Dr. Dipak Jain, Dean, Kellogg School of Management addresses Yale-Great Lakes Conf'ce

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Dr. Dipak Jain, Dean of Kellogg School of Management addresses the Yale Great Lakes Research Conference

The Yale Great Lakes Conference started with the inaugural address from Dr. Venkat Krishnan, the conference chairman.

Venkat Krishnan, Director, Yale Great Lakes Center for Management Research

He said that western models were not relevant to this country and that there was a need to build a body of knowledge. According to him, “This conference brings together the thoughts of various scholars and the body of knowledge is enriched. We have a group of excellent speakers who will be talking on various areas of management.”

Dr Bala Balachandran, Founder and Honorary Dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management

Welcome Address

Dr. Bala, the Dean of Great Lakes welcomed one and all to the 3rd Yale Great Lakes Conference. He said that it was important to push the frontiers of management education and be on the cutting edge. One of the initiatives was the Yale Great Lakes Management Research Conference. He said “we are happy to have Dr. Venkat , who is spear heading Leadership influence and Power as a discipline at Great Lakes. Great Lakes requires its students to do an empirical study in a functional area of management. There are close to 80 faculty members who guide the research of these students”. Talking about the other research initiatives, he said “The second initiative is the Great Lakes NASMEI Marketing Conference spearheaded by Dr.Seenu Srinivasan. He has put Chennai on the management education map with the work done”. Talking about the progress Great Lakes had made, he said “we have 12 full time faculty members. Just as Kellogg is known for marketing excellence, we are focusing on marketing at Great Lakes and to this effect 4 of our permanent faculty are from the marketing background. We will be soon having a journal in the marketing arena. We are also planning to have the formal inauguration of the new campus by the prime minister of India”.

Deepak Jain. Dean, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Inaugural Address

He started on a lively note with an alternate introduction for himself. Talking about the Indian education system, he said “Indian parents concentrate on giving their children the best education. He cites this as the differentiating factor that will keep India ahead”. He said that people question whether students come to management school to learn or to earn. The teachers that taught their students all these financial instruments bear some indirect responsibility since they should teach the risks associated with the instruments as well. HBS started with the concept of a pedagogical tool called case studies. This was the philosophy for a long time from 1950-70. Late 60s and early 70s took a big shift. Dr.Seenu Srinivasan and Dr.Bala etc. applied their research background to management problems and this was the turning point in management education. People from operations research, economics, anthropology etc. used their concepts to solve management problems and thus there was a paradigm shift from case studies to analytical concepts. Business strategy was nothing but an application of game theory. These were the years that faculty from different branches got into management education and lot of research papers were published. Therefore this constituted the phase of research and analysis from the 70s to the 90s. Then 90s was a revolution due to the advent of new interactivity through the internet. With technology people started leveraging it to save time etc. In 2001, people started to question b-schools. People questioned the Friedman theory of maximizing only shareholder value. Enron was the key spark provider. Rather than ROI the new mantra was return on integrity. This gave birth to CSR. People of his generation grew up in an environment of constrained optimization. This resulted in three major characteristics.
 Dealing with ambiguity: He said that ‘we do control what should be done moving forward’. ‘Uncertainty is inevitable, worrying is optional’. In this generation, no concept of constrained optimization exists. The present generation does not recognize that ambiguity can exist and therefore are ill-equipped to deal with it.

 Ability to anticipate: The way the conference arrangements were made pointed to the fact that there was enough room for changes which indicated the ability to anticipate.

 Ability to adapt: After doing his PhD he was told that mathematics isn’t going anywhere which is why Dr. Seenu, Dr.Bala and him shifted to management. He moved to marketing. Going from Tejpur, Assam to the US and adapting is something that his generation has accomplished successfully, he opined. In a joint family system the advantage was that they tend to deal with diversity better. They learnt to compromise at a young age itself.

Management education should deal with the art of dealing with situations. Freedom is good but cannot be extended to infinite limits as has happened today.

Kellogg curriculum is being defined along the four pillars.

 Intellectual depth: Curiosity to ask the professor why something happened and under what conditions it wouldn’t happen.
 Experiential learning: Like medicine in which after receiving the degree you are required to go through internship for a fixed period before you can actually practice, they have buy out labs where students are trained by alumnus’ on practical equity trading etc.
 Global emphasis: He said that any country that attains superpower status or any organization attains it because of one factor: relative tolerance of diversity. By diversity it means diversity of thoughts. Welcoming diversity has to be a part of the curriculum and it is the real source of innovation. The concept of independent directors on the board has come about like this.
 Social responsibility and leadership: Kellogg campaign currently is to move from success to significance. Management schools should focus on creating leaders. He ended the talk by saying “In life you have to live with the conditions that we are in. People leave people, people don’t leave companies. Be the best b-school not only in the world but for the world”.


Dr.Seenu Srinivasan, Professor of Marketing, Stanford University

Keynote Address

Dr.Seenu Srinivasan began his talk by talking about the progress Great Lakes had made. He went on to talk about a research paper he had worked on which dealt with customer priorities. He posed the question “Why is the measurement of customer priorities important?” and he said “There is a fixed amount of development time for a product. That is where the assessment of customer priorities becomes important eg software.
This also finds application in defining priorities among different research topics at the Marketing Research Institute, USA”. He talked about the focus on an individual level measurement of a large number of customer priorities. He talked about the 3 methods for the measurement of customer priorities namely Constant Sum, Max Difference Scaling and Adaptive self explication. The adaptive self implication method was developed by Dr.Seenu and he demonstrated that it was one of most accurate methods of assessing customer priorities.

Zubin Mulla, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Venkat R Krishnan, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

Topic: Do Karma Yogis make better leaders? Exploring the relationship between the Leader’s karma-yoga and transformational leadership

They presented a paper which validates James Macgregor Burns’ hypothesis that moral development is a critical qualification of transformational leaders. Mr Zubin said that morality is conceptualized as Karma Yoga, a technique for performing actions such that the soul is not bound by the results of the actions. He also explained that Karma Yoga has three dimensions namely duty-orientation, indifference to rewards and equanimity. They studied 205 leader-follower pairs to investigate the impact of leaders’ karma yoga and follower’s belief in Indian philosophy on the follower’s perception of transformational leadership. They found that leader’s duty orientation was related to leader’s charisma and inspirational motivation. The relationship was strengthened when follower’s belief in Indian philosophy was high. The findings support a model of Indian transformational leadership built on the fundamental beliefs in Indian philosophy and duty-orientation.

Sayantan Sen & Joffi Thomas, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

Sayantan Sen, a student of Great Lakes Institute of Management presented a paper on “Environment, Business Strategy and Sustainable Competitive Advantage” which he co-authored with Prof. Joffi Thomas from IIM K. Their paper suggested some models that companies should use in future to address climate change, and how they can profit from what they do.

The models showed how climate change strategies can be implemented to root out existing inefficiencies. At the company level, implementing climate strategies will draw attention to money-saving opportunities. At an economy-wide level, climate change strategies will reform inefficient energy systems and remove distorting energy subsidies

Ashok Vasudevan, Preferred Brands International, USA

Topic: “Crisis as Capital & Capital as Crisis: The Entrepreneur’s Post Meltdown Dilemma”

He talked about the days bygone around the 4th five year plan when the outlay for the 1st and the second five year plan was 2356 and 4346 crores respectively. At that point in time, it was a big sum of money. If you have to build a nation, large amounts of money is needed. He talked about the number 28 trillion dollars which was the amount of money we have lost in the first 9 months of this year in the stock markets. The financial crisis in the past was caused mostly by insufficient capital available at the right time at the right place but the current crisis is caused not by the lack of capital. He drew a parallel between thermodynamics and business wrt capital which flows from an area of lower return to an area of higher return. He said “Most of the assets we own increase our standard of living although they depreciate over time except for real estate at least that was the thinking till now”. He talked about the trickle down economics based on increased spending by consumers who would also become recipients of this wealth in a small way. He said that this cycle was a vicious one over time. He said that the current system of economy resembled a universe centered on the consumer encouraged by irrational exuberance and profligacy while the government was somewhere at the outskirts of this universe. He talked about the amount of money spent on home loans which he said was a significant part of the consumer spending. The second circle of the universe he referred to were the corporates who were driven by greed, hubris, inequality and a huge amount of leverage. In the 1980s, for the top10 corporations, the average salary of the CEO was 4 million but today, it has gone up 50 times which he quoted as an example of inequality and greed. The third circle of the universe was the financial instruments like excessive capital, some of them dubious and driven by a quarterly focus. The banks who till recently been conservative in giving loans decided that it was ok to give loans without the guarantee of repayment with the collateral of the real estate property which was booming. 9 out of 10 MBA students did not know what the hedge fund was which he mentioned as the 4th circle of the universe which was driven by deregulation, ideology and ignorance. He talked about what the entrepreneurs need to do in an environment like this. There are only 3 ways to improve the business: increase users, increase usage and find new uses for existing products. He revisited porter’s 5 forces and talked about the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers, consumers and the environment. The first force of the year was inflation which was the bargaining power of the suppliers to raise prices. The customers drive their inventories down and provide cash discounts. The environment was driven by a strengthening rupee and they hedged exports. The consumers as a result were expressing frugality. Once the consumers became frugal, they devised a strategy to increase the number of users. All this put together is a zero sum game which will make you come out of it the way you went in. The inflation came down when the oil prices fell down. So they started conserving cash. The rupee started weakening and became 50 Rs to the dollar. The need of the hour was to hedge imports. In a deflationary situation, they gave price offs which drove the consumers to buy more given that there were some attractive deals on offer. The cost of customer acquisition is high and one is willing to invest money on consumers. The priority shifted to increase the usage of the products instead of increasing consumers.

Recessions force entrepreneurs to take a closer look at their ideas. He said that they are usually obsessed with their ideas and the time had come to evaluate them. If however, one had the right idea, this was the right time to start a business. Recession forces frugality. The business that tries to resolve customer pain becomes more visible in a recession. Recessions lead to committed start up teams. Also, startup costs are low.


Krishnan Dandapani, Florida International University

Topic: “Winning Strategies for conquering the financial crisis of 2009”

He talked about the financial crisis and he said “The total loss in the stock market is $45 trillion. This is as much as the entire GDP of the world. The loss in the stock market is like taking away the earnings of everyone in the world for a year. Recessions are a regular occurrence”. He believes it is a failure of the regulators, not so much a systemic failure. According to him, “The housing market went up 25% on an average over the last 4 years. Normally it goes up only 4%. This was the root of the problem. By the latest measure 20% of the homes in the US have to walk away from their mortgages. Ninja loans are loans given to people with no income and no assets. This led to change in the way banks obtained funding – from deposits to securities. The debt payment on mortgages should generally be around 26% of the income. Across the nation it rose to approximately 50%. Almost $62 trillion of CDS market has been developed. Banking system had assets that were worth much less than that. Sub-prime mortgages as a percentage of the total mortgages issued per year has been rising to up to 20% before the crisis. Because of securitization toxic securities were distributed all over the world. This led to re-pricing of many mortgage backed securities. Most American people have their wealth in their homes. Similarly people have money in their retirement accounts and the stock market. In a recession it is expected that the unemployment rate will reach around 10%. In the depression it was at about 30%. Present one is not expected to go down to this level.”

In 2009, he expects a recession will be forced in India as well and expected unemployment rate to be around 10%. The balance 90% will see a 10-15% reduction in income. The prices of capital goods – home prices, automobiles etc. will all fall. There may be collapses of major companies. Generally companies that are not cost efficient are the ones that collapse.

Talking about the crisis, he said “Why is this happening? Financial leverage went up to around 20 times on average. Lehman etc. had a leverage ratio of around 40. How long will it be?, it may last upto 1 or 2 years”

He said regulators didn’t act because people did not have an incentive to shift from the “originate and distribute model” back to “originate and hold model”. According to him “Ratings agencies thought the real estate market would not move up continuously and they always knew that they were part of a chain and if the chain broke they would still be able to escape scot-free. The major concern that led to the bailout of the auto companies is that around 300,000 people are indirectly involved with the auto industry and will all be unemployed. Second is that if they declared bankruptcy no one would buy a car from them. So, they would never be able to recover. The social cost of keeping them up and running makes it the right solution and GM etc. will have to improve their performance”. He also posed the question “Doesn’t the bailout package de-incentivize companies from improving their efficiency?” to which he answered “Since the monetary stimuli didn’t work the fiscal stimulus package is the only way out”.

Prem Saran, IAS, Government of Assam
Topic – “Win-Win Management: An Indic approach”

He proposed an alternative to Peter Senge’s model of organizational management He said that the Indian ways of thinking are going to be increasingly salient. India, Japan and China are going to take the sun. He developed a trivalent axiology of culture. There are not many useful models of Indian culture. He feels his model can set people thinking. Of the 3 themes or values in Indian culture that have been dominant for centuries:
 Valorization of play and pleasure:
 Counter-intuitive valorization of gender equity:
 Personality structure is porous:
 He said these qualities are relevant when portraying the personality of Indians. The use of this kind of a model in management is as follows. His model was considered as an alternative to Senge’s fifth discipline. He called his discipline the sixth and ultimate discipline at the conference where he presented it as an alternative to Senge’s approach. According to him, the Nobel prize winning work of two parts of the brain- left and right is useful even today. A meditative and visualization approach can help tap up to 90% of the right brain. The West uses more of the left brain. Meditative practices also help to create permanent changes in the brain, given the tremendous neuro-plasticity of the human brain. With practice those parts of the brain become more dominant and hence more accessible for use. Neuro-linguisitic programming sees the human brain as a tremendously powerful bio-computer. He cited the example of champion athletes who regularly use visualization. Every 90 minutes or so the human brain shifts from left to right brain mode. He said “What we need is a simple technique to access this right brain state. Once in this deeply focused state present yourself with the pain or problem that you face. Having a technique to access that state systematically will help you be one up on the competition”. He proposed a simple modification of the ancient kundalini technique. He put some IAS officers in an altered state of mind in an experiment and he observed that, in this state the brain uses its tremendous power of association. This according to him was Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking. This type of technique will help one develop a winning organization, foster team work and that’s why he calls it win-win management. He proposed the Indic way as an alternative to the protestant work ethic.

Sivan Nathan

Topic: Going green is a winning management strategy.

He began by citing the example of Henry Ford’s assembly line when he wasn’t aware of the potential damaging effects on the environment. According to him “Since it was small scale the effects were localized and were hardly noticeable. As the scale of industrialization and consumption increased the effects on the environment became noticeable around the 1930s. Steel, coal based power plants etc. started showing their damaging effects on the environment. As Japan and Germany joined the ranks of industrialization the effects were even more significant. Water industrial discharge, pesticides, cleaning agents, plastics etc. were more and more in use. Early 60s and 70s the Asian countries became more prosperous. With most of the manufacturing shifting to China, the lack of regulation exacerbated the problem. With the fall of the Berlin Wall things like Chernobyl etc. came to light and people got to know the damaging effects of pollution in the former Soviet Union. Over the last 2 decades as Indian and China ascended the crisis came on as the scale is so large due to the populations of these 2 countries. Smog in LA etc. even after all these years of regulation. Children born with birth defects etc. were visible as the scale of pollution became enormous. In Asia it occurred in the order of Japan, China and now even India”.

He said that a lot of credit should go to the NPA organizations formed in the US that then proliferated all over the world. Initially they were considered to be hostile to industry but now their role is being understood. The EPA was charged to regulate chemicals and protect human health by safeguarding the natural environment: air, water, and land. Similar govt. agencies have been established all over the world. Auto-emission regulations also started in the US and were exported abroad. Over the last decade the focus has been on worldwide regulation, e.g. the Kyoto protocol regulating emissions of four gases and two CFCs. The US however has not subscribed to this protocol. Rise in the price of crude oil helped research into alternatives like renewable energy etc. Regulation and the eco-system (in the sense of the rising price of energy) have both played their hand in the development of renewable and energy efficient appliances. Example of how going green is a winning management strategy: Georgia state pass out Crissy Klaus opened a volatile zero organic compound child care center that uses no chemicals in the food, electricity etc. that is hugely successful. Many companies have gone into generation of electricity in biomass plants from mainly wood rather than coal firing. Marketing research shows that consumers are concerned about the environmental policies of a company. Consumers are less likely to buy from a company that follows unethical and illegal environmental policies. A significant drop in sales occurs when a company comes to media attention because of faulty environmental policies.



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