BANGALORE: Guess what's going to be taught at the Harvard Business School soon — business models adopted by mid-tier companies like MindTree and
Zensar Technologies which emerged unscathed from the downturn. And, among the list of personality profiles the students of this high-profile B-school will delve into, will be names like S Gopalakrishnan, CEO Infosys, Anand G Mahindra, vice-chairman and managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, Britannia Industries MD Vinita Bali and ICICI Bank chairman KV Kamath.
David A Garvin, the C Roland Christensen professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, is at present on a India mission, building up case studies along with his research associates, on these two midsize companies.
They are also conducting extensive interviews with top 25 senior executives of Indian firms to understand the distinctive qualities of the Indian business environment, organisations and leadership.
Garvin says that the economic meltdown and the aggressive growth of emerging markets was one of the reasons to study more about Indian companies which have surfed past the difficult times successfully.
“What I found is that companies like Infosys takes the perspective of multiple stakeholders. Shareholders are important, so are the executives, employees and customers and the public. It is different from the US where shareholder views dominate,” Mr Garvin pointed out. He said organisations such as Infosys has a wonderful system of planning for a slack. “They move around their resources, because there is a fair degree of unpredictability in the environment” . He is also meeting top executives of other companies as well such as Microsoft India and GE India.
The case study he is focusing on will include work place practices like innovations in terms of knowledge management at MindTree and innovative human resource practices and vision community at Zensar.
“The distinctive aspect of these companies is their management practices. MindTree has a distinctive culture, because they have a very strong value system, like sharing and they believe in collaborations,” said Mr Garvin who first visited India in 1969. “Zensar has got a vision community, where a cross section of the organisation is empowered to develop proposals on major policies and issues of the company. You don’t see this form of empowerment very often”.
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