Edu-leaders

EDU: Darden has partnerships with various Indian schools. Any specific criteria for selection?

Robert F Bruner: We have partnered with IIM, Ahmedabad, ISB, Hyderabad and XLRI, Jamshedpur. We chose schools which share our values and are in synch with the way we present ourselves to the world. Our emphasis is on excellent teaching, service and high attention to ethics. Like us, IIM-A teaches by the case method, so we share the pedagogy. ISB and XLRI also have the same case method teaching. Because we share these values, it’s easy for us to have conversations about common projects, joint programmes and things that matter to us. The students, who come to our school on exchange, fit right in. Our partner schools in India and all over the world have very high admission standards. So, when we exchange students, we are confident that they can stand the rigours of our programme.

Q: What are your thoughts on setting up an institution in India in the context of the Foreign Education Bill?

A: I think it is in India’s best interests to lower the entry barriers. Many Indian schools may feel threatened because of the possibility of new entrants in their market. I was visiting a professor at IIM, Bangalore. They have 200 thousand applicants for 400 places. That is a very big unmet demand. There are high quality schools at one end, and there are diploma mills on the other, and you need screening to make the right choices. If India is careful about the schools it lets in, I believe it will make for a vibrant academic sector. Foreign schools can help strengthen Indian schools and vice versa.

Rather than more competition, it could be more collaboration. Alternately, I think the students would be the winners from a liberalisation programme in this sector.

Q: Will the exposure to different markets help them see where their skills are relevant?

A: Yes. Our view is in contrast to Thomas Friedman in his book The World is Flat where he said national boundaries don’t matter anymore. I think the world is lumpy or curvy. It may not be round anymore — thanks to technology and globalisation, but there are at least four kinds of distances that matter. The first is cultural, due to differences in language, ethnicity, religion, and values. The second is administrative, due to differences in laws and how industries are regulated. The third is geographical distances: some countries are remote, some have easy access, some are big, some little and some are advanced. The final is economic distances: some countries are rich, some are poor, some have very sophisticated financial systems and some don’t.

We will go to manufacturing plants. We will show people, the workspaces and the working conditions, the logistical challenges of serving markets. It’s very impactful learning. You can’t learn about this sitting in an armchair at your home or in your home country.

Q: How does a business school make itself different and relevant?

A: It all starts from great clarity about the mission and values of the school itself. Too many schools today are chasing fads to get attention. This is dangerous. I think the right way to consider how to have impact and stature is to ask, “What is your purpose? What is the mission of the school?” A mission always has a sense of who you are serving — is it corporations, is it the nation, the entire world, or students?, What is it that really matters to you? Once you define that, then you can identify the new paths and initiatives that can actually raise the effectiveness of a school. I know that many schools today say that they want to be a world-ranked school. High rankings follow from high impact. The relevant question in my view is “How can a school gain impact; trusting that the world will sit up and take notice if you are having impact, and schools will discover that they are constrained in the impact they can have.” For some schools, the greatest impact is in areas of speciality because they build upon strengths of the parent university, special strengths with respect to engineering, healthcare or information technology. That might suggest starting specialised degrees. Other schools will discover and decide they are strong because they serve a geographic area: a city, a region or a type of industry: agricultural industry or energy. It’s easy for me to say this because my school is well-recognised. But if I were advising the dean and trustees of a school that wanted to gain a national and global stature, I would say they should begin by thinking about service. Ask: “Who am I trying to help and why and how?” Once you have clarity in the answers to these questions, the next steps to building your impact will leap out.

Q: How did Darden establish its distinct identity?

A: The world tells us we are distinct for a few things. The way we teach the case method — how we teach is what we teach. We teach how to manage and lead people by asking questions. And the virtue of leading that way is that it encourages people to think for themselves and reach their own conclusions.

If you knit together the rankings, the blogs, the guidebooks and the chatter about business schools, you’d probably conclude that Darden is the world’s best teaching school. We are very serious about producing excitement and impact in the classroom. The second thing that we are really known for is leadership development and the development of general managers.

Financial Times ranked us No. 1 for general management. This stems from our legacy at our founding which was focussed on creating leaders and general managers, and we have just continued to invest in it and improve on it; adding to the stack of knowledge in that area in ways that have accumulated into a very strong reputation.

We were founded in 1955, so we are still comparatively young. We were originally found to serve the state of Virginia in the United States. So we are affiliated with the University of Virginia which is a state-based institution. But starting in 1970s and 1980s, we began to develop a national stature and now we have an international stature. This comes from single-minded focus on what it is we want to do and do it well. We have a very strong business ethics department, and values and ethics are the core of everything we do. It is an illustration of the importance of focus: not trying to be all things to all people but trying to do a few things very well to have the impact.

Q: As Chairman of the AACSB Globalisation of Management Education Task Force you brought out a globalisation study. What were the highlights of this study?

A: I was a part of the team of a dozen deans of global business schools and we were chartered by the AACSB which accredits business schools to study how globalisation is affecting management education. This is an amorphous topic and we could have gone into many different directions. But we concentrated on four different paths. The profile we developed of the field is very interesting.

We began by conducting a census of all the schools in the world: their number and where they are. It is still going on but, at the last count, there were over 13,000 institutions that offered degrees in business of some kind. The first insight thus is that it’s a vast field. Students have immense choice. Less than 10 per cent of these are accredited schools. There are some excellent schools in the remaining 90 per cent, but the notion of accreditation of an independent group checking the standards of grading, admissions and student support is still spreading slowly in the world.

The second insight is very active partnering among schools across borders. Schools are setting up exchange programmes for students, exchange of faculty, joint research initiatives and degree programmes. One school boasted of 200 partners. Our school, in contrast, has only 15 international partners. We keep it small because we focus on rich relationships.

The third finding was about the curriculum of business schools: how they are teaching globalisation. We found that schools do a better job talking about globalisation than actually inserting it into the curriculum and helping shape the mindsets of the students. A lot more work needs to be done there: teaching materials, new course plans and helping the traditional professor build confidence about being able to deal with global matters.

And the final of the four big insights stemmed from some in-depth case studies we did of business schools. We looked at 10 schools, studied their motives, strategies, tactics and from that emerged the insight that there is no single strategy that applies to all schools.

Different schools are trying different things and this is good for the students and the field, but it also feels like an early stage industry, like Silicon Valley in its early days, or Bollywood. And it also means that eventually, there will be a shakeout. Some experiments will work, some won’t; schools will rise and fall. But I don’t think we are close to the shakeout.

Q: People have started talking about how business education is not relevant anymore, what are your thoughts?

A: I think that business education is more relevant than ever before. Recently I was giving a talk. A young person said that I hear from Silicon Valley that getting an MBA is irrelevant. That if you want to start a business you should just go ahead and start it. My reply was that if you have great clarity about the business you want to start, sure go ahead and start it. But the world of hard knocks is full of

many hard knocks. It’s an expensive place to get an education. If you have a lot of money, time, unlimited energy, go start businesses because what will happen is you will start many and most of them will fail because the failure rate of new business start-ups is quite high.

Seventy per cent fail to live beyond the third anniversary of founding. And, what a good business school education can do is to help you understand the risk you are taking to begin with and how to mitigate them. This saves you untold time and effort and money in starting businesses. At the end of the day, it can actually help and prove your success as an entrepreneur.

Q: A recent article in FT said that the number of students applying to business schools is going down. Why do think that has happened?

A: I think the truth is that the number of students applying within the United States is flat to declining. But from the robust emerging economies, it’s rising. In fact, the UNESCO website has figures on student mobility across borders. It’s continuing to grow, even outbound from the US to the world, I believe is growing. The exception is Japan which is unfortunately, really turning inward. What is happening in the United States is a phenomenon that I believe is tied to the economic cycle. When the cycle turns down, more young people tend to apply to schools because they lose their jobs and their future for the next few years is not as bright. When the cycle turns up, young people are less inclined to quit their jobs. What we don’t know is, if this cycle is different and I am sceptical. John Templeton, one of the great investors in the history of capitals said the four most dangerous words in investing are: “This time it’s different”, because we tend to see the repetition of human behaviour with some regularity.

My belief is that students will attend business schools in increasing volumes. There is infinite demand for business education. That said, where the demand is supplied and how is a big question mark. This is an exciting time to be in the industry and that is what our study on globalisation also suggested.