5 S.P. JAIN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT & RESEARCH (SPJIMR), MUMBAI
FROM NASSCOM’S President Debjani Ghosh to Bacardi’s CEO Mahesh Madhavan, Mumbai-based B-school SPJIMR’s network of notable alumni is endless. Founded in 1981, the institute’s student-centric approach has worked well for it. And Varun Nagaraj, who took charge as Dean in September 2021, attests to the fact that the relationship between the faculty and the students of this institute is “incredibly surprising”. “We’re the smallest in terms of our student intake. Here we have our students staying connected with the faculty and continuing that handholding from an instructional point of view. It’s something I have never seen in any other university,” says Nagaraj.
He adds that another thing that works for them is the selection criteria. “As compared to many other business schools, we have a more balanced selection scheme. You will actually see a wider spread amongst our students in terms of their cut-off scores. We will have people with lower scores because we found something interesting about them or they might be the ones that can adapt to change,” he adds.
Adapting to change in a VUCA world is the biggest differentiator of how well an institute and its students perform. One of the strengths of SPJIMR lies in its approach of balancing traditional management principles with contemporary skills. “VUCA is all about something you’re confronting for the first time, and new situations call for new solutions. Sometimes, B-schools get hung up in what you would call ‘the jargon of the day’: whether it’s AI, analytics or design thinking,” he says. For Nagaraj, basic principles like critical thinking, scientific reasoning, philosophy of science, systems thinking, etc., which are required for innovation, are eternal: “They are not a tool or a technique; they are core principles of how people should think if they want to be innovators. I think that’s what business schools should focus on.”
The key, he says, is to keep a fine balance between the fundamentals and the skills that one will require on Day One on the job. “You have to expose your students to today’s tech, because that is what they’re going to do on Day One, but the employer is also hiring them for Day 10 and Day 1,000 on the job, and that will be a lot better if their principles are strong because the current technologies would have changed by then,” he says.
Over the years, there have been courses like cloud computing that have stood the test of time and topics like Web 3.0 that have not. “Business schools introduced a Web 3.0 class in 2018 and pulled it out in 2020. I’m sure some schools are introducing courses on Metaverse right now. But the key is to stick to the basics. I’m a strong advocate for the focus on fundamentals in management education,” he says.