Understanding India
Helping business leaders in India and throughout the world better understand the work which needs to be done in India – and how best it may be done – is London Business School’s Aditya Birla India Centre. Its directors, Phanish Puranam and Nirmalya Kumar, explain more about the Centre’s work.
London Business School’s India Centre is named after Aditya Birla (1943-95). Birla was a visionary Indian industrialist, who was among the first pioneers of globalising Indian business. Under his leadership, the Birla Group set up world-class production bases outside India in Thailand, Malayisa, Indonesia, the Philipines and Egypt. At the time India was a tightly controlled market and only out of the coutnry did Birla find the freedom his businesses needed. His success paved the way for later Indian globalisers such as the Mittal family.
The Centre at London Business School was founded by Aditya Birla’s son Kumar Mangalam Birla – a London Business School MBA -- who now leads the Birla group of companies. The modern-day Birla group is hugely diversified with invovement in financial services, telecoms, software as well as more traditional products such as aluminium, cement and copper.
“The Aditya Birla Indian Centre was the first India-focused centre set up at any top business school in the world. This was before India was the flavour of the day,” says Nirmlaya Kumar. “The mandate of the centre is very straightforward: it is to generate materials on India, which can then be used at London Business School as well at any other school in the world, and to raise the profile of India at London Business School.”
The Birla Centre’s activities include an annual case study development initiative; a lecture series; and a seminar series. Since its inception, over 10 London Business School faculty have been involved in the Centre’s activities.
Of course, the Indian contribution to London Business School is substantial. As well as a strong Indian faculty contignent, around 10 per cent of the school’s student body comes from India and the school was also, with Kellogg and Wharton, one of the partner schools of India’s leading business school, the Indian School of Business.
Says Nirmalya Kumar: “We are here to make sure our students are well prepared for the business world they’ve got to face over the next 30 years. India, like China, is going to play a major role so we have to make sure that they get enough exposure to India, even though they are doing their MBA in London.”
Up-skilling India
As Phanish Puranam emphasises, key to the Centre is its commitment to building research expertise in India. “While our number one mandate is generating case studies we have adopted a model where these cases are actually written by Indian faculty, with help from us , so we work with them to get the case up to a standard where we can then list it on the European Case Clearing House. We’ve been doing that now for three years, and we are, in the process, generating new cases on India but also up-skilling the Indian faculty, who are writing these cases.”
The Centre now receives nearly 100 proposals every year for Indian case studies. From this around eight finished cases emerge. Increasing expertise at Indian business school is seen by Professors Kumar and Puranam as central to India’s continuing development. “Intellectual property is definitely the next frontier for India, both from a corporate, an academic and a social perspective,” says Nirmalya Kumar.
Speaking out
One of the Birla Centre’s best received activites is its regular series of speaking events in London and India. “Through our speaker series, the Centre aims to support Indian companies, academics and public policy makers in their pursuit of global business capabilities. The series also helps global corporations and governements understand business in India,” says Phanish Puranam.
Speakers have included Sir Gulam Noon of Noon Products; Kris Gopalakrishnan and Nadan Nilekani of Infosys; Aditya Mittal of Areclor Mittal; government minister P. Chidambaram; and Azim Premji of Wipro, among others. Most recently, Peter Unsworth, who heads Tetley Tea for the Tata Group talked about what it’s like to work for an Indian company as an Englishman.
Spreading the word still further, the Centre’s directors are helping to put together two one-day events in Mumbai and Delhi in September. “We think our faculty and their ideas can play a role in changing how corporations work and even how governments work in India,” says Phanish Puranam.
Each day is structured around individual faculty with panels of experts drawn from inside and outside the country. London Business School dean Sir Andrew Likierman will chair the events. Richard Jolly, Helene Rey, and Madan Pilutla from the London Business School faculty will also be involved.
Nirmalya Kumar believes that the timing is right because the London Business School agenda is a perfect fit with the issues now facing India. “Our value proposition is about bringing global business capabilities to the world. Today the Indian corporate sector faces a very strategic dilemma: how to raise their game to the global level. Even Indian companies that do not want to compete outside India, still realise they need global best practices because they are going to be competing, within the domestic market, against global companies and multinationals, such as Unilever. So it is imperative for Indian companies to have global business capabilities, regardless of whether they want to go overseas, like the Tata, Birla or Reliance groups, or not.”
Two-way learning
There is a sense that the educational balance has shifted. Learning is increasingly two-way. This can be seen in the growing influence of Indian-born business scholars in some of the world’s top business schools. The bi-annual ranking of business gurus, the Thinkers 50, was topped in 2007 and 2009 by the late CK Prahalad and featured a growing number of Indian thinkers and practitioners.
“There are some things that Indian business can teach to the world -- being more flexible, dealing with diversity, and having great value consciousness. On the other hand, Indian companies also realise that they have a lot to learn from companies abroad,” says Nirmalya Kumar. “We at London Business School don’t think about Indian best practices versus US best practices versus European best practice, we think of global best practices, wherever they may be found in the world and bring them to wherever they may be needed in the world; that’s our mission.”
Phaniash Puranam develops the point: “India is not just an emerging market; it could be the next big innovation and talent engine. If you look at the availability of raw talent in India that’s what many Western companies really get excited about, and that’s why they come to India. We’re working on a book project, which is called India Inside. The idea is that, just like Intel inside, there’s a lot of innovation happening in India which consumers don’t see because it’s embedded in a B2B context or it’s part of a long value chain. We have been to a number of R&D units set up in India by multinationals like Intel, Microsoft, G.E. and Astra Zeneca. They are in India for talent and the ability to scale up in a way they cannot do in the US and in Europe.
“A global company of the future will have to have the best global practices and processes; but they cannot execute those processes without human capitalwhich is available in India on a scale not easily available anywhere else.”
Making the links between best practice in India and the rest of the world is an exhausting job. Phanish Puranam calculates he spends anywhere between six and eight weeks a year in India. Nirmalya Kumar has been on the board of a number of Indian companies and estimates he spends more than ten weeks a year on the ground in India. “You cannot sit in London and write articles about India. It’s not possible.”
Phanish Puranam and Nirmalya Kumar can look forward to accumulating many more air miles. Fascination with the Indian way of doing business is growing – as well as general interest in what drives emerging markets – and London Business School’s India Centre is set to be in even greater demand in the years to come.