IIM-A job tougher: Harvard Business School dean

It would have been harder for me to become the dean of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, than the dean of Harvard Business School, said Nitin Nohria.

He was only half-joking.

On July 1, Nohria became the first India-born dean of Harvard Business School (HBS). An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, he received a PhD in management in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Since then, Nohria has been receiving messages from all parts of India, including small villages.

“I have heard from people who have said, ‘your name is Nohria, does that mean that you grew up in a village called Nohar? I am from Nohar. We are so proud of you’,” Nohria, who is on a visit to Mumbai, said.

Nohria first started teaching at Harvard in 1988. “Then, you would have been hard-pressed to find a case on an Indian company or a Chinese company. Today, we have 80 cases on Indian companies that have been developed in the last 10 years and an equal number, if not more, on Chinese ones,” he said.

At HBS, the case study method of teaching is employed.
In light of the financial crisis, largely engineered by highly-paid MBAs on Wall Street, Nohria has been instrumental in getting students to take the ‘MBA oath’ while passing out, and has found some success with it.

“I had proposed the MBA oath in a very simple way because my sister is a doctor. She had taken the Hippocratic oath, which gives them some guidance about their role in society. Wouldn’t it be useful for MBA students to ask themselves the question: what is our role in society, what do we think about it?” he said. Last year, half the graduating students at HBS took the oath. It was also taken by 5,000 other students at 200-odd business schools across the US, Europe and Australia.  

Nohria, whose first love is teaching, hasn’t been, well, teaching this year. “This year, I will have to, for the first time in 22 years, not teach as I have become dean. It’s simply because it’s a very big institution and just trying get my arms around all of the things I have to do is just a lot of work… but I am very committed to teaching and I can assure you that I will start teaching again,” he said.

On HBS’s plans for India, Nohria wants to follow an “asset light but intellectually heavy” strategy, which means he is not looking to set up any branches of HBS in India. “We are not in the business of chasing demand in India,” he said. But India is still relevant to them.

“We have developed 80 cases on India; these cases are being used at business schools all across the world. So, if anybody is learning about India right now, chances are they are learning about India from HBS more than anywhere else,” Nohria added. 

Nohria is also seeing more and more Indians who go to the US to study coming back to work here. “When I graduated from IIT Bombay in 1984, more than two-thirds of my class went abroad.

Many of us had in our minds promised that we will come back. I don’t think many of us did. Now the scene has completely changed. A large number of Indian students at HBS go back to India, if not immediately, probably two or three years later, as opportunities in India have become as exciting as everywhere else.”