BPO to India a big fad on US campuses
MUMBAI: Outsourcing isn’t just making waves in India, it seems the flavour in US universities too. For Patrick T Harker, dean of Wharton School, outsourcing appears to be the biggest fad. But he adds in the same breath that India is so “hot” because of this fad on US campuses, that almost every faculty member wants to come to India. “We carried out a research on outsourcing and India, and the demand among business, students and academia was so great that we are doing a programme on it,” he says.
“I try to dissuade the faculty from following fads as it does not lead to long-term credibility. I remember when I was starting out, Japanese manufacturing was a rage and everyone was making a pilgrimage to Japan to learn about it. The same seems to be happening in outsourcing these days,” he says.
He said that India is hot and everyone wants to understand the country, its companies and economy. In conversation with ET, Harker also spoke about ethics in management and the challenges of globalising a B-school. ( Can there be a reverse brain drain from the US to India? )
US companies across industries has been hit by scandals, graft and abuses of power in the past few years. The uproar has been huge and the American style of management has been questioned. But, amidst the evil, Harker revels in the speed with which action has been taken against offending companies, and the swiftness with which they are either going away or recovering. “It’s very hard to hide anything these days,” he says. “As a corporate leader you have to understand that you live in a very transparent, open environment”. Wharton has been teaching ethics since 1970’s, he adds.
Over the past few years, Wharton has taken steps to extend this long tradition of excellence in education to other parts of the world. Today, the school has two campuses in the US along with alliances with the French B-school INSEAD (with campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore) and the Indian School of Business (ISB). But, in a quickly globalising world that isn’t enough
