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Dean’s Address at the Graduation Ceremony of the Class of 2008


Distinguished Guests, Students of the Class of 2008, parents and family members of the Graduating Class, members of the ISB Board, the media, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the ISB’s seventh Graduation Ceremony. At the outset, I would like to welcome our Chief Guest, Mr K P Singh, Chairman of the Board, DLF Limited.

Mr Singh has had a long and distinguished career, reflected in the establishment of India’s largest real estate company - DLF. Under his leadership DLF Limited, has established an unrivalled position in the real estate industry with an enviable portfolio in terms of scale of delivery, range of products and development potential. He has conceived and pioneered initiatives, which are today, recognised as benchmarks in the real estate sector. A shining example of this is the sprawling DLF City in Gurgaon, a 3,000 acre master piece in township development in the NCR region.

Mr Singh has played a significant role in mobilising public-private partnerships with the objective of ‘Building India’ and taking it to a new level of realisation. He has involved the farmer community as ‘partners in progress’ in urban development, he has actively pursued land reforms to open up the housing and construction sector, and has made efforts to liberalise FDI into the real estate sector.

After his graduation in science, Mr. Singh pursued Aeronautical Engineering in UK, and was subsequently selected to the Indian Army by the British Officers Services Selection Board, UK. He was commissioned into the renowned cavalry regiment of ‘The Deccan Horse’ of the Indian Army. In 1960, he joined American Universal Electric Company and soon after its merger with DLF Universal Limited in 1979, he took over as the Managing Director of this new company.

Mr Singh is presently the Honorary Consul General of the Principality of Monaco and has occupied prestigious positions in India such as the President of ASSOCHAM (Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India), President of the PHD Chambers of Commerce & Industry, Director of Central Board of Reserve Bank of India, member of General Electric's National Advisory Board. He is also associated with various educational and charitable trusts.

I welcome you Sir, as the Chief Guest of today’s occasion.

I would also like to welcome our Chairman, Rajat Gupta, and Members of the ISB Board who have come down especially to be with us today. Thank you all for coming.

I would like extend a hearty welcome to Dean Thomas Robertson of The Wharton School who has flown in especially for this occasion. Our Area leaders, Professors Jagmohan Raju, Sri Sridharan, and Madan Pillutla are here. I would like to welcome them as well.

A hearty welcome to all the students, families, faculty, staff, media and members of the Hyderabad community.

It is a very special moment for us with 421 students of the Class of 2008 graduating today. The students at the ISB have a very pivotal role to play in the progress of the school and the Class of 2008 have shouldered their responsibility in an excellent manner and set some high standards for the future classes to emulate. I would like to highlight some of the achievements of the last academic year.



FT 20 RANKING

The latest list of the 100 top Global MBAs in the world released by The Financial Times today ranks ISB at Twenty (20), making it perhaps the youngest institution ever to be ranked among the top business schools in the world. The fact that we have been ranked 20th in the first time we have participated in rankings, makes this announcement so much more gratifying.

We set out in 2001 with a vision to be an internationally top-ranked, research driven and independent management institution that grooms future leaders for India and the world. It is therefore a great moment for us, as it marks the accomplishment of an important part of the vision that guides and inspires every action that we take.

Each one of you has played a critical part in scripting this success. The Board of the ISB for their vision and support, Area Leaders, for their effort in faculty recruitment, staffing of PGP courses, curriculum development which has played a critical part in scripting this success, our faculty for their research work and publishing in top tier journals and teaching our alumni, especially of the early classes who had taken a great leap of faith by investing their careers in a young school, our students, who are all successful professionals today, our staff, who are passionately committed to excellence, and our families for making the ISB such a vibrant community that it is, our donors for their support to this cause and the Hyderabad community who have made us so much a part of their lives. I thank you all for your invaluable contributions, and look forward to your continued support and commitment towards strengthening this great institution.


CURRICULUM

Our focus at the ISB has been to offer a curriculum that is in tune with the fast changing global business trends and this has been one of our significant strengths. Our students benefit from this exposure and the industry values this a lot. Some of the notable new courses offered to the students this year include Mobile Phone and M-Commerce, Power and Politics, International and Cross Cultural Management, Marketing Models.

The Curriculum Review Committee, chaired by Professor Sanjay Kallapur has released the draft of their recommendations which has been reviewed by faculty, area leaders and others. We will announce the implementation details soon.

ISB continues to set high standards in the use of technology to aid teaching.


EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES

The number of exchange agreements with B-schools worldwide now stands at 34 Schools. Not only has this been a very fast ramp up of exchange programmes at the post graduate level, but also speaks of the diversity and quality of the schools. It gives me pleasure in mentioning here that we played host to 43 students of 10 nationalities who visited us on student exchange programmes this year. Similarly 20 of our students went to 9 schools on exchange. Through the exchange programmes we have endeavoured to provide ISB students with global exposure and broaden their perspectives to suit the present global business requirements.


STUDY TOURS

As a part of international study tours, this year we hosted 120 students from 6 schools, for duration of one to three weeks each. We received excellent feedback from the study tour participants; they were highly appreciative of the facilities and intellectual capabilities of ISB faculty and students. Some of the schools like Bocconi from Italy have chosen ISB to host their study tour for the 4th time in succession. Study tours have also been an excellent platform to showcase ISB to vast number of undergraduate and graduate business students across the world.


PGP PROJECTS

The Experiential Learning Programme, offers our student teams to solve live problems from the various sectors of the economy. This year we had 69 projects from various sectors such as Government, IT, Software services, Infrastructure and real estate, Banking and finance, Consumer goods, Healthcare, Education and Manufacturing. The areas of focus of these studies were market entry strategies, positioning strategies, growth strategies, financial modelling, and talent management. The feedback from the clients has been excellent, pointing out the innovative thinking, strength of analysis, and practicality of suggestions and recommendations. Recommendations from two such projects carried out for the Government of Andhra Pradesh have been accepted in to-to and the AP Government has initiated action to implement them.

We initiated a new Project called COGENT (Corporate Growth through Entrepreneurial Teams) to help the corporate world to recruit ISB students as complete teams to launch new, in-house, entrepreneurial businesses units,. This year one IT company recruited a student team for this purpose and will be giving students equity stakes in the project along with salaries.

Another initiative we have launched this year is a Student Incubation Project, to help ISB alumni and student teams to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. One of the very reputed early-stage VC, is instituting entrepreneurship fellowship for two teams this year along with mentoring support for a period of 10 months. This will allow these students to make their project, investor-ready and they will have access to all the resources of the ISB and the VC partner.
 

EVENTS

Events at the ISB serve multi purpose objectives. The students augment their class room learning with several learning events outside the classroom. The various student clubs organised events like the Healthcare Summit, Ikshaa – Marketing Summit, Capital Markets Conference, Social Responsibility Conclave hosted by the Net Impact Club, Media Conclave, several knowledge sharing sessions, workshops and interactive sessions with practitioners. These events serve as a platform for the students to interact intimately with industry leaders, and academicians.

The students successfully organised the ISB Leadership Summit, which has now become an annual tradition for the School. The theme this year was ‘India - Fostering Sustainable, Inclusive Growth’. Over 30 top business leaders, academicians and leaders of civil society attended the event and shared their insights with the Class of 2008.


AWARDS

Our students participated in several inter b-school events at national and international levels. To name a few are:

• First and Second prize at the IIMB Vista Manifestations 2007 by Vijay Arimbur Madham, Shikha Khandelwal, Rahul Mishra, Neha Kalra and Pankaj Gupta

• Second Prize at IIT Bombay by Arun Patabhiraman Kumar, Jayanth Ganapathy, Srinath Rajaram and Venkatraman RM.

• Fourth Prize at IIM-A by Pankaj Singh, Shashank Dubey and Sasi S

• First Prize at ET Business Quiz Contest by Viswanath Chavali and Chitra Raghunath

Our students have excelled at several business plan competitions,

• Second Prize at IIT Bombay by Sanjna Rao, Nirman Shetty R, and Pradeep Machineni,

• Second Prize at IIM Calcutta by Lalit Kumar and Puneet Arora

• First Prize at FMS by Amit Kapur, Shallabh Pal, Ishit Pilani and Shruti Dhanda

• First prize at ISB - DST Metamorphosis by Dr. Kiran M. Shete, Satish Kashyap and Hardik Manek

• Placed 4th out of 400 entries at the Cognizant Board Room B-Plan Competition by Vinod Chathlani, Mohit Sharma, Rao Korupolu and Anandram Narasimhan

At a global level our students achieved no less.

• First Prize at Asia Moot Corp by Sanjna Rao and Pradeep Machineni and representing Asia at the Global Moot Corp

• Second Prize at Darden Business School Innovation Challenge by Pushkar Jain, Prashant Goel, Nishant Pandey, Meghna Rao and Sushant Bhansali.

• Asia Round finalist at Global Social Venture Competition – by Chandan Panda, Amit Bajaj Dinesh, Tina Arora and Aditya Bhalla

• Second Prize at Bangkok Business Challenge by Sanjna Rao, Nirman Shetty R and Pradeep Machineni

• One team selected for finals at HKUST B-Plan Competition under way by Sanjna Rao and Pradeep Machineni

I congratulate each one of you for your efforts and success.

The ISB Young Leaders and the ISB Torch Bearers Awardees symbolise the extraordinary ability, leadership, commitment and quality of participation of the PGP students in the ISB campus life. The inaugural Rajat Gupta Award for Excellence in Leadership is being awarded to Manik Gupta, the President of the GSB. I congratulate each one of the awardees for a well deserved recognition.


PLACEMENTS

Placements 2008 have been truly global at the ISB with several leading and niche international companies visiting the campus. The number of international companies visiting the ISB has doubled this year establishing the fact that the ISB has indeed become a talent pool for the world. 41 new international companies visited the ISB campus for the first time. The 111 international offers are spread across 23 cities across USA, Europe, Middle East, and the Asia Pacific. The offers encompass a wide range of functions and industries such as consulting, manufacturing, real estate, IT, and others.

I would like to thank our friends in the industry for their continued association with the School.

This year we decided to take a stand on not revealing the highest CTC received by a student. Both the student body and we felt that the average salary of the entire class is the true representation of a Class’s performance in placements and that sharing the highest salary actually distorts the perception of young aspirants who want to join the ISB, besides putting a lot of pressure on students during placements. I want to thank members of the media who have all supported us through this decision.


ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Well known painter Julius Mcawan was the Artist-in-Residence this year. The purpose of this programme is to stimulate creativity in the students and provide them a holistic learning experience. His provoking work of art adorns the walls in the Khemka Auditorium at the ISB. We also invited noted theatre personality and film maker, Kalpana Lajmi and actor, Soni Razdan to address the ISB community on art and creativity.


SFA

The Spouse and Family Association of the class of 2008 continued the rich tradition of being the torch bearers of a vibrant community life on campus. Their enthusiastic celebrations of events like, Spice Nite, Drizzle, Children’s Day, Diwali, Karvachauth, Pottery making, dance classes, Origami workshop, cookery classes brought the entire ISB community together as a family. The ISB Juniors, as the children on campus are affectionately called, are a bundle of joy. During the course of this year about 10 students were blessed with babies. I am happy to say that the families at the ISB enrich our academic lives in innumerable ways.


CENTRE FOR EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

The Centre for Executive Education continues with its dominant position in the Indian market. Working towards its mission of providing world class education to different audience segments, it deployed innovative education solutions for educators, doctors, sports managers, entrepreneurs, family business owners, and other national and international private and public sector corporations. As compared to 48 programmes and 1500 participants in the previous year, CEE offered 75 programmes which saw the participation of 2350 managers from across various sectors. We are happy to be the leading executive education provider in the country and amongst the top 3 in Asia.


FACULTY

We have been able to make steady progress in recruiting resident faculty. Our permanent faculty figure stands at 25. Professor Dishan Kamdar was promoted as an Associate Professor with tenure. Professor Kamdar’s promotion assumes special significance for ISB because he is the first person to be promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor at ISB. Professors Rajesh Chakrabarti, Sumit Kunnumkal, Nishtha Langer, Gireesh Shrimali and Shamika Ravi have joined us in the rank of Assistant Professors. Professor Reuben Abraham joined us as a Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab India. Professor S Ramnarayan joined us as a Clinical Professor, while Professor Prasad Kaipa joined us as the Executive Director of the Centre for Leadership, Innovation and Change. We have 6 faculty members joining us over the next 5 months. Needless to say, our faculty bring with them a deep passion and commitment to research. Our recent faculty achievements and publications in top ranked journals are testimony to this fact.

ISB organised 35 faculty research seminars and 24 Brown Bag seminars. These are now a regular feature of the academic life on campus, facilitating very enriching discussions.

Professors Ravi Bapna, Rajesh Chakrabarti, Sanjay Kallapur and N Viswanadham have been invited to Editorial positions of top journals. Our faculty members continue to publish in international top tier journals. Editorship appointments and publications enhance the academic visibility of the school greatly.

We have also been host to 9 Visiting Scholars in the past one year, who have chosen to spend their sabbatical period at ISB, engaging in productive research projects. For the year 2008 – 09, we have 7 long term visitors scheduled to make ISB their home during this period.

Under the aegis of the Thomas Schmidheiny Chair of Family Business and Wealth Management, ISB recently organized the First Asian Invitational Family Business Conference. The First Asian Invitational Conference held during February 1-3, 2008 was a great success with more than 250 delegates attending. ISB board members Adi Godrej, Sunil Kant Munjal, Mallika Srinivasan, were among the prominent speakers. Professor Ramachandran who is currently the Thomas Schmidheiny Fellow and MV Subbiah, ex - chairman, Murugappa group offered a PGP course on family business. Other activities in this area included research on Governance, Professionalisation and Succession Challenges in family business.

The Indian School of Business (ISB), hosted the first Accounting Research Conference, between December 17 –19, 2007, on the ISB campus. The theme of the Conference was 'Need for Accounting Research in India and Asia’. The Conference saw presentation of papers from top researchers in Asia and North America.


CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE

CLIC

This year we launched a new Centre of Excellence for Leadership, Innovation, and Change (CLIC). This is the fifth centre to be established at the ISB. The CLIC has developed a unique ‘Integral Approach’ that is based on the integration of knowledge from wisdom traditions, scientific research, and contemporary management practices. This approach will refine the leadership personality by combining leadership, change, and innovation with the body, heart, and head. The CLIC will focus on developing best practices to groom Indian talent for global leadership. It will specialise in researching and developing models and tools to understand and influence the ‘Indian mindset’.

The CLIC will work closely with companies, Government, Educational Institutions and NGO’s in the areas of change management and innovation. It will execute applied research projects, develop special programmes, projects to increase organisational effectiveness, and create new repositories of knowledge. In addition to this, the Centre will also introduce new elective courses in the Post Graduate Programme and Executive Education courses at the ISB and conduct joint certificate courses in association with industry.

The Centre aspires to grow into an International Centre for developing global leaders by replicating the success of the Indian model in other emerging economies with the support of traditions specific to their countries.

WCED

The Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development continues to promote entrepreneurship ecosystem in this country. The third year of the TiE – ISB Connect, a platform which brings together entrepreneurs and venture capitalists was very well received and it was a grand success. As part of the Indu Chair on Real Estate and Urban Studies, a panel discussion on “Indian Real Estate Scenario – Bringing up to Date” was organised jointly with Ernst & Young, along with a special address by Prof. Joseph Gyourko, Director of Zell-Lurie Real Estate Centre, Wharton Business School, and University of Pennsylvania. The discussion brought together thought leaders in the field of Real Estate in India. K-Hub is a business accelerator, providing mentoring and a range of related services that give the client enterprises a strong competitive advantage over other start-ups so that they will be well-positioned to achieve success. The ISB K-Hub has been supported by the Government of Andhra Pradesh to help promote the growth of high technology ventures in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The Centre organised Metamorphosis, a business model and application discovery contest. The contest was organised by the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club (EVC) in partnership with the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. It was a vibrant platform which brought together grass-root innovators, and B-School students, where the innovators were offered concrete solutions on how to take ahead their innovation towards successful commercial exploitation. The Asia leg of the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC), organised by WCED saw participation from 50 business schools in 5 Asian countries. 13 teams were short listed for Asia Finals and 2 teams have been selected for Global finals. WCED also has initiated work in the Base of Pyramid Learning Lab (BoP) and has undertaken some very interesting and socially relevant projects. Professor Reuben Abraham has joined as Assistant Professor and heading the BoP Lab. As Director, he will be Advisor to an SME fund that is being set up with the investments of Google, Soros Foundation & Omidyar Foundation.



CAF

2007-8 has been another year of accomplishments for CAF. I will mention some major accomplishments. CAF held the first tri-continental finance research conference in partnership with Wharton Financial Institutions Centre (FIC) and Swedish Institute for Financial Research (SIFR) in April 2007 at Wharton. CAF signed a contract with Nomura Institute for Capital Market Research (NICMR), Tokyo, to bring out the first authoritative handbook on Indian capital markets. The book will be published in early 2009. Until now, NICMR has partnered only with Brookings Institution in DC, a highly regarded think-tank in economics and public policy. CAF received a grant form Citi Foundation to cover its operating expenses for the next three years, the first such grant by the foundation to a research unit at an academic institution in Asia. We are thankful to Citi Foundation for their continued support. CAF research findings were presented at the most prestigious finance research forums in the world, including Western Finance Association and American Finance Association. One of the junior researchers of CAF was selected for a top tier finance Ph.D. programme.

GLAMS

The Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies had a very productive research year. The Project on Supply Chain Risk funded by Indian Science Laboratory, General Motor has been completed. IBM has signed Open Collaborative Research (OCR) agreement with GLAMS. IBM has given an initial grant to GLAMS to work on the role of social networks in achieving business competitiveness. The Website Kisanbandhu.com is operational and gives very useful information to the stake holders. GLAMS jointly with CEE has signed an MOU with Automobile Components Manufacturing Association (ACMA) to conduct executive education programmes for CEO’s and Senior Management of its member companies. GLAMS also hosted the Global Supply Chain Summit and RFID Workshop during September, 2007 which was very well received by academia and industry.

CITNE

The Centre for IT and the Networked Economy’s commitment to excellence was recognized and rewarded by a generous pledge of Rs 35 crores by Hyderabad based serial entrepreneur and now serial philanthropist, Srini Raju. CITNE’s research and education impacts CIOs to middle managers to people at the base of the pyramid. , CITNE research is characterized as being rigorous and relevant with projects and training related to -

• creating and appropriating above average value from IT investments,

• understanding the productivity impact of close to a billion dollars the Indian IT industry spends on competency development

• estimating the economic impact of mobile telephony in rural India.

CITNE faculty in the past year have had multiple publications in top-tier peer reviewed journals such as Information Systems Research and INFORMS Journal on Computing. On the education front CITNE is actively developing emerging market specific case studies and continues to push the frontiers of where technology meets business. In a collaborative programme with the ISB CEE and a large IT major, CITNE is in the process of training thousands of Indian trained IT engineers to become globally capable managers.


VISITORS

The School continued to host several prominent visitors from government, from businesses and academia. Some prominent visitors include –
Hon’ble Home Minister Shivraj Patil,
Minster of State for Higher Education, D Purandeswari,
Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh,
Tarun Gogoi, Chief Minister of Assam,
H E Narasimhan, Governor of Chhattisgarh,
Noted cartoonist R K Laxman,
Gan Kim Young, Education Minister Singapore,
Lyonp Dorji, IT Minister of Bhutan,
Ambassadors of United Kingdom, Canada, United States of America and Members of Parliament from UK.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Professor Raghuram Rajan, Thomas L Friedman, Captain Gopinath, Ram Shriram, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudeva, Hamad Al-Sayari, Governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency amongst others.
In addition I had the pleasure of receiving my counterparts from some very prominent schools worldwide.


INTERACTIONS WITH HYDERABAD SOCIETY

We have actively worked with the Hyderabad community on various occasions. These include the Net Impact Club’s activities and the Hyderabad 10K Run. This year saw enthusiastic participation yet again by several of our students, staff and faculty in the 10K Run.

As always, the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the media, AIKYA families, the Art Committee have been big supporters. I recognise some of you in the audience today.

Hon’ble Chief Minister Dr. Y S Rajasekhara Reddy and Leader of Opposition N Chandrababu Naidu have also visited us this year. I did not mention them in the visitors list, since they are part of the ISB Family.

I thank the Board, Area Leaders, Faculty, and Staff for their continued support and contribution.


CONCLUSION

And now a few words for the graduating class in whose honour we are here today. I congratulate all of you for completing a successful year at the ISB. We are very proud of all of you. I wish you all the best as you embark on your new careers today. As you set about charting new career paths I want you to remember that learning does not end here, it continues throughout life. You took a chance, a big leap of faith in yourself, when you quit your jobs and decided to spend a year at the ISB. Many of you have transformed your careers, transformed your lives. You are very lucky, for this is a time of great opportunities. As you go forward remember ‘when opportunity does not knock on your door, remember - you can build a door’. Not only can you build a door for yourself and your family, you can open doors for many. In fact, we need, our country needs, bright young people such as you to transform our society. And the best you can do that is by being able to remake yourself, as Mahatma Gandhi said, not so much in being able to remake the world. As you forge new careers remember to ‘Be the change you wish to see’. I look forward to seeing you lead this transformation. You are, and will always be, an integral part of the ISB family, and all of us here look forward to sharing in the joys of your accomplishments as worthy citizens of this world. "Graduation is only a concept. In real life every day you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that, you'll make a difference."

I conclude in the words of Thoreau
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

I wish you all Good Luck!

Thank You