Fulbright Scholar Looks for Ways to Help India Produce Better Business Leaders

When Dr. Asha Bhandarker, a Fulbright Scholar from India who is being hosted by SPP, researched how business schools in her home country trained future managers, she was disappointed at the results. “Top schools were not shaping students into managers and future leaders,” she says. They were focusing on theories, ignoring the importance of interpersonal skills and, ultimately, failing to mold the kind of leaders that Indian and global companies need, she says. Today, the Indian corporate world lays strong emphasis on people management skills like leadership and team work. In addition they also emphasize the need for flexibility, ambiguity tolerance and the capacity for innovative thinking,” she wrote in her Fulbright proposal. Later, she added that the “Enron and Anderson debacles” raise concerns about the values that schools are teaching future leaders.

Dr. Asha Bhandarker is interested in how top business schools are shaping students to become future business leaders.

During her eight-month stay in the United States, Bhandarker is studying how certain U.S. business schools are training students to become better business leaders in the future. She has chosen to base her research on four schools that stand out as the most progressive, according to her preliminary research: the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University; the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; and the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.

From these examples, Bhandarker hopes to write about how Indian business schools can improve their curriculums. “My focus is on best practices,” explains Bhandarker, a professor at the Management Development Institute, a top-ranked Indian “B” School in Gurgaon (a town near Delhi that is known as one of the leading outsourcing capitals in the world).

While GMU is not among the schools in her study, Bhandarker still considers her time here to be part of her learning experience. Being immersed into such a diverse culture has been an eye opener, she says. “What I love about GMU is the diversity,” she says. “It’s a fantastic learning lab to see how to operate anywhere in the world. As the world becomes increasingly global, the skills needed to manage can be acquired in such an environment”.

While working in her office in Finley, she says that she also has become inspired by SPP faculty and staff. She adds, “It’s very stimulating to be here and see the pace at which people work.”