TAKING THE LEAD
LM Thapar School of Management looks at grooming new age B-school graduates. By Mridu Rai
Amidst a pastoral landscape of lush green fields and beaten tracks just outside the town of Dera Bassi in Punjab, the newly opened LM Thapar School of Management ( LMTSM) clearly stands out with its modern architecture. The school is the management arm of the Thapar University ( TTU), Patiala which was established in 1956 as an engineering college and was granted deemed university status in 1985. With the branching out of LMTSM to a new campus at Dera Bassi, which is approximately 20 kilometres from the capital city of Chandigargh, the school is now looking to reinvent the field of business education.
“There are more than 3,000 business schools in India and more than 9,000 abroad. Unfortunately most of these schools are functioning in more or less the same manner. In most cases, B- schools are institutions that over- promise and under- deliver,” says Dr Padmakumar Nair, director, LMTSM. “What we want to do here is to create excellent business school graduates who are also exemplary citizens of the society, are morally conscious and have a strong sense of community,” he adds.
In order to fulfil this objective, LMTSM have introduced innovative programmes in its two-year MBA course, which explore philosophic themes. The ‘ To Scholary Practice’ programme which Dr Nair says is “a new course, which no other business school in the world has”, brings together the study of business, science and philosophy under one umbrella. In this course, students are joined by the entire faculty staff during a session each week where a professor presents a published research paper, critically evaluating it before opening the floor for questions and discussion. Another course taught at LMTSM is the ‘Theory of Life’. This course has been designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and understand their own strengths and limitations better. Such a holistic learning, Dr Nair, believes, is the key to grooming individuals who can make a mark in the future. “When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft, the whole country erupted in a frenzy of excitement. But if a German or a Dutch citizen had gained the same position, I don’t think these countries’ media would have glorified the news to such an extent,” says Nair who adds that currently India is using only 10 per cent of its total potential. Once the citizens of the country, especially young minds, start implementing their full potential such achievements by an Indian will stop being so few and far between. The school has plans to address these areas in a big way.
Another significant aspect of the
curriculum at LMTSM involves encouraging students to become entrepreneurs. “The best thing about being a student here is that we are given a lot of opportunities to develop our entrepreneurial ventures,” says Nikhil Lamba, a first-year student from Haryana. “We are being trained right from the beginning about how to set up our own enterprise,” he adds. “If I had to pick a USP of our institute, it would definitely be the focus on cultivating entrepreneurial skills,” says Abhishek Mudgal, another first year student.
According to Dr Karminder Ghuman, associate professor, LMTSM, the minute someone joins a B-school, they become highly job oriented and their ultimate goal is to bag a high paying corporate job. “But we are now trying to make our students realise that they can create jobs for themselves if they want to,” Dr Ghuman says. He explains that while in other places in India, especially in the south, it is usually the people who’re well educated and have done well in their careers who later go onto start their own business ventures, the trend is the opposite in the north. “Here it is the people who couldn’t do well in studies who lean more towards establishing their own commercial initiatives. Some go into real estate, some start a small retail outfit while some set up advisory services and so on. Since well-informed, educated and structured entrepreneurship practices hasn’t found a footing in this region, we’re very keen to fill this gap and develop means to further its growth,” Dr Ghuman adds. For the same purpose, LMTSM hosted a threeday event called the Start-up Weekend in March this year. The event saw about 100 potential entrepreneurs being trained by 15 actual entrepreneurs. Of these 100, 30 per cent were students.
The efforts of the faculty and administration at LMTSM seem to be already paying off. A group of students from the institute spent a summer working at Delhi International Airport Limited ( DIAL) where they implemented a project on baggage handling. DIAL was so impressed that they felicitated the students and went on record to say that their work was more effective than their French consultants. So even as they work towards changing business education LMTSM seems to have started off on the right foot.