Meet the Indian-American deans of US B-schools

B-schools across the world seem to be facing a difficulty in getting deans. With salaries of about $500,000 to $750,000 for a dean's job at top American business schools, professors who get additional income from consultancy services are reluctant to take up a dean's job, says a Financial Times report.

A dean's job is 24/7, tough and challenging, dealing with a host of issues everyday. Nevertheless, Indian-American professors have done a commendable job at foreign universities.

"With business education at an inflection point, we must strive to equip future leaders with the competence and character to address emerging global business and social challenges," says Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School.

Meet the Indian-American deans who have established their leadership and managerial skills taking up high-profile jobs at prestigious institutes.

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"I feel a profound sense of responsibility for continuing Harvard Business School's proud legacy of groundbreaking ideas and transformational educational experiences," Nitin Nohria said as he became the first Indian-American dean of the Harvard Business School.

"As we enter our second century, I look forward to working with the School's faculty, staff, students, and alumni to forge a vision for Harvard Business School that will enable it to remain a beacon for business education for the next 100 years."

A scholar of leadership and organisational change, IIT-ian Nitin Nohria will be the Harvard Business School's 10th dean. He has previously been the School's senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behaviour unit. Current co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and a member of the HBS faculty since 1988, he will take up his new role on July 1.

Nohria received his bachelor of technology degree in chemical engineering in 1984 from IIT, Bombay, which awarded him its Distinguished Alumni Medal in 2007.

He received his PhD in management in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, where he earned the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in behavioral and policy sciences.

He joined the HBS faculty immediately after receiving his PhD, as an assistant professor, was appointed associate professor in 1993, received tenure in 1997, and was promoted to his current chair as Richard P Chapman Professor of Business Administration in 1999.

Nohria has co-written or edited 16 books, and authored more than 50 articles and dozens of teaching cases and notes.

His most recent book, which he co-edited with Rakesh Khurana, titled 'Handbook of Leadership, Theory & Practice,' published earlier this year, reflects the colloquium he organised as part of the Harvard Business School's centennial in 2008 to stimulate serious scholarly research on leadership.

Nohria, who has taught across the Business School's MBA, doctoral, and executive education programs, recently taught a program titled 'Building a Global Enterprise in India'.

His intellectual interests focus on human motivation, leadership, corporate transformation and accountability, and sustainable economic and human performance.

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"My job as the dean is to promote the extraordinary resources of the Rutgers School of Business-Camden to the region and the nation," says Jaishankar Ganesh.

Jaishankar Ganesh, a noted business education innovator and scholar in international marketing, has been named as the dean of the prestigious Rutgers School of Business-Camden, becoming the first Indian- American to get the coveted post.

The 45-year-old Ganesh will serve as the fourth dean of the Rutgers-Camden business school from August 1. Ganesh will become Rutgers' first full and permanent dean of Asian Indian descent.

As dean, Ganesh will develop the academic and administrative operations of the Rutgers-Camden business school, which has 679 undergraduate and 276 master of business administration (MBA) students attending classes on the Camden Campus and in Atlantic City and Mount Laurel.

Ganesh, currently serves as associate dean for administration and executive education at the University of Central Florida's College of Business Administration. 

In this position, he worked to revamp the Executive Development Centre's programs, resulting in increased enrollment and a surge in revenue from $300,000 to more than $3.5 million during a five-year period. 

He earned his Ph.D. in marketing and international business from the University of Houston, where he also earned his MBA.

He received a bachelor's degree in instrument technology from the Madras Institute of Technology at Anna University, and a bachelor's degree in physics from the Loyola Autonomous College of at the University of Madras, both in India. He previously served as an engineer at HCL-India.

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Yash Gupta

Yash P Gupta is dean and professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore. Yash Gupta became the first permanent dean of the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School on January 1, 2008.

He has led the development of a vision, a faculty governance structure, academic and administrative processes, and financial and academic resource strategies.

During his tenure at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Gupta developed an innovation-focused MBA curriculum; increased emphasis on faculty research; and created four research centres.

He raised over $55 million and improved the school's rankings in the Wall Street Journal from 26th to 10th on the national list. He served as a professor (2004-2007) and dean (2004-2006) and held the Robert R. Dockson Dean's Chair of Business Administration.

Gupta was also professor and dean, and held the Kirby L. Cramer Endowed Chair in Business Administration, at the University of Washington from 1999 to 2004.

From 1992-1999, he was dean and professor of management in the College of Business and Administration at the University of Colorado at Denver.

He earned a PhD in Management Sciences from the University of Bradford, England (1976). He also holds an MTech, Production Management from Brunel University, and a BSc (Engineering) from Punjab University, India.

He is a registered professional engineer in the Province of Manitoba, Canada. He also completed the College Management Program in the Heinz School of Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University.

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G 'Anand' Anandalingam, 54, is dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business since July 1, 2008.

Anandalingam identifies sustainable innovation as a priority in developing business leaders ready to meet the varied and mutable challenges of a global 21st century economy. 

A dynamic leader with a strong founding in academia, Anandalingam has been with the Smith School since 2001.

During this time he has served in various key senior leadership positions as senior associate dean and as chair of the Smith School's Decision, Operations and Information Technologies department.

He played a key role in supporting the school's rise in reputation in the past decade with expansion projects that more than doubled the physical size of the school and equipped it with state-of-the-art infrastructure; and the recruitment of a significant number of new faculty members from the world's premier research institutions.

He was also responsible for helping to develop Smith's global executive programs and led the school's effort to revamp and innovate the MBA curriculum.

He is the founder of the Center for Electronic Markets and Enterprises, a center that he co-directed from 2001-2004, and he helped found the school's Center on Health Information and Decision Systems.

Before joining Smith in 2001, Anandalingam was at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly 15 years where he was the National Center Professor of Resource and Technology Management, and a professor in both the Engineering School and the Wharton School.

Anandalingam began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University, and his B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University.

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Sunil Chopra is interim dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Sally Blount, the dean of the undergraduate college and vice dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University has been named dean of the school from July.

Chopra is also the IBM Distinguished Professor of Operations Management. He became a faculty member of the school in 1989. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at the Stern School of Business Administration at New York University. He has a PhD in Operations Research from SUNY Stony Brook.

Professor Chopra's research and teaching interests are Operations Management, Logistics and Distribution Management, design of communication networks and design of distribution networks.

He has co-authored the books Managing Business Process Flows and Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation. Both books are published by Prentice Hall and are used at several of the top business schools to teach Operations Management and Supply Chain Management respectively.

The Supply Chain Management book was awarded the best book of the year for 2002 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). Professor Chopra has won several teaching awards at Kellogg.

His recent research has focused on risk management in supply chains. He has also studied distribution systems in a variety of companies trying to identify market, manufacturing, and product characteristics that drive the structure of a supply chain.

He has consulted for a variety of firms including Boise Cascade Office Products, GE Capital, W.W. Grainger, Motorola, Intel, and Sara Lee.

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Dipak C. Jain is the Sandy and Morton Goldman Professor in Entrepreneurial Studies and a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1987.

From 2001-2009, Jain served as Dean of the Kellogg School, bringing more than 20 years of experience in management and education to his position at the school's helm.

Prior to his appointment as Dean, he served as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for five years and worked closely with former Kellogg School Dean Donald P. Jacobs to set the agenda for the school's curriculum, faculty and research activities.

Dean Jain's areas of research include the marketing of high-tech products; market segmentation and competitive market structure analysis; cross-cultural issues in global product diffusion; new product diffusion; and forecasting models.

He has had more than 50 articles published in leading academic journals. Dean Jain teaches courses on marketing research, new products and services, and statistical models in marketing.

His was educated in Tezpur in Assam. He went on to earn his bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics in 1976 and his master's degree in mathematical statistics in 1978 from Gawahati University in India. He taught at Gawahati for the next five years before leaving for Dallas to pursue his PhD in marketing at the University of Texas.

Ajay Patel

Ajay Patel was interim dean and dean of the Babcock Graduate School of Management from 2003-2008. Patel joined Wake Forest University in 1993. While at Wake Forest, he has served as Associate Dean for Faculty and Alumni Affairs (2002-2003) and then Interim Dean and Dean (2003-2008) of the Babcock Graduate School of Management.

Patel's work has been widely published in scholarly journals and has won four awards from academic associations and two from practitioner associations.

During his tenure at the Babcock School, he has won numerous professional awards and teaching honours. In 1997 and 2000, Patel was honored with the Outstanding Faculty Award for the Babcock School's Charlotte evening MBA programme.