Despite a 47-year career in the fields of education, training and management consultancy and many a mission accomplished in banking and academia, Prof. Y.K. Bhushan believes that he has one more major mission to accomplish. Right now he is pulling out all the stops and utilising his reservoir of skills and experience to vault the ICFAI Business School, Mumbai (IBS-M) into the top ten league of B-schools in the country by the year 2008. Given that IBS-M admitted its first batch of students in 1995 and has entered the business management education ‘occupation’ (business in academics is frowned upon by the Supreme Court) some three decades after the country’s first B-school (IIM- Calcutta) was established and that currently there are 958 business education institutes countrywide, that’s quite a tall order. But quite obviously the promoters of IBS-M believe that Bhushan who is modestly designated senior advisor to the school, is their best bet. Which is hardly surprising given Bhushan’s impressive curriculum vitae and track record. An alumnus of Delhi’s top-ranked Shri Ram College of Commerce and Institute of Economic Growth who pressed on to acquire an MBA from Indiana University, USA, Bhushan played a pioneer’s role by introducing contemporary personnel management and HRD practices in the then floundering public sector banks as HRD manager of the Central Bank of India and Dena Bank. In 1984 after over a decade in banking, Bhushan accepted the challenge of taking charge of a newly-promoted, low-profile B-school operating under the name and style of the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Mumbai. Under his stewardship during the period 1984-2001, NMIMS metamorphosed into one of the most respected B-schools in India and is consistently rated among the top ten in the annual surveys of business magazines and the pink papers. “NMIMS was the first B-school to interact intensively with Indian industry and non-profit organisations to design innovative, new age syllabuses and programmes for students and working executives. We also added a new dimension to business education by developing study programmes for NGOs, women entrepreneurs and school leaders. And a factor critical to our success was that we were able to develop a cohesive and stable faculty with negligible turnover,” says Bhushan explaining the rise of NMIMS through the ranks. Now Bhushan is all set to apply this institution development formula — with additional innovations — to catapult IBS-M into the league of top ten B-schools. Can he replicate his NMIMS success with IBS-M? The 300 students who are enrolled in the institute seem to believe he can. And so do some of the top corporates in Indian industry who have snapped up the latest batch of 150 IBS-M graduates at annual salaries averaging Rs.4 lakh. Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai) Chaudhuri’s theme song With his youthful looks and trademark ponytail, young Delhi-based Arindam Chaudhuri has already established a reputation as a business management guru. The author of three heavily-promoted business bestsellers and dean of the Centre For Economic Research and Advanced Studies at the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM),…
