wealth presents an interview with Ramesh Venkateswaran, Director of the SDM Institute of Management Development, Mysore, to understand the B-School's Unique Selling Proposition, and why yoga and vegetarian food are compulsory on campus.
What do you think are the differentiating qualities of SDM-IMD over its peer institutes?
Peer institutes are much larger than SDM-IMD. The difference is that we have strongly believed in being low profile. That's why we tried to build on a small number quality. We have only 120 students a batch. Many people look at us and say that in an economic model this doesn’t t make sense and we should go for a larger student body of say 400 to 500. The major differentiator: we are low profile, high quality, and that's really what sets us apart.
In terms of a B-school ranking, where exactly would you place SDM-IMD?
We should be in the top two to three per cent, which means that we are in the top 30, assuming that there are 1,700 B-schools across the country.
Profile: My salary increased four times after my MBA!
How has SDM changed over the years? What are the major changes in the infrastructure? For instance, you have a new campus.
I think there are two things that have changed. One is physical infrastructure; we have a substantial new campus and so on. The second thing, which has distinctly changed: we are consciously trying to break out of this conservative low profile mode. We want to tell people that there's great institute here.
We want to tell them that studying in Mysore is an advantage rather than an obstacle because you have the ambience, and everything you need to help you concentrate.
So, you will be seeing a lot more of SDM-IMD in terms of people from all over the country. Statistics will tell you that more than 40 to 50 per cent of students come from areas other than Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. I think that is a major change.
We are also making changes in our academic outlook; we are making a change to see whether we are producing leaders of the future. A lot of people provide an MBA in the standard fields such as marketing and financial management. This year we are trying to build in what we call a socially relevant project.
A first year student must go out in society and spend a week and sensitise himself or herself. We are getting into more seminar-oriented projects where people will have to get involved in hands-on learning rather than just classroom instructions.
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Photograph: Vipurva Parikh
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