thinker and professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Vijay Govindarajan, agrees that Indian management professors have an edge in being educated in English and well-versed in Western pedagogies. "We are masters of data and facts," he said.
