MBAs In INDIA

Dr. Das Interview Part 1




Dr. Das Interview Part 2

We visited today with Dr. Jitendra K. Das who is the Director of the Fore School of Management in Delhi. His position as Director is equivalent to mine as Dean.

Dr. Das (pronounced "Dahss") is a tall, courtly gentleman. He appears to be in his fifties, with a distinguished speckling of gray starting to peek out. Although scholarly, having earned his PhD in Toronto, Canada, he has the animated speech and gestures of an entrepreneur.

As he talked about his first year at Fore, just completed, his excitement was contagious.

Founded in the 1980s, Fore is among a new breed of schools in India. A private institution, Fore lives by its revenues almost exclusively. Therefore its programs must sell. It must meet a need or it will no longer exist, and Dr. Das knows that.

So he is working on lots of new ideas, just like we are at Lipscomb. To go with his full-time MBA program (with 200 students) and his part-time evening and weekend programs (with 500 students), he is now planning to add a satellite campus in the fast-growing suburb of
Gurgaon.

He is adding degrees in health care and operations management. He has developed faculty and student exchange programs with universities in the U.S. and France. He is building a new classroom building at his primary campus in Delhi. He is considering adding executive education certificate programs online.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Not only are his ideas almost exactly like our ideas, but his market is just like ours. Lots of competition. The students pay for their own degrees while working full-time jobs and, for
many, being a mom or a dad too.

To make payment easier, he brings the bank to his campus on registration day. The bankers set up a kiosk and make student loans right there on the spot.

We talked about our differences and about our similarities. The latter conversation took a lot longer than the former.

Hopefully we can partner with Fore on various projects. When we return with students in March, 2012, Dr. Das has agreed to host us and to provide a faculty member to lecture on business in India.

We talked about student exchanges and even faculty exchanges. (I probably should keep that bit of news to myself until I can get home and reassure our faculty this would be a reward, not exile.)

We even talked about offering joint degrees online, with each faculty teaching a portion of the classes.

President Lowry is right...tomorrow's university will be a DIY university. It will be custom-tailored for market response to needs, for speed to market, and for creative solutions. Hello world!

Healthcare in India

Apollo Hospital Interview Part 1

Apollo Hospital Interview Part 2

Today we visited with key executives of Apollo Hospitals, India's largest private hospital company.

Founded in 1983 by Dr. Prathap C. Reddy, the company today has 53 hospitals and 9,500 beds. That makes it about the size of some of Nashville's leading hospital companies, which are among the largest in the U.S.

A day in Apollo's hospitals is amazing:

• Over 1,000 admissions

• Over 40,000 lab tests

• 175 MRIs and 270 CT scans daily

• 500 major surgeries

• 1,500 emergency room cases

We met with Anil K. Maini, president of corporate development for the parent company; Abhijit Majumder. general manager of the hospital in Delhi; and Dr. Karan Thakur, a young dentist who runs outpatient services in Delhi using the business skills he learned in two years of MBA study in the U.K.

You would have thought we were at a Nashville Health Care Council meeting.

Smart, savvy, extremely well educated, knowledgeable about U.S. healthcare as well as Indian healthcare, these three executives would have helped you to understand how we spend more per capita on healthcare than any nation on earth but only rank about tenth for what we get with our money.

They're converting to electronic medical records. They can do a knee replacement for half the cost in the U.S. They do organ transplants daily. They are working on wellness programs to combat epidemic levels of Diabetes Type II, a condition caused in India by genetics rather than by obesity as in our country.

They market their services throughout Asia but refuse to call the wealthy patient we saw checking in today a "medical tourist." These patients, who are attracted by the high quality of care and the reasonable prices, are simply "international patients."

Tom Friedman would have been proud because Apollo's world is definitely flat. Their hospitals daily whip x-rays around from doctor to hospital to radiologist via the digital highway, bringing healthcare to millions of rural Indians.

With the Frist family building a 500 bed acute care hospital in Shanghai and with pioneers like the Apollo group, Nashville's healthcare industry better be ready to go global because global medicine is a reality. And the market is measured in billions, not

thousands or millions.

Turney Stevens, Dean

My First Impressions of India

MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA

We arrived late Saturday evening to begin a two week trip preparing for a new Lipscomb MBA travel class to India, beginning in early 2012. Joining me are Dr. Mike Kendrick, associate dean, and Tom Gray, a Nashville business executive who chairs the international subcommittee of our College of Business Board of Visitors.

Quick facts about why we are in India:

*India is home 1.2 billion people, second only to China and four times the population of our country.

*Its economy is expected to expand 8.5% this year, with a growth rate that could overtake China by 2013.

*Some economists think India's economy will grow faster than any nation's on earth over the next 25 years.

There are two reasons why India's economy will soon start to outpace China's, according to a recent article in the Economist magazine:

1. Demography: China's workforce will shortly start to age and grow older; India's will continue to get younger for at least another generation.

2. Democracy: Although China has surged ahead because of its strong central planning, India's rough and tumble democracy has led to the nation having millions of young entrepreneurs all furiously doing their own things.

Since the early 1990s when India opened up foreign trade, Indian business has boomed. Ideas flow easily. Its people are exceptionally well educated and highly literate in what counts most in the 21st Century: the digital economy. Even our Indian guide is on Facebook, he told us yesterday.

You've heard about the bad stuff: Dirty toilets. Teeming masses. Dusty, dirty streets and very poor people.

We saw all of this and more yesterday on our first day in Delhi, the nation's capital. But is the future in India's hands? Many think it is and we'll let you know what we think over the next two weeks as our trip to India progresses. Stay tuned.

Turney Stevens, Dean