Up there, with the best

Three thousand feet above sea level, in Lavale taluka on the outskirts of Pune (which is about 800 ft above sea level), the winds of change are blowing through the 30-year-old Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM). Spread over 300 acres on a picturesque hilltop, the Symbiosis Knowledge Village, SIBM’s new residential campus, has become operational from the current academic session.

The students, numbering a little over 400, have already checked in, but finishing touches are still being given to the auditorium, lecture rooms, library and recreational centre. But no one is complaining about the “work in progress”. Some new students even feel that “studying here is like holidaying in Khandala, Ooty or Mussorie”. Arun Mudbidri, Director, SIBM, is justifiably proud of the new picture postcard campus. “A residential campus was the big missing link in our portfolio,” he says, adding that he now plans to take the institute “to the next level in terms of infrastructure, faculty and programmes”.

Aiming for the top

That’s shorthand for a concerted effort “to challenge the supremacy of IIMs”. SIBM is getting there. It ranks #4 in the 6th BT-Nielsen Survey of India’s best B-schools, the third successive year that it has held on to that position—ahead of the entire universe of Indian B-schools covered by this survey barring the Big 3 IIMs (A, B and C).

SIBM, in fact, is already threatening these IIMs on some key parameters. According to the BTNielsen Survey, functional heads, HR heads and young executives rate SIBM at par with, and, in one or two cases, even above IIM-A, IIM-B and IIM-C in areas like teaching methodology, quality of placements, infrastructure and specialist units.

Mudbidri is now focussing on building greater corporate linkages— both on course content and in the sphere of attracting professionals from the corporate sector to teach at the institute. “It is (and will remain) a win-win situation for both sides. We’ll assist the corporate sector to grow and, this, in turn, will help us grow,” he says.

All you wanted to know about Symbiosis The school has established itself as one among the best B-schools in India. Established: 1978 Batch size: 180 Faculty-student ratio: 1:19 Course fee: Rs 2,10,000 per annum Entrance criteria: Graduates with 50 per cent marks are eligible to appear in Symbiosis National Aptitude Programme held in December every year Annual average salary domestic: Rs 10.38 lakh per annum International: $50,000 per annum No. of offers made: 233 No. of international offers: 11 No. of offers per student: 1.88

SIBM has four verticals for corporate linkages—Corporate Education (training field managers), Competence-based Programmes (select programmes for senior managers), Core Development (building new skills in managers) and Consulting (services). “We are also doing consulting work in insurance with Max New York Life. It’s an HR initiative to address attrition,” says Shrirang Altekar, Associate Professor at SIBM.

The school also has a very successful collaboration with Hindustan Unilever. In the first week of September, the entire marketing batch of SIBM will be out in the market, embedded with a dozen HUL distributors. “Each group will be attached to a distributor for eight days, in order to gain market exposure,” says Mudbidri. Then, it is also developing a practical retail module with Subhiksha. “There are another half a dozen corporate tie-ups in the offing. We’re talking to ITC, Dabur, Goldman Sachs, E&Y and others for this,” discloses Mudbidri.

Himanshu Kulkarni, Associate Faculty at SIBM, who has almost three decades of corporate experience, says the biggest challenge for B-schools is to attract talent. “Today, the compensation gap between the corporate sector and academia is huge,” he says.

Expansion plans

In early June, SIBM launched a 3.5-acre campus in Bangalore’s Electronics City. “The campus is virtually the replica of SIBM Pune,” says Mudbidri. He also has plans to open a campus in Hyderabad, probably by 2010. These expansions will be driven by corporate collaborations rather than academic ones.

“I would prefer to go with a top corporate to new cities,” he adds. SIBM is also talking to B-schools in France and the UK to induct foreign students and also send SIBM’s students there. “We will soon have multi-cultural classes,” says Ameeta Shiroor, Deputy Director at SIBM.

The school is laying a special emphasis on beefing up international placements. “We cannot match IIM-A on this count,” admits Mudbidri. To start with, he has Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai on his radar. “We are likely to launch an executive MBA programme with a state university in Dubai by the end of this year,” he says, adding that SIBM is also in negotiations with global corporations based in these three countries.

SIBM is progressing systematically on its plans to challenge the supremacy of the IIMs and IIM-A in particular. Mudbidri has identified aspirational value as one of his focus areas. “That’s one area where aspiring MBAs place the IIMs way ahead of Symbiosis,” he admits, while doling out what he calls “encouraging statistics”. Of the 108,000 students who appeared for the all-India entrance test for SIBM last year, 98,000 opted for SIBM as their first choice (for the available 180 seats).

“The competition to get into SIBM is very tough,” he says, but admits that SIBM still has to go some distance before it can hope to challenge the top three IIMs on this count. “The first choice for any student is clearly the IIMs, but Symbiosis is clearly the next best choice,” says Aditya Sihmar, a second-year student at the institute. Mudbidri feels the lack of infrastructure, and particularly residential facilities, was a major reason for this. “But I’m sure we will be able to change that perception in the near future,” he adds.

SIBM is also focussing on a module for entrepreneurship development this year. “Symbiosis has really transformed me as a leader,” says Vineet Nerurkar, from the class of 1993, who worked in Parle and Nivea for a decade before setting up his own media valuation company in early 2000. Mudbidri wants to institutionalise this and turn SIBM into a breeding ground for entrepreneurs. “There are thousands of opportunities to turn entrepreneur in today’s liberalised and globalised business environment,” says Mudbidri.

Indian B-schools have attained international fame for turning out good managers. If SIBM can take that forward and institutionalise a system of turning out entrepreneurs, Mudbidri might yet fulfill his ambition of pipping the IIMs to the top rank in future BT surveys.