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IN CONVERSATION 29 Jul 2011

'Students Are Not Vessels'

The founder and Chief Executive Officer of School of Inspired Leadership speaks about his newly established business school, leadership and more
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he Gurgaon-based School of Inspired Leadership (Soil) - a comparatively new entrant in the business school arena - may sound like just another B-School mushrooming across the country. Take a closer look and you spot the difference. The B-School is focused on preparing leaders and not just managers. It is not only talking about premium placements but nurturing character through the practice of our value system. The classrooms are not theatrical but more like a cluster of roundtables. Sustainability, besides being talked about, is practised as well. The school has been built with industry support especially in designing the placement process. A brainchild of Anil Sachdev, who as the chief executive officer likes to run the business school as a company. Sachdev, founder of Eicher Consultancy Services and an HR dvelopment firm called Grow Talent, has taught at various leading business schools including ISB, the Kelly School of Business, Flint Michigan and Seattle and Ohio University. He spoke to Businessworld Online's Chetna Mehra about his recent foray into higher education, Soil. Excerpts.

How is management different from leadership? Management is all about planning, organising and controlling. You set a goal, you plan it and you organise the resources and then implement and control it. Leadership on the other hand is about vision, values and empowerment. So there is a difference. Management is about getting people to work together to achieve a goal and you manage them. Leadership is about developing a vision which makes people in-charge. It's about emphasising on the right values that inspire people and then imploring those values by creating conditions in which people take responsibility. So, management is more outside-in, leadership is

more inside-out. Now Leadership also could be of two kinds. One could be a powerful leader with a charismatic personality. People trust and follow him or her. In such a situation, once the leader is around, the results are good but once the leader is gone and no one else is able to perform a similar role, the success is short lived. This brings us to the second type of leader. There are some leaders who articulate what one would like to see in him or herself i.e. it is not their (leaders') vision but the understanding of the needs of the people, and articulating on their behalf a preferred future from which people are inspired by. So, the leadership can have a motivational dimension. Why inspired leadership? People are yearning for a better future for our community. For example, in the global context, people are deeply worried about the amount of social unrest, degradation of the environment and planet. Everybody is asking the question if the growth we are experiencing is sustainable. So, when the economic crisis came, people's worst fears came true and they could see the impact of their uncontrolled greed. In the Indian context, people are deeply concerned that though we earned the freedom from the British and we visualised an India of our dreams, a small percentage of the population has been growing wealthy but for a lot of people the economic situation has not dramatically improved. If you look at the difference between the salaries of the people on top of the pyramid and those at the bottom, the gap is widening by the year. Twenty years ago, the difference between the pay of an MD or top level executive and front line person was 1:20 in a typical Indian company. Today it is 1:500. We have experienced a growth that is not balanced. The government on the other hand is spending a lot more money, but the impact of this money is not impacting the country. The state of the nutrition of children, the living standard and the health care is not upto the mark. This means the growth is not really resulting in the qualitative development of the country and it's a big challenge and it is a big challenge. This same young population, which is our biggest asset, if we don't give them the proper capability, the same will become more of a liability. All this shows, the kind of growth we are having across India and in fact world is not sustainable. I think people need to talk about a model of development and how it can be achieved. The businesses cannot say that their job is to only give highest returns to the share holders and they are not responsible for the environmental degradation, poverty, ethics and corruption. As it is the pace of development was not enough, corruption destroys the capacity to do more. We found these issues becoming grave each day and no business school seems to have a subject on these social issues. Business schools are not teaching what businesses can do to develop the character of a human being. We find these challenges are increasingly becoming bigger and business schools have closed their eyes as ostriches. break-page-break Even when it comes to selecting people they were selecting the similar kind of people, those who are highly analytical,

very sharp in left brain thinking. What they didn't consider was those 'left brain thinking people' don't have any new ideas because they were not creative enough. We found nobody was really thinking of leadership and specially, inspired leadership - taking responsibility of the way we live. And we thought of filling this gap in higher education and that's how the School of Inspired Leadership was born. So, if we want a world in which there is proper utilisation of resources and there is equality, more justice, less corruption, if we dream about all these things in our heart that's what we should convert into education. That's what inspired leadership is all about. Ethics and values are something which a person learns at the elementary stage. Do you think at such a stage where the students are grown ups, these values can still be instilled in them? Students are not vessels to be filled. This is not something that we are trying to put something into them. Our notion is students are yearning for improving their lives and the lives of those around them. Rather than filling them up, it is better to ask some pertinent questions to them so they began taking responsibility. Higher education cannot get away with an excuse that it cannot develop a character and moulding a character is work of the earlier education, parenting and teachers. I think at every stage of life an ethical person may want to change sides because human mind is very complex. You cannot teach what is good or what is bad, you just have to create awareness. Leadership is about saying you are not a victim and you are given a choice. How do you choose your students? We did a thorough research of the admission processes across the business schools world-wide. We follow the process in which students are encouraged to express their inner desire to do something more. We ask our applicants to write essays and ask them to express why they want to study in Soil. We also ask them some unusual questions, which help these candidates to come-up with their innermost desire to do something. Then we ask the applicants to take a test which we have been using for the last 9 years now - the Caliper test (a test by Caliper - an organisation in Princeton which has tested 2 and a half million people and in India). CAT and GMAT can fairly test one's analytical ability but none of these can test the students on their creative ability and emotional intelligence. Now, the research is showing that emotional intelligence is lot more important than analytical intelligence. We test both of them during our admission process. Caliper helps to create diversity in our classrooms rather than take people who think alike. After, we conduct personal interviews which lasts for at least an hour and is known as the talent appreciation process. How many application did you receive this year? The ratio of people who applied to those who joined was 3:1 this year. The first batch (last year) was of 60 students. The students who came to join us in first batch took a major risk because it was the time when financial crisis were going on. So, it was a leap of faith for them. Why did you choose Gurgaon for your campus? It was very important for us to be very near to the industry in the initial years. People should not think twice before visiting us. Soil should be next door to them because the business school is created for and by the industry. Once the reputation is built and we are an established brand we will move a little further. We do have a long-term plan to shift to a residential campus not too far from here but that will come after we earn a reputation among industry and students. What are your future plans? Right now our complete focus is on establishing unimpeachable quality. We have to make sure that we deliver the promises we have made. The kind of learning experience we thrive to give to our students have to be flawless. I think for the first few years it is very important to do so. Second, we want to keep attracting the top faculty, not just on the part time but full time basis. Third, we want to increase our student intake gradually year on year. Our current building has a capacity of 240 students. So, for the first few years we want to make sure, as we increase in numbers that quality should not go down. And when things start falling in place, gradually, we will be planning our residential campus. In this financial year, our aim is to take a firm position on location and land. Soil is a private, non-profit initiative. We teach ethical business in this school and we practice it. We believe you should teach only what you practice. So, if you are running a business school and you don't run it like a business, most of your administrator's don't have an idea what a good business is all about. It's like a medicine college or a law school. So, we felt we should be very transparent with our students, we tell them don't apply to us for a masters degree, we cannot give you that. You only come to us if you want yourself to develop as a leader. This is an alternative to a traditional business education. Why Soil has included a programme on Social Innovation in its one-year programme? We had visualised this right in the beginning. For us, there are five pillars of leadership. The deepest core is human consciousness which we call mindfulness, this can be practiced by Yoga and meditation. Next comes the practice on intellectual level or asking the right kind of questions. Then comes the third level of existence which is at the emotional level - it is practice of compassion. And when it comes to practice of compassion, we have the SIP. You can't teach compassion by role playing or lectures, but when the students work with the NGOs and at grass root level with the people who are less fortunate then even if they are not that emotionally stimulated they tend to imbibe in themselves a certain feeling of compassion. Our students work with the NGOs thoughout the year, which is a very beautiful experience. Many of them come back and report experiences that were life changing for them.

Tags: in conversation | anil sachdev | soil | leadership | management | admission | inspired leadership | ethics | ngo | chetna mehra
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