If you bring together Indian business leaders, a common link is likely to be their education at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management. Such is the brand equity of a Masters in Business Administration from India’s six IIMs that the leading member, in Ahmedabad, is often spoken of in the same breathless manner as traditional centres of excellence such as Harvard Business School in the US.
The comparison may not be entirely fanciful: in the next few months Harvard Business School, already stacked with Indian faculty members, will appoint a new dean. A front runner is Srikant Datar, who graduated with distinction from IIM-Ahmedabad in 1978. If business schools are symbols of global civil society, as Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, told Indian alumni of Wharton Business School, then arguably IIM-Ahmedabad is in the vanguard of globalisation in India.
