Vijay Sethi, 'world's best business professor'

Vijay Sethi, 52, a professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, was late last week named the world’s best business educator at an event sponsored by The Economist Intelligence Unit and the Hult International Business School.

It was a reality-show kind of competition where over 30,000 students and alumni nominated and voted for 222 professors from 31 countries.

Sethi and three other finalists were then asked to give a lecture for 35 minutes to a class of 40 students from top 20 business management schools.

The best teacher was adjudged on the basis of student votes, according to Stephen Hodges, president of Hult.

Sethi, who specialises in IT-related academia, shared his experience and more in an interview with Parnika Sokhi. He said he plans to use the $100,000 prize money to help needy students by way of scholarships.

How was this different from normal teaching?
Teaching is very normal for us, but if you have to condense everything you have to teach in 35 minutes, then it is a bit different. First try to define what kind of a message you have to convey and secondly how do you convey it in the assigned short period to the audience which is fairly mixed; you don’t even know who these students are going to be.

What topic did you choose?
It was ‘The dynamics of technology networks’. Basically, the message was that we have done a lot with technology but it has to become very pervasive. If you understand technology dynamics, the key issue is to change our own particular behaviour and our mindsets. I was leading them to the fact that now we should be changing our thinking to what I call ‘network thinking’.

Organisations need to think of itself as a network, it can no longer continue to think of itself as an individual organisation. I track technology trends or phenomena wherever it is emerging. One could think of cloud computing as an emerging phenomenon and it is also the era of data. That’s the technical point of view. From an organisational perspective, I look at what is the ultimate impact.

In terms of cloud computing, more is being said than done...
Most phenomena are like this, they get hyped up. If you look at large companies and think of cloud computing, it’s going to be slower because they have a lot of existing infrastructure. But if you look at the smaller and start-up companies, they will not be able to survive without looking up to the cloud. So the phenomena is real, it does get hyped up but eventually reality catches up.

Technologically, what is India lacking in?
India has access to the most cutting-edge technology, but it is lacking in terms of how technology should be adopted in transforming the organisations. For example, take online buying... Obviously, one can say that we still don’t have broadband infrastructure but what about the population which can buy – I mean everybody who has internet access? It has to do with something more like mistrust of buying online.

India faces tough competition in IT outsourcing. What needs to be done?
I think that’s a good thing. One should always move up in the value chain. Every nation or company, starts at the bottom of the value chain. But you cannot stay there. Someone else will take up the area you vacate. That’s what happened with Indian IT. The only way to recapture is by moving up the value chain or shifting more from processing to process management.

The big challenge is going to be competency of the people, which is different. You need to train people to become knowledge assets. We have to move up in terms of how we are training our students so that they are able to operate at higher levels in that value chain.