With heavyweights from India Inc engaging in an annual stampede to snap up its graduates, the Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship has acquired an excellent reputation. The twelfth batch of 113 students, who were awarded the postgraduate diploma of the Bangalore-based Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship (XIME) on May 10 this year, had an advantage over their predecessors. By the time they received their diplomas at an impressive convocation ceremony presided over by chief guest Kiran Karnik, former president of NASSCOM, they had already been campus recruited by blue-chip majors who came calling at the campus of XIME (estb. 1991), a nationally reputed B-school repeatedly ranked among the countrys top 25 by the pink newspapers and business periodicals. When the gates of the institute were thrown open to recruiters from corporate India in mid February, all the 113 XIME graduates who offered themselves for placement were snapped up at high prices. The average start-up remuner-ation of the batch of 2008 was Rs.5.6 lakh per year with the highest touching Rs.10.7 lakh. Among the most successful recruiters were India Inc heavyweights such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Vedanta — a testimony to the excellent reputation that the XIME management and faculty has built up for the institute during the past 17 years. The accolades from Indian industry — reflected in the steadily rising average start-up salaries offered to the institutes graduates year after year — is music to the ears of Prof. J. Philip, who after completing a nearly six-year term (1985-91) as director of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, founded XIME in 1991. Given my exposure to Harvard Business School, XLRI and IIM-B, I always felt I had it within me to promote a B-school which would incorporate the best teaching-learning practices and provide the value addition of exposing students to international business and management practices. Therefore when I promoted XIME in 1991 — the year in which the then finance minister Dr. Manmohan Singh presented a historic Union budget which began the process of integrating what was an isolationist Indian economy with the emerging global economy — I resolved to develop a curriculum with greater outward orientation and stronger emphasis on developing entrepreneurs rather than mere corporate professionals, as was the dominant practice of B-schools at that time. And to this day they are the distinguishing characteristics of business management education at XIME, says Philip an alumnus of Kerala University and XLRI Jamshedpur who pressed on to acquire the prestigious ITP (International Teaching Programme in Business Administration) diploma of Harvard Business School. Starting his professional career in 1960 in XLRI, Philip moved on to Hindustan Steel (later renamed SAIL) in 1971, and subsequently served as vice-president (human resources) of the globe-girdling Oberoi Group of hotels (1980-85) prior to being appointed director of IIM-B (1985-91). Relatively free from the constraints of reporting to the Union HRD ministry which governs the IIMs and starting with a modest initial investment of a few lakhs in 1991, Philip has developed…
