‘Future of B-schools likely to be new-format courses, with fewer 2-year MBAs’

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[00:00:29] Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter. I'm Ashraf Engineer. Business management education in India has evolved significantly over the decades, especially after liberalization in the 1990s and the era of high growth. As corporations began playing an increasingly larger role in the economy and society, the demand for MBA degrees skyrocketed. This in turn led to the establishment of many public and private institutions offering MBAs.

[00:00:53] As such schools became almost ubiquitous, several challenges arose, not least that many of the graduates they produced were not employable in the first place. That apart, facing severe disruption due to technology as well as a fast-changing business landscape, management education finds itself at another inflection point. The urgent imperatives of sustainability, inclusion and competitiveness all demand a transformation to ensure such education remains relevant to students, industry and the challenges before the world.

[00:01:23] All Indians Matter We have on the show Dr. Varun Nagraj, Dean of the SPJN Institute of Management and Research or SPJIMR. Dr. Nagraj has focused on research and community engagement efforts by setting up an institutional North Star of Advancing Wise Innovation. During a 30-year career in product innovation in Boston and Silicon Valley, before taking on the role at SPJIMR, he held various product leadership roles including that of CEO at venture-funded startups and public companies.

[00:01:52] He was also a partner at PRTM Management Consulting, now part of PWC. Welcome, Varun. Thank you, Ashraf. Varun, what are the biggest challenges facing business management education in India today? See, I think a good way of looking at management education in India is by looking at the number of institutions and schools we have that offer MBAs or what is often referred to as a postgraduate diploma in management. So MBAs or PGDM, as you know, in India are viewed interchangeably.

[00:02:21] And there are nearly 4,000 institutions that offer this particular degree. And the NIRF, which is a national rankings agency, and others, you know, look at these 4,000 schools in sort of distinct tiers, even though they might hesitate to call it that. You know, there's a tier of perhaps 50 schools or so that I think have a genuine shot at being sort of international caliber schools.

[00:02:48] And so the way to look at these 50 schools really is by benchmarking them against international standards and against each other. Then I think you have a group of perhaps, you know, several hundred schools, maybe 700, 800 of them, you know, that are perfectly competent in terms of turning out functional MBAs and functional PGDMs.

[00:03:09] Then, unfortunately, at the base of the pyramid, you do have probably a few thousand schools, each of them maybe putting out between 50 and 100 or 50 and 150 graduates a year, which is where I think the issue is that you talked about, right? Are these folks employment ready? What really is going on in these thousands of schools? Are these universities or schools actually providing a good return on investment, you know,

[00:03:36] to the students who invest their aspirations and hopes into these particular schools? So I think we should have probably a different conversation about the three tiers, if you will, even if not explicitly. At least when I'm giving you an answer to a broader question, I might point out that, you know, for this group of schools, here's how I would answer it. But for the other group of schools, you know, the answer might be different. So I hope you'll allow me to have these more nuanced answers to your questions that follow.

[00:04:05] Absolutely. In fact, I encourage it because you're absolutely right. I mean, I was going to mention at some stage or I might already have mentioned that, you know, MBA schools or business schools are almost ubiquitous. You find them virtually in every neighborhood now. They're simply cashing in on the demand, I think, for that sort of thing. But we'll come to that, Varun, in a second. But I just wanted to ask, COVID-19 made digitization switch to warp speed? Now, naturally, this impacts businesses and the way they are managed. What does this mean for B schools?

[00:04:34] So I think there's probably two ways of looking at B schools. One is, you know, at the end of the day, B schools or universities, whether they're profit or nonprofit, are businesses. They have to produce enough cash flow, however the incoming cash comes in, to balance their operating costs. So at one level, I would say the experience that universities had was no different than the experience that other businesses had. Right. How do you keep the lights on?

[00:05:01] How do you keep fulfilling your mission even while the pandemic is raging? So in that sense, a lot of the things that universities did were probably identical to what other companies did. You know, how do you essentially go to a remote workforce? Except in this case, you know, the workforce also has a student force associated with it, if you will. But one would argue, you know, I was at that time when COVID struck.

[00:05:23] I was in California working as a chief operating officer for an AI company whose customers were utilities, you know, like Adani Electric and so forth. Not Adani particularly, but, you know, that kind of company. And we had to deal not only with the remote workforce of our own, we had to deal with the fact that our customers are now remote. Right. So we still had the need to communicate to them. We still had the need to basically get their software implementations up and running and so forth. A lot of it, which we did remotely.

[00:05:50] I then moved towards the end of the COVID crisis here to SPJMR in Mumbai. And a lot of the challenges were similar, right? I mean, you have policies you're ensuring to make sure your employees are healthy. You're, you know, you're confirming with the norms around social distancing or potentially even partial lockouts. Except the difference was you now have the number of students far exceed, if you will, the number of employees that you have. And these students are remote.

[00:06:17] So how do you now basically change your fundamental product to make it digital? Right. And that was the key difference between, let's say, what I had to do at my AI software company where the product was the same. Our operating structures had to change. We surveyed in a university setting where not only the operating structures had to change, but the product had to change as well. And so this is really what I think a lot of business schools and schools did wonderfully well. And they used technologies ranging from WhatsApp all the way to far more sophisticated means.

[00:06:47] And of course, as you know, Zoom became kind of the market leader partially because of this. Now, the key really is, you know, we sometimes over-rotate on sort of the importance of technology. So I really want to give you a low-tech example. My wife at this time was the principal of a NGO school for underprivileged children in Uttarakhand. Right. So they had about 500 children, all of who were on scholarship from poor means. And they had to continue their educational mission.

[00:07:14] And it was amazing to watch what she and her staff did just using WhatsApp. Right. So WhatsApp became essentially your medium of instruction. And I'm not saying it was perfect when the children came back. Of course, they had lost some ground. But it was amazing what a simple tool like WhatsApp was able to do by way of providing affordances to the teachers in order to try and make things happen. So I think the entire world, education sector included, was very creative about using technology.

[00:07:43] Now, certainly at SPJMR, we have the resources to do more than WhatsApp. Right. So we equipped all our classrooms as hybrid classrooms. Instruction became something where, you know, to some degree, the faculty was maybe in the classroom. Perhaps there was some social distancing. So some students were in the classroom. Other students were in their hostel rooms. In some cases, others might have been remote. We learned how to essentially change the way in which the classroom discussion works.

[00:08:09] So the content of the product, you know, how it is delivered in class, post-class, how do you do group work, for example. So the whole idea of using breakout rooms in Zoom, which, by the way, was a very nice feature, allowed you to simulate the breakout groups or the project groups that you have. But you also know that people's attention span is much lower virtually than it is in person. So how do you then change the amount of content that you package into each discussion?

[00:08:36] How often do you jump in to test if people are understanding what's going on? How do you keep a group engaged hour after hour after hour with no social interaction happening between them? So I think these were the challenges that all educational institutions had to deal with that were different than the challenges that, you know, other businesses had to deal with. So we had to deal with the regular business challenges. Plus, we had to really modify the product itself. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when you talk about that part. I remember my own classes.

[00:09:03] I teach at several institutions and I actually didn't know how to use these features on Zoom. And I kind of contacted an ex-student of mine and she gave me some tutorials over a few days. And I learned how to use breakout rooms and polls and things like that. It's quite nostalgic, actually, when you mentioned all this. But Varun, coming back to what we were discussing earlier. Now, industry has long held that a large number of graduates and post-graduates are not actually employable, that they don't have the skills to deliver in this modern world.

[00:09:33] Now, how serious is this issue? And what is industry telling you particularly in your discussions with it? Okay. And so here, Ashraf, I'll sort of revert to that three-tier model, if you will, because I think the answer is different. And I'll just focus on the bottom tier and the top tier. And we leave the middle tier unknown because, you know, it could go either way, right?

[00:09:53] So in the bottom tier, I think when industry talks about the fact that graduates are unemployable, and let's say they're talking about not just MBA graduates, they're talking about engineering graduates as well. You know, we have 4,000 MBA schools. You have many more engineering schools churning out lakhs and lakhs of engineers, millions of engineers actually per year that, you know, many of them are not employable. So what do they mean when they say that, when they're talking about sort of the bottom half of the pyramid, if you will?

[00:10:19] So we have to break employability and excellence as a professional into two buckets. I think you have sort of the, what you would consider the functional skills that are necessary to do a job. And then you have, I'll just broadly call them life skills. I'm not going to call them soft skills because people automatically think it's about speaking and communication and so on, right? So let's just say there are functional skills and there are life skills. At the bottom of the pyramid, I do think you have a problem with functional skills as well.

[00:10:47] Meaning you have electrical engineers coming out of some engineering institution that really don't understand the basics of electrical engineering. They've gone through a four-year program, but who knows what the caliber of the teachers really was? Who knows how exactly the instruction was delivered? So you have a bunch of students coming out with what I would consider insufficient functional knowledge to go in and start doing the job at whoever it is that is hiring them. And this has long been known.

[00:11:14] I don't think it is a, it's probably at least a 20 year, 25 year problem, at least on the engineering side. And so you've had institutions like Infosys that run essentially a finishing school, a long finishing school, maybe a whole year long in places like Mysore, right? So Infosys might take 10,000 people a year into their Mysore campus. These are new graduates that they've hired. And they generally conclude that these folks lack the functional skills that are necessary to work at Infosys.

[00:11:41] And so for a whole year, they're basically in training school at Infosys where Infosys is teaching them essentially what they could have learned during the four years, right? It's not a horrible model, honestly, right? You could argue that, hey, it's a wasted year and so on. But honestly, if you look at the people who have gone into that program, they have learned things they wouldn't have learned in a university. And so, you know, did it need a whole year? Could it have been done in three months? Possibly, right? So maybe there is some lost productivity there.

[00:12:09] But organizations like Infosys have certainly figured out the fact that they can provide the functional skills that students need to succeed within Infosys. Problem, of course, is not everybody has the resources of an Infosys in order to be able to onboard these numbers of people. And essentially provide an extra year's worth of education, right? That really is the problem.

[00:12:30] So, you know, if you're a bislery and you're hiring, you know, 25 engineers, sure, you can do some level of training and HR and leadership and development. Could probably have some basic forces. But bislery is not thinking of teaching chemical engineering or mechanical engineering to the 25 engineers that they hired. Or they're not looking to teach financial accounting to the 10 MBAs that they hired, right? Their expectation is these people come in with that. So we do have a problem, though Infosys represents one way of solving that particular problem.

[00:12:59] But if you insist on the bottom half of the pyramid as essentially delivering functionally literate graduates, that is a standard that the regulation agencies are trying to hold the bottom of the pyramid up to, right? Do you have sufficient number of faculty? Who are these faculty, right? And are they aware of what it is that, you know, electrical engineering looks like these days or financial accounting or digital marketing looks like these days?

[00:13:23] You know, are you being taught by somebody who is 20 years or 30 years away from any kind of marketing they did and they're trying to teach you digital marketing based on what they're reading on medium.com, right? So these are the right kinds of questions. And therefore, the regulation institutions have tried to insist that practitioners be included as well in the delivery scheme. And that's the reason, Ashraf, you are a popular invitee into university campuses because you bring a practitioner viewpoint into the classrooms that you take.

[00:13:51] So that is a relatively short-term fix, right? That in the bottom of the pyramid, can we involve a fair number of practitioners, not just providing requirements, but actually actively engaged in the delivery, you know, of content, in the delivery of teaching? And that way, try and, you know, address the functional skill gap that might be emerging in that lower half of the pyramid.

[00:14:11] The upper half of the pyramid or the upper tenth of the pyramid, because I said, you know, maybe 50, maybe max 100 schools out of 4,000, I don't believe have that particular problem. You know, if you look at the caliber of instruction, the caliber of inclusion of industry in the classroom, also the caliber of the students themselves, by the way, right? I mean, there is, you know, unfortunately in India, we have a hierarchical structure where you know the best students are in the top 100 schools, right?

[00:14:38] So if you put all these things together, you will, you come out with functionally literate engineers and functionally literate MBAs. I have never personally had one conversation with an industry recruiter that had any issue whatsoever about the functional literacy of our graduates or graduates of schools like ours. Now, they might occasionally talk about the fact, you know, that, hey, your curriculum should expand to include how Gen AI is changing marketing. True, right?

[00:15:07] But those kinds of topics, as you know, Ashraf, are also potentially self-taught topics and pretty rapidly self-taught topics. So sure, you know, institutions like ours will include contemporary trends that are happening, what their impact in the classroom might be. But we're relying on the fact that once our students are in a job, if they need to learn how to use Gen AI to basically do targeted marketing, they'll figure it out, right? It's not that big a deal.

[00:15:31] So I think a lot of these new technologies that we get impressed by, in the business world, we are fundamentally users of this technology, right? We are not creators of this technology. So while you need to be a rocket scientist genius to work at OpenAI to produce, you know, the kind of OpenAI, Gen AI tools that they put out, you don't need to be a genius to use it, right? And when we talk about MBAs and we say, do you understand AI trends? My point is it's not that hard, guys.

[00:15:59] You know, using technology for most literate people is not that big a deal. We figure it out. You figure out how to use a spreadsheet. When email changes to group pair, you figure out how to use it. Sure, maybe you need two days of training to learn the tools and techniques or as Ashraf, as you did on Zoom. You know, we all learned Zoom, right? Did we have training classes, you know, a whole semester's worth of how to use Zoom? No. You fumble, you know, you mess up once or twice, then you figure it out.

[00:16:24] So I think we confuse the usage of all of these new generation technologies with the creation of these generation technologies. The usage of these technologies, which is what 95% of managers do, is not that big a deal. So I think we should stop worrying and getting hysterical about we don't know how to absorb technology. We don't know how to create great technology. That is true. But that's a separate problem altogether, right?

[00:16:47] So I would say functionally, the top 10% of the universities are producing functionally literate, you know, employable graduates. But there is a big problem, though, with the top 10%, including my school and the bottom 50%, 60%. And these are sort of what I would call the life gaps that exist, you know, the life skills that for whatever reason, this generation of students doesn't seem to possess in the same measure as maybe previous generations did.

[00:17:16] I'll also recognize that every generation, as it gets older, nostalgically thinks about how great they are and how bad the next generation is. So I will absolutely confess that I might be tainted by that. But here's sort of what I hear from the recruiters when they talk about the unemployability or gaps even from top schools like ours.

[00:17:36] And I'll lay these out and then we can talk about are these things you actually teach in a classroom or is this a larger educational system that's failing us or is it a societal transition that's causing this, right? So we can have a larger philosophical discussion because I don't believe it's just a matter of what's happening in these schools. The first issue that most recruiters will basically point out as a big gap, even amongst the best graduates, is a lack of curiosity.

[00:18:01] So their fundamental notion is that learning is a continuous lifelong process and it's not about just learning skills, right? Being insightful requires really a vast domain knowledge. You have to learn things because you enjoy learning things. You don't learn things saying I need to know A to do B only, right? That can't be the only reason why you learn A. You learn A because someday it might be important. Someday or when you learn A, it triggers some idea that you had no idea that would get triggered.

[00:18:29] That might be relevant to something that happens a year down the line. So learning has to be driven by curiosity, right? Not by the need to pass an exam, not by the need to do a job. This curiosity is the basis of lifelong learning and lifelong adaptability. And it is true that, you know, the generation of students now passing through business schools and engineering schools do lack that curiosity, right?

[00:18:54] They tend to be focused on what do I need to know to go do something as opposed to let me just sit back and absorb things and learn things and contemplate and so forth, right? And I don't think... And where did the skill come from? This skill has to be inculcated from an early age. If you have an entire school system that is focused on exams, you have an entire school system that's focused on a tight syllabus,

[00:19:17] you have parental expectations that are very much driven by results only, you have, you know, evaluation criteria, which, you know, much as I admire a lot of the work that our regulation agencies are doing at the university level, I am firmly philosophically on the side that we over-evaluate our students. And I say this as somebody that has gone through India's most rigorous evaluation systems. I am an IITN from Bombay and so forth. But yet I don't believe that is the right way to test somebody's measure, right?

[00:19:46] But we keep insisting on doing that with a focus on evaluation, which I think cuts out all the curiosity or the time to explore things and so on. So at one level, we are at fault within the MBA system. I think the school system is at fault because of the way it sort of emphasizes things. And I think society might be at fault because we have stopped appreciating rich, nuanced conversations. We are a, you know, swipe right, swipe left society, unfortunately.

[00:20:13] We have the attention span of a fruit fly these days, you know, as you switch from one topic to the other. I'll give you a funny story, Ashraf. I, you know, I had a reading for my students in one of the classes I was teaching. And it was a wonderful reading. It was about first principles thinking. You know, I try and do as many liberal arts kinds of things in my class because I think these are the life skills people are missing. So this was about how are you, what does it mean to be a first principles thinker?

[00:20:39] You know, because that is, and fundamentally, that's just a different way of, you know, being a critical thinker, right? So we're discussing critical thinking. I have a lovely reading. And in that reading, there's a hyperlink. It's a web, it was a web reading. There's a hyperlink that says, here's how Warren Buffett, you know, used critical thinking to build his first trillion dollars or whatever, right? Intriguing little subheading in a larger, not that large, right? A 10-minute read, maybe an 8-minute read at best.

[00:21:05] And in that, there are a few hyperlinks that lead to what seem to be intriguing and related topics. I checked in class. How many of you guys clicked on that link, right? Less than 10%. Why? Because it was not part, quote-unquote, of the reading. And I said, how do you decide what is the reading? What's the point of a hyperlink if not to take you elsewhere, right? You would have done that on Instagram. You would have done that on, you know, when you're doing reels from one to the other. Why not on this one?

[00:21:31] And the answer is, well, we didn't think you're going to be evaluating us on that other stuff, right? So this notion of evaluation, I think, has really, to some degree, killed curiosity, killed time, and so forth, right? So curiosity was one big hole that employers are mentioning. And I think this is a problem for us as a society in India. You know, you talk about all Indians matter. However, this is something that matters to all Indians. We should be careful not to lose our sense of curiosity.

[00:21:57] And it looks like we're losing it even at the highest levels of educational accomplishment. The second one basically has to deal with problem solving, right? Which is, are you a problem solver? Are you a problem figure-outer, if you will, or a problem framer? A problem solver is what we've all been trained to do. Your teacher gives you a problem. You have a math problem, a physics problem. You try and come up with an answer. The real world isn't like that. Nobody ever poses a question to you, right? You enter a messy world in the workforce.

[00:22:26] It's not clear what even the goal needs to be. So part of what you need to figure out is really working in an unstructured environment where even there is no question to answer. You have to figure out which of the 10 possible questions make the most amount of sense to answer, right? So framing a question, looking at a messy situation and saying, these are all the possible things that maybe need to be answered. Which of these should I answer, right? And then you go about answering it. That makes people really, really uncomfortable.

[00:22:53] It is like, what is a question you want me to answer? How are you going to evaluate or assess the answer? What is the right answer? What is the wrong answer? And the answer is there is no right or wrong answer. There's no right or wrong question, right? So this ability to operate in the gray zone in a total state of ambiguity is one that employers are saying our students don't have. And why is that? Because what it means is they need much more supervision.

[00:23:17] It means that managers have to be specifying jobs and projects for these people, have to be monitoring them, have to tell them, here's how I will assess you. And that may be okay in school. That is not how you run a good business with this kind of, I will tell you exactly what to do and here's how I'm going to evaluate it, right? People should be able to come in and figure out what needs to be done, do the right thing, and so forth. And the third big thing folks talk about is really the work ethic. And this one, again, might sound generational to some degree.

[00:23:47] The work ethic is really one where you're looking at this whole notion of professionalism, accountability, no excuses, right? Versus sort of saying I couldn't do it because of X, Y, Z. And here I think we're having a couple of things. One, I do see the younger generation hiding behind excuses a lot more, right? As opposed to just fessing up. If you don't get something done, that's fine. You know, you failed, big deal. But this generation is not used to failing.

[00:24:13] In the top 50 business schools, these are your 99-cat score people, right? In their mind, they're successes. I try to tell them that, yeah, you're all failures and it's perfectly fine, right? And think about all the times you've failed and learned. And that's how, in my business, I've unfortunately run companies that went nowhere, right? I've had situations where the outcome was terrible. But, you know, you pick yourself up, you learn something, and you soldier on. And this generation is not strong enough, in my opinion, to deal with failure.

[00:24:43] And therefore, you know, they get stressed. You hear about a greater amount of mental health issues. Much of it is legitimate. But I also think some of it is basically coming from the lack of resilience that people have, right? If you are accepting of the fact that you will fail half the time, the level of stress you put on yourself will be lower as well.

[00:25:06] But for a various bunch of reasons, we have created a generation of people who are high-stress people who don't want to fail, therefore will not take chances. But at the same time, when they do fail, it is never their fault. It's always somebody else's fault, right? So there's a world of excuses. And then there is this whole work-life balance stuff, which, you know, I am firmly on the side as an older guy that first you work and then you look for balance. You know, you don't start with work-life balance on day one.

[00:25:32] And so all these things combine to basically make employers frustrated about the quality of the product that they're hiring, right? So when they say lack of work ethic, lack of resilience, you know, the inability to take ownership, making excuses, they're all related to each other, right? They're like your mindset with which you approach a professional situation. So the first part is sort of curiosity, right, which just allows you to know a bunch of things and be interested. You know, the vitality of life and thought comes from interest and curiosity.

[00:26:02] That seems to be a problem. The second one is even if you had curiosity, you have to have the ability to look at everything you're learning and figuring out what does it all mean, right? What are the big questions? How might I go about it? That is not the same as problem solving. That's problem framing based on the curiosity that brought in all this information. And the third is once you've framed the problem, you've figured out what you might want to do. Being fearless and professional and hardworking about tackling those issues. These three things to me are life skills, Ashraf.

[00:26:32] And somehow we are failing, you know, the younger generation in preparing them with these life skills. How we go about it in the top 50 business schools will be different than perhaps how you go about it elsewhere. But I think here all 4,000 business schools have to come together to figure out how to address these three things. Because I think these are actually plaguing the entire system, not just the MBA system, the engineering system, our arts and science systems, our schooling systems, and so on.

[00:27:02] This is a larger conversation to have. And just by claiming at some high level saying, teach critical thinking, it doesn't quite happen that way. You have to have a lot of systemic changes in what you value, what you evaluate, how you reward success, what attitudes you inculcate, how you celebrate failure. Why do we only celebrate successes? Why don't we celebrate the two biggest wipeouts of the year from which we all learned, right? As opposed to being embarrassed about those wipeouts. So I think these are some more fundamental changes.

[00:27:29] And I might be sounding a bit Silicon Valley Asian American in this particular manner. But I do think these are reasons why certain other societies maybe have innovated at a faster pace. Yeah. And I think the other factor, Varun, I often think about is leadership. Now, in this particular world where globalization is increasing, I think the quality of leadership is critical to any organization's success. I mean, we already talked about other, quote unquote, soft skills such as communication, empathy, etc.

[00:27:58] Particularly when it comes to leadership, how about B-Schools pivoting? So that's a great question, right? So the question would be, what are kind of the skills that the new leader needs to take into the workplace? And remember, B-School graduates are not going to be leaders day one, right? Maybe if they go join a sales and distribution arm of Asian paints, you know, within three, four years, they're actually running, you know, they're being leaders to their dealer network and so on.

[00:28:24] But the fact is, typically in three, four, five years, if you're joined many other places, your title may have gone up, but you're really not a leader yet. So I'm going to take like a 10-year view, if you will, right? So how do you post-MBA, day one through year 10, if you will, become a better leader? What skills do we need today that, besides the functional skills, right? Because the three things I told you about, the ones I was ranting about are all sort of personal oriented things, right? That you as an individual needs to do.

[00:28:51] You move the conversation very nicely to, okay, even if you as an individual are curious, even you as an individual are hardworking, you're comfortable in ambiguity, that's great, but you're also a leader. How do you basically have your teams succeed? How do you become a good leader? So I think it's a very different question. Great question. So if you look at the new kinds of skills that I think a leader needs to have, there's a whole, you know, set of internationalization kinds of skills that I think a leader needs to bring in, right?

[00:29:18] A broader perspective, because at the end of the day, I fear, and I think you might share that fear, that sometimes we are turning inwards a little bit too much, right? Becoming a little self-congratulatory in how great we are. We celebrate our successes as a country, which is good to do, but it should not come at the cost of recognizing we still work in a global environment, and we should not declare victory too soon. And I sometimes see that tendency, right?

[00:29:45] We are absolutely, all the trends are right, but we are not number one yet, right? So let's not pretend we are number one. Let's fight to be number one. So which basically means being very conscious of the international world, benchmarking against them, looking at leadership styles that are emerging, and so forth. So international exposure, in my mind, is a really important thing to do. And yet you do see that there is a tendency to not look to the outside as much as we used to.

[00:30:12] Now, my generation, your generation, Ashraf, could be criticized as being too Western-influenced in the past. But there's a difference between Western-influenced and Western-informed, in my opinion. It is important for us to be informed about the larger world we work in. I'm not saying you have to celebrate it. You have to at least be aware of your competition, right? You have to be aware of who you're trying to beat. And I am seeing a decreasing level of internationalization in Indian society to some degree, and in education to some degree, right?

[00:30:42] We're talking about, let's go back to our roots. Let's go back and learn from Indic wisdom and so forth, which I'll come to in a second. But that cannot be at the expense of understanding the larger context that we operate in. And if anything, it's become even faster. Now, this comes back a little bit to curiosity, right? How do you as a leader, you know, to operate? You need to have an international perspective. So with your teams and looking at the outside world, you're able to figure out what the right things to do is. And it comes back again to a sense of curiosity, right?

[00:31:11] You know, what music do you listen to? What shows do you watch? What books do you read? You know, who do you talk to, right? Do you actively seek out people with a different point of view? Do you actively find somebody when you're sitting out in the bar, you know, the bar, you know, the bar stop exchange or something? Somebody looks like they might be a student from Nigeria. Do you sit with them to ask them, you know, what's going on in Nigeria? You know, what's really happening in West Africa? We don't tend to do that much, right? So I think that internationalization or a global mindset is one that I think a leader needs to have.

[00:31:40] And I think some of it is personality driven. So it relates to the first three things I talked about. But some of it is, I think, additional. How do you go about, you know, being internationally plugged in all the time? The second part is let us look inwards. You know, there is a huge amount to be learned from Indic wisdom. There's a huge amount of unique perspectives that Indian management and Indian scholarship can bring in. But I'll put it in the larger context of wisdom, right?

[00:32:05] So I do think, you know, there have been many, many frame terms used for leadership. Servant leadership, etc. Right? You've heard, we've all heard those particular phrases of different kinds of leadership. So I think wise leadership or wisdom and leadership is basically the second area. So you have to be global in your outlook. But I think you have to be wise in your interpretation of what it is that's going on. And there's a huge amount of work currently around wisdom, right? So there are scholars around the world, including within SPJMR,

[00:32:34] where we look at the best of wisdom traditions, you know, outside the world and within the Indic wisdom traditions. We have tried to distill these into various, you know, pieces. And we're asking, are we teaching these principles? So one principle of wisdom that actually is more Eastern than it is Western is the idea of interconnectedness, right? That we're all part of the same whole. That what I do, what I think impacts what you do and what you might think. And that we live in a web of interconnectedness.

[00:33:02] This is very much an Eastern concept coming from our traditions. What does that mean for a manager? So if a manager in business school, A, learns to think about interconnectedness, cares about interconnectedness, and realizes his actions will have consequences, not just on himself or a small group of stakeholders, but a larger stakeholder. How would you go about inculcating this into a business school curriculum? One thing you would do, for example, is you would probably teach systems thinking and systems

[00:33:31] dynamics, which is something most Indian business schools do not teach. Systems thinking or systems dynamics, and systems dynamics is a far more mathematical, harder form of thinking of systems thinking. At MIT Sloan School, they do that. Many American business schools also don't do systems dynamics. But the essence of that, which is captured in systems thinking, is a way for MBA students to think about any problem situated in a much larger system context. So this is, again, and it helps you with your problem framing as well.

[00:34:01] Rather than saying solve this problem, you sort of say, where does this problem actually fit within the larger scheme of things? Is this really the most important problem to solve? Or are there actually other areas where you could intervene to create better results, as opposed to saying, I have a given problem I need to solve? So systems thinking is a wonderful, wonderful thing that I think all business schools need to be teaching. It teaches you this notion of interconnectedness, right?

[00:34:27] The fact that things are related to each other over four months in a visual fashion comes out. So it's not just some Sadhguru sitting and telling you that we're all one. You have realized that when you look at the retail environment, holy cow, you know, look at the number of interconnections between everybody within not just the retail space, but how it impacts, you know, business to business settings. So you begin with a B2C problem and then you realize it's just a portion of a much larger map.

[00:34:52] So systems thinking, I think, will teach you about interconnectedness and how to understand. And the second part is, so do you care? So you realize in that large system map, your actions might be creating negative influences elsewhere, which perhaps your business doesn't care about, right? That your company says that doesn't matter. That's a negative externality. I don't have to pay tax on it. I don't have to basically deal with it. It's somebody else's problem. Whatever negative thing I create, like CO2 emissions would be a classic example of a negative externality, right?

[00:35:22] Carbon dioxide emissions. I know unless you're taxed on it, you know, you don't really care, right? As a company. Now, as a manager, do you go in with the old mindset, right? Where you essentially say, hey, the Milton Friedman approach will say, I only need to maximize shareholder value. These negative externalities, you know, doesn't impact me. So what do I care? Or do you take the stakeholder capitalism view where you sort of say you really take a larger view of constituents and stakeholders? And in which case you do start caring about the negative externality.

[00:35:52] Or do you even take a more compassionate view and say, I'm not doing it just because of regulatory reasons. I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do. Now, in order to build that mindset, which I do think we need, you know, and I'm going to call that as part of the wisdom mindset, understanding interconnectedness and caring about the consequences of your action. How do you teach that? So at SPJMR, for example, we have specific courses, you know, that are attempting to connect students with realities that are very different than their own.

[00:36:21] Urban poverty, rural poverty, we immerse them into these environments at the expense of them doing business and industry things. And one would argue, you know, we are somewhat odd school in that manner. But the reason we're doing it is because we're trying to inculcate in our students the fact that don't you think you should care, right? Don't you think even if you join Asian Pains or Henderson, Leaver or McKinsey or whatever, you know, do great. But keep in mind that the purpose of business is to not just do business, right?

[00:36:49] The purpose of business is to make the world a better place in a profitable, sustainable manner. And there's no stress between these things. You know, you can't be sustainable, which means over a long period of time, do good things if you're not profitable. On the other hand, if your profit comes at the cost of sacrificing the future, you're not going to be profitable in the long term either, right? So there really is no conflict that people say, do I have to do well or do I have to do good? The answer is you can do both.

[00:37:15] These kinds of debates, these kinds of problems or these kinds of conversations business schools need to have. So they prepare the kinds of leaders who will go out into the workforce, have a global perspective as to what it is. How do we compete? How do we become the number one we, you know, deserve to be but need to work for? And how do we do it in a manner that's compassionate? How do we do it in a manner that's wise? You know, so I would sort of say these perhaps are the two globalization and wisdom might be

[00:37:43] the two things that we really do need to focus on in the next generation of leaders. Right. One of the things I'm constantly told is, you know, the lack of quality faculty in these schools. And this is across, which is also would be a problem faced by the top tier schools that you mentioned. First of all, how serious is this problem? And secondly, do you think greater collaboration with industry, greater industry involvement is the answer to that? The first part is, yes, there is a problem.

[00:38:12] Two, what you're suggesting, industry collaboration is a part of the solution, right? So let me just talk about both of those questions. Do we have a problem with not having enough faculty? If you look at 4,000 business schools, the answer is definitely yes. If you look at, and then again, the question is who are, who's the right faculty? So I'm going to break it into sort of the traditional faculty, you know, the, the PhD type folks, if you will, who are sort of professional academics, but focused on management as a discipline.

[00:38:40] A business school might have anywhere between, you know, 30, 40 faculty members, maybe 20, if it's really small, all the way to 100, 200, right? So if you do the mathematics and say, okay, 4,000 schools, you know, assume on average, 50 faculty members per school. That's a pretty big number, right? You know, you know, that's, you know, 4,000 times 50 is 200,000, right?

[00:39:05] So the point is, do you have actually that many qualified, you know, management PhDs or, you know, even sociology PhDs, psychology PhDs are fine, right? If they have actually the right mindset. And the answer is no. So do we have the ability to put, you know, more PhDs out? And I think most top business schools are increasing the number of students they have in their respective PhD programs.

[00:39:33] We have, we and other schools all have now a new executive PhD option that has been added for folks from industry, where hopefully they pick up the essence of academia, but don't lose the essence of who they are, which is practitioners with a lot of experience. That's a little bit of, you know, so that's a late stage PhD, if you will, to some degree. And this late stage PhD is being taken up by two kinds of people. It's being taken up by people who are currently teachers in business school,

[00:40:01] but who don't have a PhD, right? So they're trying to essentially get the PhD credential. And it's also being taken up by people who are genuinely in industry, right? And for whatever reason, at the age of 35, 40, 45, decide this is what they want to do. So the supply of PhDs is definitely increasing. Um, the quality of PhDs, because I do sit in all the PhD committees of our students or PhD candidates. I sit obviously on the selection committees of our incoming faculty.

[00:40:30] And we're typically within India looking at, uh, folks that have got PhDs out of, I am Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, typically, right? I mean, those are the ones we look at. Um, the caliber of these, uh, PhD candidates is definitely starting to approach world-class levels. You know, I did my PhD in the U S not that long ago. I was one of the late stage PhDs, if you will. Uh, and so I think I'm still, uh, qualified to benchmark the new generation of PhDs coming

[00:40:57] in Indian schools, top schools, and the ones that I'm familiar with. And, and the gap is definitely closing. So I think we are producing high quality, uh, PhDs, but the numbers are such that, you know, even if you have 15, 20 coming out per year from the top 50 schools, you know, that is a thousand, right? Versus the kinds of numbers I'm talking about. So therefore what you suggested is in fact, you know, a part of the solution, which is,

[00:41:23] I think from a business school, the only way you're actually going to, for the next five, 10 years, at least, right. As a PhD group arises, the only way you're going to basically be able to make it work is through the so-called professors of practice or visiting professors who come in. And the difference really is a professor of practice, uh, which is now a designation that our accreditation agencies are encouraging, which is very good. Uh, a professor of practice is a professional who is on a contract with the university, uh, for one to three years.

[00:41:52] The idea is they're bringing some unique industry expertise in, uh, into the teaching mission of that particular university, right? They're not expected to contribute to the research mission of the university. They contribute to the teaching mission of the university. I think it's a very good scheme. One could argue, you know, the fact that you're making it a one to three year contract automatically means that the only ones who consider it are those that are nearing superannuation, right? You know, and, and, and, you know, yes, while they have a whole bunch of experience, there

[00:42:18] may be certain areas where you might actually prefer a more contemporary, um, you know, practitioner. So there is that one problem, I think, with a professor of practice, it does allow you to bring folks in. The other way universities often get industry folks in is through a, uh, you know, through visiting, uh, positions like you, like you have ush, right? You know, you go into a classroom, you might be responsible for a whole course, uh, or you're responsible for co-teaching a couple of the sessions.

[00:42:44] Um, either way, uh, I think these are good things for industry people who are comfortable, um, talking about and sharing their experiences and, and, and instructing students. It's a very good thing for folks to do. The question is, if you're in the bottom half of these schools, do you have access to these industry people, right? See, it's easy for me to pick up the phone and call our alumni to come into class to, you know, discuss something. Um, you know, going down the line, I might basically be doing a class on branding.

[00:43:11] Ashraf, you know, my marketing prof might call you and say, Hey, Ashraf, come in for a session. Um, you know, and we do that with, you know, you know, companies all the time. But if you're in the bottom half, your alumni base is probably not that strong yet. Um, they may not be local to the small town that you happen to be operating out of. How do you basically bring your own alumni who are successful or people who are not your alumni, but who want to help in, if you happen to be in some remote village in, in, in

[00:43:38] Tamil Nadu and you're running a MBA program over there, that I think is, is a bit of a problem. So we need a larger nation nationwide solution, I think for this, and I'll give a shout out to TCS here that I think is trying to solve this particular problem. And I hope, I hope they do. So, you know, as TCS had reached out to a bunch of business schools talking about this particular problem and their idea is some sort of a talent marketplace, you know, of universities

[00:44:06] that are looking for visiting faculty around specific areas and industry people who are willing to contribute, uh, with their limitations and their restrictions and parameters, if you will, to then see if in fact, the lower tier of business schools actually have access to a larger pool of industry people that today they don't have visibility to, you know, for example, maybe you want to go to Rameshwaram Ashraf, but perhaps a business school in Rameshwaram, you know, and you are in touch with each other.

[00:44:34] And then there is a vacation that you take towards Rameshwaram and you go in and you teach a week's worth of classes there and you teach them brand strategy as an example, you know, from a practitioner's point of view. So I think this sort of a platform, um, you know, that could be put together in this case, TCS is looking to do it. Uh, there is a wonderful national initiative called Honest, O-N-E-S-T. And we may have all heard about ONDC, which is trying to create open commerce, if you will.

[00:45:02] So Honest, again, uses the same approach or the same protocols, which are called the Beckham protocols, which interestingly, that organization is led by an SPJMR alum. So shout out to him. Um, so the Beckham protocols are the basis of this Honest network, where the idea is that people who have the ability to provide education of some sort and people who want to receive it are on a network that is like a marketplace. Um, TCS may be using Honest, maybe not.

[00:45:29] I don't know, but what they're trying to do is fundamentally a similar thing, right? Trying to be the lead aggregator of this network. I really don't know how else you fix this problem, Ashraf, because that number gap is so huge and access in the bottom of the pyramid towards these industry professionals is not strong. That needs to be fixed. I think that is a short-term fix or a medium-term fix that could be done because it is technology based, right? And things can happen fast. The first one, which is increasing the supply of quality PhDs will take some time to play

[00:45:59] out. Absolutely. That's right. That, uh, TCS model made me think of the line as like an Uber for faculty. But, uh, but hopefully without the four star, five star ratings and all that, I think there are some things that have to be kept sacrosanct from consumer ratings. At least I didn't say Tinder for faculty. No, you would start getting younger faculty. Who knows? That might be a feature the platform needs to offer too.

[00:46:27] But, uh, you know, uh, also the, the way MBA programs are structured. Now there has been a lot of talk about shifting to shorter duration and modular programs, delivering, delivering specific capabilities. Uh, two years MBAs, two year MBAs, it is often said will give way to model modular 15 month or one year programs. And market demand is likely to increase for these shorter programs that provide super specialized certifications. What's your view of that debate?

[00:46:57] I, I actually agree with you, Ashraf. I think the two year MBA serves a certain niche. I don't think that niche goes away, right? It serves a niche as a feeder program, you know, to large, you know, to many, many companies, right? So if you're a consulting company like Accenture, um, you know, you go to these MBA schools because, you know, you want them in large numbers, right? And you have a certain expectation that the MBA school has done the job that the Infosys

[00:47:25] training school would have done if you think about it. Right. And so in the top 50 business schools, I don't see the demand for the two year MBA actually reducing because you do need those graduates to take the management trainee programs and the management training positions at Mahindra, Tata Sons, at McKinsey, at Accenture, uh, at Deutsche Bank, et cetera, et cetera. So these are all necessary. A two year MBA program in the bottom half of the pyramid, I think is actually not a necessarily

[00:47:53] a good thing, uh, because here's where the return on investment, um, you know, it becomes an issue running a two year MBA program of sufficient quality requires you to charge a certain amount of tuition. You know, faculty are not free. I mean, they may be willing to work for less than what the private sector pays, but you know, you have infrastructure, you have faculty, you have other costs in delivering education that requires a certain amount of tuition fee from the incoming students, right? In order for the business to be viable.

[00:48:21] And that incoming tuition fee, the student needs to feel that their outgoing placement, uh, salaries justify whatever loans they took or however, or however they raise the money. That equation of that return on investment works in the top 50 business schools. It does not work below that. And so you've got a situation where not only is the quality of education, maybe suspect in the bottom half of the pyramid, the ROI is definitely not there as well. And so one would ask whether in fact the world needs or India needs, you know, 4,000 business

[00:48:51] schools offering two year programs. It may not, right? It may need much fewer than that, in my opinion. Um, they're also seeing, you know, we, we, there are these one year programs that exist as well in India, right? That I am run, we run and so forth. And they are meant for folks who are more five years in seven years into their careers who then take a year to come in and do an MBA. This by the way is a typical American model, right? American business schools do not take young MBAs the way we do.

[00:49:18] Uh, you know, the typical MBA here for the two year program, 30% of them are coming straight out of their undergraduate. So they're 21 years old, have never worked, you know, have held a real job or they have two years and three years work experience. And it's very cute when you ask them, so how much work experience do you have? And they'll say 2.4. And I'll say, you know, that sounds like a kid who says I'm four and a half years old, right? You know, when you become 40, you don't say I'm 40 and a half. You just say I'm 40, right? So, so the point is, you know, we take these young folks.

[00:49:47] So that's the two year MBA. So there is an experiment that's been running in India now for a while about this one year MBA. And this is an interesting experiment, right? How many people are willing to forego where they are in their lives? You know, for a whole year without income, go back into campus and do a one year program. And the number of applicants for this particular class of programs, even within the IAMs or within SPJMR and so forth is much fewer than the number of applicants you have for that two year program.

[00:50:13] So the two year program will basically have, you know, you will have basically 20 applicants for every one applicant that you end up picking, right? So that's kind of the kind of demand you have. For the one year program, which is meant for more seasoned people, you might have five applicants for every person that you pick. So it's telling you right up front that this notion of taking time off and spending two years or one year on campus, once you're past a certain age, may not be working as well as we would hope.

[00:50:43] Like in America, it works very well there. It doesn't work well here. So now you have to look at alternate forms of education, right? Either your company sponsors you. And so therefore we run an executive management program that's company sponsored where they are working with a company, but they come in for 10 days every quarter on campus. So they get the best of both worlds and then they take their learnings back into their business. And the faculty here work, in fact, with the sponsoring managers. So the projects they're working on are actually very relevant to what their day job happens to be.

[00:51:12] I think that's a wonderful format, you know, that kind of an executive MBA. So it still might take two years. Our executive MBA takes 21 months, but it consists of, you know, 250 people a year who are company sponsored coming in and spending 10 days every quarter on campus with stuff in between that is remote, right? So that's one particular format. So it's still long form, but it's one where you continue working. Then you have the weekend format, which we have in Mumbai, for example, we have a Friday,

[00:51:40] Saturday MBA program for working professionals, people with 10, 15 years experience. They're not looking at us for placements and so on. They're looking at it because it is relevant to whatever it is their plans happen to be. And that's a two-year program as well. But it's a two-year program delivered over the weekends that doesn't necessarily require them to leave their jobs, right? So that's a common thread between them. You also have these increasing short form programs, right? So for example, we're looking at one on AI and business, right? So AI and business would be a six, seven-month kind of a program that you run.

[00:52:10] My wife recently did a program online, which was about, you know, managing the non-profit sector, again, at one of the IAMs. And that was essentially a nine-month program done, you know, for three hours every weekend done remotely in their case. So these kinds of formats will come about where you have shorter form. But again, the main common theme across all these is you stay in your current job or you continue your professional careers and you absorb the information that you need.

[00:52:39] And it could be very small size. It could be a three-month effort. You're trying to understand fintech because maybe you're working in a bank. You're looking at a new job in a new division, you know, within HDFC, where it is necessary to understand fintech well. And you go in and you do a three-month certificate program on fintech, you know, from us or from anybody else. So that form of education, I absolutely think is a future. The two-year form, I think, does survive, but I think it survives with smaller numbers

[00:53:07] and probably concentrated in the best schools. Right. Now, one of the major criticisms of these schools is that they're very expensive. Which leaves out very large chunks of the population. They're also urban-centric, which you also mentioned, which leaves out rural students. So on the one hand, you have the costs associated with quality education, which you detailed, but also the lack of inclusiveness that is a problem. Now, how do you bridge this gap?

[00:53:31] See, I think one of the good things, many good things, but one of the good things about India is sort of it's very meritocratic in many ways. Right. So if you are the poorest students. So if I were to take the students that come into SPJMR, and again, I'm looking at it from an inclusiveness point of view. Now, where do they come from? Right now, we might be urban and we might be in Mumbai, but I'm looking at sort of the, you know, we take in 360 students a year into our two-year program. Right.

[00:53:59] So if I, and I know what their profiles are and such, and I'll share that with you. These are coming from 21, 22 states, right? At any given year's batch will have people from around the country. So you're getting geographic diversity that way. You are basically getting economic diversity for sure, because one of the questions we ask is the CTC of the parents, you know, just to understand what kind of a socioeconomic status that particular applicant might belong to.

[00:54:28] And I will tell you in almost every case, the student who is graduating from SPJMR is going to make more on day one after SPJMR than their mom or dad did at that moment, right? Or does at that moment. So it tells you that, you know, these are not, you know, kids coming from, you know, middle upper middle class families, right? You know, the majority of our students, I would say are coming from middle class, many, many from lower middle class. I'm actually surprised to see the CTCs of some of the parents, right?

[00:54:57] Sort of saying, wow, you know, this is impressive that this participant has done what they have with the limited resources that they had. So I think we do have, and other business schools as well, you know, I'm not taking SPJMR credit here. The XLRI, you know, wonderful institution, MDI. So these are all our private competitive peers, right? But they're also friends of mine, the directors and deans who run those, the IMs. I think we all do a good job of having economic inclusiveness.

[00:55:23] And the reason why it doesn't matter is in the top 50 schools, Ashraf, the banks know that these students are going to make a salary day one after the club, you know, after they graduate. And so getting loans is no problem at all. If you're in these top 50 schools, which is the reason why I'm saying the two-year program is a viable business model, including for social inclusiveness, including for bringing rurals in because the financing is available to support it. So the education cannot be made any cheaper, right?

[00:55:53] There is no way we or MDI or XLRI could drop our fees and be viable. But yet the fees, yes, they're hard. Not one student in any of the top 50 business schools will have any problem getting a loan, you know, from any of the institutions on favorable terms that they can pay off in four years, five years, six years, whatever it might take. So that's sort of the reason also why... Now, this whole thing doesn't work if you're in the 3,000th ranked business school, right?

[00:56:20] The 3,000th ranked business school, yes, might pay their faculty less, but that also results in poorer quality faculty. So it becomes a vicious cycle and the students aren't eligible for loans because they're not going to make enough money. So I do think you have an economic viability problem in the bottom half of the pyramid. You do not have an inclusiveness problem in the top part of the pyramid because of the fact that I think India has generally been a meritocratic system. So Varun, tell us a little bit about SPJIMR. Okay.

[00:56:49] It's an interesting institution. You know, I am honored to have, you know, the opportunity to lead it as its dean. It's talk a little bit about its history and perhaps maybe the changes and the new direction that we're taking it in. SPJIMR, when it started in the 80s, took a very different view. You know, the initial, one of the early deans was a talented individual. You know, he was willing to challenge convention, which I hope I also do. Right.

[00:57:19] So in that sense, you know, while we might have been very different people, I hope I share that particular attribute with that particular dean. But what he did do was he basically made it a point that this business school would be different from other business schools. And it didn't matter, you know, what the consequences were, right? He had a vision that business should serve a societal good. And so from day one, you know, you've had this notion of social service as a part of business school education.

[00:57:45] He also, because of his leanings, believed that spirituality or what I'm calling wisdom, right, played an important role in a person's development. So some of these things we were talking about were things that were sort of baked in, right? The caring about society and potentially applying some lens that is not a classic management lens were things that this dean, Dean Srikant, basically brought in, you know, to the founding ethos of SPJMR.

[00:58:12] And so SPJMR then grew in that manner, adding on rural internships, creating a program, which is a wonderful program called Abhudeh, which essentially immerses our students in with, you know, the K-ward, Andheri K-ward's BMC schools, many of whose children live in, you know, Jopat Patis or houses that are being reclaimed and rebuilt and so forth. So that was the founding ethos. If you will, the reason why I found it interesting was when I was speaking with sort of the chair

[00:58:39] person of SPJMR, who's Mr. Deepak Parekh of HDFC, we talked about where next? Is it enough to be a good person or do you really need to be more than a good person in order to achieve things? And so I joined SPJMR really with a mission from the board to bring innovation into the pursuit of societal benefits, right? And so if you go onto the SPJMR website, you'll see hashtag innovation for societal benefit. And that fundamentally is the ethos of SPJMR now.

[00:59:09] So I've tried to build on a strong foundation laid by my predecessors and brought in what I feel is important, right? Which is the ability to be innovative. And I think hopefully that came in when I talked about unstructured problems and problem framing and so on. Those are my passions that I've tried to bring in and take my faculty along as we try and create both a, you know, an educational package, but also our research that is really focused around innovation for society. But we call it wise innovation.

[00:59:36] And you heard me use the word wisdom a few times because I do believe to do innovation for societal benefit, these wisdom principles we have, the interconnectedness, the caring, the ability to absorb knowledge from multiple places. All of these, I think, are in fact the secret sauce that will allow the right kind of innovation to happen to produce the right kind of outcome, which is broad societal benefit. So that's the organization or the, you know, institution I'm leading. We have done well over the last three years.

[01:00:04] You know, if you care about the rankings and we sometimes care about it, sometimes we don't. In the Financial Times ranking, we are ranked number one in India, number 35 globally. And, you know, we're proud to be India's standard bearer here. And in a field, by the way, that includes my friends from the IIMs and so forth, right? Generally, the India Today, Business Today kinds of rankings will position us in very favorable light as well. But I'd like to think that we are trying to create a business school that matches the needs of the future.

[01:00:32] It is challenging because the demographic, student demographic is changing and it is a challenge. It's just not me as an old fart here, Ashraf. You know, I guess all the old farts that basically are at the IIMs and MDI, you know, the people I meet at our Dean Director kinds of things, talk about the same thing, you know, the lack of curiosity, the lack of drive and so forth. So this is something we have to solve outside the business school context. I don't think it's an MBA problem. I think it's a larger problem. So those are the challenges. But, you know, you do what you can do, right?

[01:01:02] And then the domain you have is what you have. And the new trends you have talked about, the bite-sized education, all of those are absolutely valid. So those are all the things that basically are reshaping SPJMR. I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to lead it in these times. I just want to point out that not all old farts join educational institutions. Some of them start podcasts. It's just delivered in a different bite-sized manner.

[01:01:30] Yours is a one-hour bite-sized manner. But, Varun, that actually is a good time to, you know, ask you, and this is a question I ask all my guests at the end of the show. Why do you do this work? You know, I think we all seek meaning or purpose, right? And one of the advantages of being on the second half of your career, if you will, is you have a chance to reflect on all the things you missed in the first half of the career, right? And you have a chance to make things right.

[01:01:58] And therefore, you know, I am a little harsh when I look at a 25-year-old and say, how come they're missing all these things? Because I was missing all those things too, right? I mean, to some degree. I wish I'd known what was required. And so, therefore, I'd jump in and try and, you know, hopefully fix the situation. But let's think, why do I do what I do, right? The first half of my career was good. I had a wonderful first innings, if you will, in the U.S. I'm proud of, you know, the things I was able to contribute professionally. And it was a lot of fun. But I think a couple of things happened.

[01:02:27] One, we all want more impact and purpose and meaning in life. Hopefully leave behind things that are a little more sustaining. And one of the problems, of course, in Silicon Valley is all the products you do, you know, three, four years later, they're obsolete, right? So, in a sense, I'd be hard-pressed to point to products that I worked on that I was so proud of that are still in existence. You know, I'll have to say that set the stage for something else, which set the stage for something else, right? In contrast, my father was a civil engineer for the Atomic Energy Department in India.

[01:02:56] And I look at the things he built and left behind, you know, the atomic projects, the Indira Gandhi Research Center in Kalpakam near Chennai. The Kakrapa nuclear projects and the entire township. He was a chief engineer of that. So, you know, you have your father envy, right? You look at your dad and say, man, he left behind things that are going to last. What have I left behind? And so then you sort of say, okay, you know, I do have a second innings, right? You know, and some people should bat better in the second innings than the first innings. What do I want to do in my second innings?

[01:03:24] My second innings, I said, I'm going to focus on hopefully leaving some sort of a lasting impact. But knowing what I know, you know, could it be through influencing others? Could it be through maybe having an army of people, you know, that think in a positive way? So it's not just me trying to make a difference. It's a bunch of people trying to make a difference. And teaching is a wonderful way to do that. You know, if you do connect with who it is you're trying to teach and maybe 10% of your students get why you're doing what you're doing and it inspires them in some manner to do the right thing.

[01:03:54] So I think it's probably, you know, the desperate middle-aged search for meaning, Ashraf, right? You know, that we should all have a purpose in life. And I'm hoping my purpose in life is fulfilled through leading SPJMR, influencing students and creating some good research that makes the world a better place in however small a way. Desperate middle-aged leanings. Some of us just buy motorcycles. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you. Thank you, Ashraf. It was a fun conversation.

[01:04:24] Thank you so much. All Indians matter.