Dr ML Shrikant, widely respected as a pioneer of management education in India, passed away on October 16. He served as the Honorary Dean of SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR) from 1987 till 2014. During his tenure SPJIMR emerged as one of leading Bschool in India with unique approach to curriculum and pedagogy.
Prior to joining SPJIMR, Dr. Shrikant had a stellar academic record. He completed his BS from Michigan Technology University and MS at the University of Illionis. In 1970s, he was one of the youngest CEOs in India -- heading Mukand Ltd. He went back to the United States to pursue his MBA at Cornell and later completed DBA from Harvard Business School.
In November 2014, when Dr Shrikant stepped down as the Honorary Dean, SPJIMR had noted, “Dr. Shrikant crafted new courses and programmes, helped create innovative pedagogies and focused relentlessly on values and contribution, driving a revolution in the field of management education and setting SPJIMR on a growth trajectory that has taken it to be recognised as a B-School rated among the top five in India. Dr.Shrikant’s efforts saw SPJIMR grow from a little known Institute into a B-School that has consistently been ranked among top 10 in India in the last five years and has now moved into the top-five league.”
To pay tribute to the legend, MBAUniverse.com invited Dr Atish Chattopadhyay, who had worked in the leadership of Dr Shrikant at SPJIMR for a long time. His tribute follows.
Remembering Dr Shrikant: A Tribute
By Dr Atish Chattopadhyay
My recruitment at SPJIMR was a bit of an exception as I was not interviewed by Dr. Shrikant. So I had no experience of either meeting him or even seeing him. My friends who knew him warned that he had a low level of tolerance for non-performance, but the entrepreneur in me took the risk of shifting to Mumbai and join SPJIMR.
During the initial months I did not get much of an opportunity to interact with him except seeing him conduct the weekly faculty meetings – which were more like attending a case discussion on various issues and a test of one’s preparedness. The first time I met him personally was to inform him regarding the award of my PhD and he quizzed me regarding the propositions in the thesis.
My next meeting with him was towards the end of the academic year, when I was called to his office and he told me ‘we are not too unhappy with you’ – subsequently, I received my first promotion at SPJIMR. In the same year, I was informed that I will be required to teach in the global campuses at Singapore and Dubai. He was a firm believer in exposing younger faculty to different contexts, teaching pedagogies and international settings.
By the time I was completing my first year at SPJIMR, I received one more call to his office – this time he informed that he wanted me to attend a teacher training program at Harvard Business School. For few moments, I was awestruck, as the cost of attending the program was more than my annual salary. He always laid great emphasis on the teaching learning experience of the students and invested in faculty development – majority of SPJIMR faculty during his tenure had attended cutting edge programs across top institutions globally.
As I completed my second year, I was made the Head of the flagship 2-Year PGDM Program which provided me the opportunity to interact with him on a regular basis on various aspects of institution building. The conversations would usually revolved around four key areas – (i) the strategic logic that should guide decisions of the institute as whole (ii) organizational challenges (iii) pedagogic challenges and (iv)faculty development.
It is during these conversations that he explained to me the need for an institute to have a differentiated mission and to develop programs aligned to the mission. Within the Indian context, since the IIMs were the major players with access to higher resources backed with a strong brand name his take was simple – ‘You cannot beat them using the same game-plan’. He used a game-plan throughout the process which is difficult to replicate – be it selection, program architecture and delivery or even placements. He developed the programs in a manner which is very different from any other institution in the country – it is the only school where applicants have to indicate their choice of specialisation at the time of admissions; only top school following a semester system; only school to have a Social Internship during summers; only school which has an Autumn Internship. The logic was to create a value-chain which the major competitor will not be able to replicate even if it wants to.
He was keen on developing programs (products) and often warned us of losing track of developments in the market. He could identify segments of the market which were underserved and develop programs aligned to such needs – The pioneering program for family managed businesses and the one for manufacturing organisations at SPJIMR, bears testimony to his success both in program development and in risk mitigation (while protecting the flagship 2-Year Program).
To him the key to launching or for that matter successfully running a program was to identify the right person to own it and then focus on execution. To Dr. Shrikant, ‘Who’ was far more important than ‘What’ or ‘How’ and ‘Execution’ far outweighed ‘Planning’ or ‘Idea’. To put it in his words, ‘an idea can be vague, the plan can be imperfect, but good execution can make a vague idea and an imperfect plan look great’. The success of SPJIMR as an institution can be attributed to his relentless pursuit for effective execution. He never announced any big vision, he used to call himself an ’opportunist’ and a ‘muddler’ – however he was always ‘muddling with a purpose’. To him every routine decision had a strategic implication, which he used to term as the ‘Art of Administration’ - he was that rare breed of general manager taken straight out of the leaf of the HBR Classic ‘Good managers don’t make policy decisions’.
Dr. Shrikant had his own take on functioning of educational institutions. To him there ought to be a symbiotic relationship between the board, the institutional head and the program heads. For a multi-program institution like SPJIMR (where each of the programs were very strong and revenue generating), he thought of integration at the corporate level and differentiation at the program level, specifying all activities which need to be centralized and the ones to be decentralized. He initiated decentralization of activities within a program like admissions, program development, program administration, industry integration and placements. He believed in distributed leadership and each of the programs operated as an independent SBU driving innovations – he used to reward the one ‘breaking the wall’, creating an environment of continuous experimentation. This may be one of the reasons for the phenomenal growth of SPJIMR both in terms of quality and scale across programs in the recent past.
Dr. Shrikant probably made maximum impact in developing and effectively implementing a pedagogy which was innovative, relevant, experiential and engaged all the stakeholders. He believed that the limitation of the western frameworks lies in the absence of focus on the ‘individual’. To him the essence of leadership begins with the ‘self’ – self awareness, self management and self development as the key ingredients for leadership development. He continued to experiment on how to teach the idea of ‘self’ as an individual? He developed the course ‘Spirituality in Management’ with the objective of developing amongst the students’ an ability to self-introspect and reflect.
To him, the context of countries like India was different from that of the developed world – he wanted the students to be exposed to the issues poverty and inequality. He wanted to integrate within the curriculum, experiences through which students are made sensitive to the issues of distributive justice. Some of the pioneering pedagogic innovations, , which today have received global accolades, like social projects during summers and mentoring of underprivileged children living in slums, were an outcome of this belief.
Dr. Shrikant believed that management cannot be learned by restricting students within the four walls of the classroom and was a great advocate of learning by doing. He involved both students and faculty in administrative and academic tasks. Idea was also to enhance faculty involvement with the institute. He believed that a faculty who is teaching management should also be able to practice the same – a marketing faculty need to be marketer in the first place - so when the pool of applicants came down in the PGDM program he actually wanted me to lead the marketing activities for admissions. He was proved right as SPJIMR achieved double digit growth at a time when others experienced a dip.
Dr. Shrikant encouraged faculty to travel abroad to get exposed to the best practices in their areas of interest and seek institutional and industry collaborations He himself used to travel to understand the emerging trends – for example the introduction of the Markstrat simulation in early 90s at SPJIMR when no one in India had heard of the same. As a Program Head, he encouraged me to visit institutions across the globe and I must have visited more than 25 global schools across continents. The ‘Global Fast Track’ program where all the 240 participants undertake specialization courses in top global institutions and are accompanied by SPJIMR faculty was an outcome of many such visits.
His approach to faculty development was to ‘walk the talk’. To him a management faculty must be valued in the industry either as a consultant or as a trainer. He himself was a leading practitioner and was a faculty par excellence. What amazed me was the amount of preparation he used to do for each of his sessions – how he was going to spend every minute of the same. Each time before the session, it appeared as if that was the first time he was going into a class. He would be in the classroom at least 10 minutes before the session began, inspect the physical infrastructure, start on time and finish on dot. End of the session, he would make sure he had erased his board-work.
For the last couple of months after I shifted to Ahmedabad, I had been meeting him over the weekends. On most occasions, he would share with me the latest book he had read and the issues facing Indian management institutions. He would raise questions like “Graduates from the Indian management institutions have earned a name globally, why the Indian institutions do not enjoy global reputation?” or “Why C K Prahlad did so well at Ross and not at IIMA?” He would share his thoughts on leadership and that leadership is about ‘being a contributor’. He would explain to me the proposition that the ‘art of giving is the basis of leadership’, that leadership is about ‘values’ of ‘non self-centeredness’. He would often disregard the concept of ‘cost to company’ and state that leader needs to consider his/her people as ‘part of the family’.
He would tell me how he would like to run an institution in his next life and how to make Indian management institutions globally recognised. He planned to write a book ‘Challenges for leadership in Indian management institutions’, but did not want his name as an author. For that matter, he never inscribed his name anywhere and never looked back – if one enters SPJIMR, nowhere will one find either his name or a photograph, even though he led the institution to all its glory in an honorary capacity drawing an honorarium of one rupee per month for more than 25 years. He loved to be in action and worked till the last moment and executed his last journey typically in his own style– at his favourite place Khandala, in the morning, post his readings and the breakfast. He was a ‘Karmayogi’ in the true sense of the word.
Some of us are truly blessed to have been mentored and guided by Dr. Shrikant. The greatest tribute to him will be to work towards fulfilling his dream of creating truly global Indian management institutions.
Author is currently Dean of MICA and was Deputy Director at SPJIMR.
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