Exchange Program Links MBAs from Stanford and Bangalore, India
November 2007
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Stanford MBA students who took part in an intense week of living, learning, and bonding with peers at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore (IIMB) last summer got to expand their understanding of the rapidly developing Indian nation beyond the usual statistics included in books and PowerPoint presentations.
The 16 students who made the program’s inaugural trip to India in September said the exchange offers the sort of intense cultural immersion that is often missing from international exchange programs where U.S. students may spend more time with fellow Americans than with the locals in the country they are visiting.
That was the intent of V. “Seenu” Srinivasan, Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who helped design the Stanford and IIMB link (SAIL) program as a way for students to form valuable contacts in India without having to spend an entire academic quarter away from Stanford. The program has a structure similar to GSB’s exchange program with Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“They lived on campus and ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a group of 16 IIMB students,” said Srinivasan. “They got to know each other in great depth.”
If mealtimes were a great way to start the bonding process, it deepened during long bus trips over packed roads shared by cars and cows alike to destinations like Infosys, Google India, and local health care centers.
Indeed these daily commutes, which most Indians endure without a shrug, emerged as one of the most striking lessons of the program: a metaphor for how the growing opportunities in India today are tempered with equally big challenges, and how the locals’ ability to navigate the two extremes reflects their patience and optimism.
“It can easily take one or two hours to travel five or ten miles,” said Chris Carter, a second-year Stanford MBA student who took part in the program. “From my perspective, it was interesting that the Indian people were able to operate so well in that kind of an environment.”
Like the outdated roads over which Indians travel to high-paying jobs in modern office buildings, the SAIL program exposed the country’s strengths and weaknesses, say the students, who will complete the exchange later this year when they host their IIMB counterparts for a week at Stanford.
Some of the surprising strengths students observed included a culture that was not only highly diverse but also highly tolerant, and a rapid reversal of the longstanding brain drain that had more locals and foreigners interested in starting their careers in India rather than in the United States.
Students say they also saw innovative approaches to some universal social problems, such as the shortage of affordable health care. One system they observed used a mini-hospital on a bus to treat patients in far-flung rural areas. One local health insurance system managed to provide coverage to rural farmers for less than a dollar a month.
“They are creating solutions for themselves,” said Lloyd Nimetz, another member of the MBA Class of 2008. “They don’t need developed countries as much as we need them.”
On the downside, Stanford students noticed a stubborn gap between the haves and the have-nots and a cultural aversion toward risk that led most Indian business students to favor careers in banking and consulting over the more entrepreneurial ventures that are so popular among Stanford MBAs.
While a number of students said they were inspired to think more seriously about starting a company in India, some admitted that the cultural differences could be a potential drawback.
“Indians are not motivated by wealth in the same way that Americans are,” said classmate Reshma Karipineni. “It’s something I would think about if I were considering starting a business there.”
If such topics can sound politically incorrect, or just awkward, when discussed in a formal setting, they were just the issues that Professor Srinivasan said he hoped the close contact with Indian peers would foster. Srinivasan, an Indian native who has lived in the United States since 1968, said he understood firsthand how the two cultures had vastly different styles of communicating, which—unless addressed—could lead to serious misunderstandings in the business world.
“Indian executives will rarely come right out and say that they will not do something. Face saving is a very big thing in India,” he said. “This is not always a good thing in business, but it can be. It can lead to ways to look for a third way, a compromise.”
One of the best things about the SAIL exchange, Srinivasan said, is that GSB students gain not just insight into these cultural differences, but also some good friends in India who they can now call to keep the dialog going by just picking up the phone.
As part of the exchange, students form teams with two members from each school to collaborate on a project during fall quarter. Work began on the IIMB campus and continues long distance during fall quarter. It will conclude when the Indian MBAs visit Stanford in December with all participants making presentations describing their work. The project offers two credits for the course work.
—Andrea Orr