Ajit Rangnekar, dean of the Indian School of Business, faces a dilemma: be a top-ranked global school that competes with western institutions or specialise as an emerging-market centre that focuses on finding solutions for developing economies. “It’s a tough call,” says the former head of PwC Consulting in Hong Kong and the Philippines. On the one hand, the ISB wants the global recognition that will put it on a par with world-class institutions such as Harvard and Stanford. “This is what the students want as they aspire to work in Fortune 500 companies.” On the other hand, Rangnekar feels the school in Hyderabad has a moral and ethical duty to interact with its environment, which means training students to affect society by setting up social businesses. “This is a harder route to pursue, as it doesn’t pay off immediately and students are not always keen to work for enterprise with a social impact.” The ISB has already launched the Centre for Emerging Markets Solutions, which helps small businesses exploit market opportunities overlooked by big enterprises. It has attracted the attention of George Soros, the billionaire investor, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay, and Google, who have invested $4m in projects linked to the ISB. Rangnekar says the support of big investors proves that what the school is doing is valuable. However, he fears that pushing too hard towards being an emerging-market business school could be counterproductive in the short term. “If we start placing more emphasis on being an emerging-market business school, then people are going to say, ‘You know what? I’m not going to get a job with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs,’” he says.
The biggest challenge for the school is to be relevant to both the top of the pyramid (providing skills for people to join big multinationals) and the bottom (providing skills for graduates to work for SMEs).
Rangnekar sees the ISB’s location in an exciting emerging economy as a clear differentiation compared with other global institutions. “This emerging market is the future,” he says. “Everybody – in the west and east – is asking: how do you translate this big, amorphous entity called the emerging world into market segments that I can understand, into market strategies that I can implement and finally catch? That’s going to be the area on which the world is going to focus in the future.”