Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63913
Kellogg, and chairman of the academic advisory committee for ISB. "But I am also positive there is a personal benefit directly tangible to them, because they will be vested in the school. They will have an identity with the school. Right now, we have a class of 130 students who would be good enough to be admitted to Wharton or Kellogg or any other school. Of that 130, I wouldn't be surprised if 110 someday will be working in one of the com- panies that sponsored the ISB." Not only do sponsoring companies get the benefit of highly qualified and highly motivated new workers, those workers aren't averse to going back to India for a three- or four-year tour of duty if the parent company needs a representative overseas. They have an emotional bond with the country, Balachandran points out, as well as loyalty to the company sending them there. Why India, Why Now? Balachandran, one of the core group of people who came up with the original idea for the ISB, says that he had long consid- ered the benefits of founding a "world-class" school in some country outside the U.S., perhaps in Asia, perhaps in Israel. But his neighbor Rajat Gupta—who also happened to be managing director of investment company McKinsey & Co.—helped him turn his focus to India. That bias might be natural, considering they're both of Indian origin; but then, so are a large number of other individuals in corporate and academic America. Balachandran can recite a long list of Indian deans and facul- ty members at prominent business schools, and he notes that Indians are highly placed in corporations all over the world. In fact, in Silicon Valley alone, the tales of Indian success stories are Architect's rendering of the campus rife. A White House fact sheet estimates that in the late 1990s, 16 percent of all start-ups in Silicon Valley involved a partner of Indian origin. Anna Lee Saxenian, a professor of community and regional development at the University of California–Berkeley, has done research that says these high-tech Silicon Valley busi- nesses account for more than $16 billion in gross revenue and more than 50,000 jobs (www.ppic.org/publications/PPIC120/ index.html). These statistics don't even take into account the hard-to-measure impact of Indians engaged in e-business. Taken together, the signs were hard to miss in the late '90s. The time seemed right to invest in a first-rate Indian business school. Balachandran canvassed Indian academics; Gupta, now chairman of the board at ISB, sounded out industry leaders. The response was overwhelmingly positive as Indians who had become citizens of countries around the world warmed to the idea of "giving a payback to their motherland without compro- mising on quality," says Balachandran. They also could help create an institution that was truly glob- al, that would give students from around the world a chance to study at an American-style school located in an emerging econo- my. The quality would be just as high, but the experience would be radically different, enabling students to absorb the differences between cultures and the impact of such differences on the busi- ness strategies of multinational enterprises. "In the context of the global economy, it is important not to think of the world as just the segment that is the U.S.," says Sridhar Ramamoorti, a principal with Andersen in Chicago, and formerly a member of the accountancy faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Ramamoorti, who recently vis- ited the ISB in Hyderabad, is among the Indian American busi- nessmen who are extremely enthusiastic about the new school. He strongly believes that a high-quality education on foreign soil 36 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001