Interview with Mr. Ganesh N. Prabhu, Professor of Corporate Strategy and Policy, IIM Bangalore

Ganesh N. Prabhu is a professor of Corporate Strategy and Policy at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.  He had come down to our college for the Open Panel Discussion at Gnosiomania 2009. We had a talk over breakfast about the various issues that are doing the rounds these days. A number of friends of mine were actually livid after getting CAT percentiles in higher 99’s and still not getting a call from the IIM’s.  So I thought Mr. Ganesh would be the right person to quiz on these issues. Here are the excerpts.

Me: Whats this talk of too many engineers getting into IIM’s ?

Mr. Ganesh: Well, engineers tend to do well in their academics right from the 10th standard. I mean, that is why they become engineers eventually. So, they do have an edge in CAT. On our part we don’t have any quotas for non engineers as such. That would not be morally right. But it is true that, having more engineers in a class doesn’t promote a good discussion. The ideas become less varied.

Me: What is the criteria by which IIM B has shortlisted the students ?

Mr. Ganesh: The criteria hasn’t changed in 2 years. You can have a look at it from our website. We give different weightages to the CAT score, 10th marks, 12th marks and the graduation marks. The average percentages for a candidate here at IIM B for their 10th, 12th and graduation are 88, 88 and 82.

Me: Do you think the urban entrepreneurs have it in them for rural startups (Mr. Prabhu has done his masters in rural management) ?

Mr. Ganesh: The awareness of the rural people of the opportunities available is very less. Well educated villagers who can help their native regions prefer moving to the cities for better opportunities. Similarly, the urban people also have a lack of awareness when it comes to the business opportunities in the rural areas. The urban people who visit the rural areas generally do that in a van or something. You actually have to live with the rural people for a few days to know about their needs. At IRMA, we had 30 weeks of compulsory training out of which 10 weeks was in the rural regions. A lot of MBA institutes have rural programs but sometimes it is not sufficient. S. P. Jain has a 2 week rural exposure program for example.

Me: What are the entrepreneurial opportunities in rural India which can be tapped ?

Mr. Ganesh: If you look at individual villages, there are no opportunities as such. But if you look across villages there are loads of opportunities. You have to make a general product for villages and test it out. The product has to be less sophisticated to spread across villages. A good example was when BPL came out with a television which had only 4 buttons. The villagers found it far more acceptable than the ones with a large number of buttons on the set or on the remote.

Me: Is MBA a good entrepreneurship course ?

Mr. Ganesh: The students who join the IIM’s by and large do not want to be entrepreneurs. It is high profile corporate jobs that is the aim of as many as 98% candidates. So in a way, an MBA is not meant to be an entrepreneurship course. At the same time there is no reason why aspiring entrepreneurs should not do an MBA. It does give them platforms for excellent networking and knowledge.

Me: What is corporate Strategy ? When you consult the corporates, what is the pain that they have which you relieve ?

Mr. Ganesh: Corporate Strategy is about looking at the business as a whole. The problems are generally low profits, high overheads and expenses, etc.  Sometimes the companies are very good at doing the wrong things or making the wrong products. The company thenselves may not be able to integrate the work of different departments that they have. Here we teach the candidates on how to analyse the data and situation well. They are taught to identify the key problems efficiently.

P.S. There were a whole lot of other questions which I asked. I will publish them sometime later as part 2 of the interview. We sat for a good one and a half hours and discussed a lot of things ranging from the recession to the Satyam Scam to PPP models, etc. Again I have adapted the interview to my style of writing. You can view Ganesh N. Prabhu’s profile here http://www.iimb.ernet.in/~gprabhu/