A key milestone in this journey was the acceptance of the paper “Beyond Institutional Voids: Business Groups, Incomplete Markets and Organizational Form” accepted for publication by the strategy field’s top journal, Strategic Management Journal in late 2013. This was the paper that provided the rigorous justification for the arguments advanced in “Why Conglomerates Thrive.”
What can we take away from the JR Story?
There are several takeaways from the JR story. At the top, I would emphasise the importance of how we faculty see ourselves, i.e. the question of identity. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we need to see ourselves as more than teachers. JR’s experience suggests that we need to see ourselves as engaged scholars, striving for rigour, relevance and conceptual or theoretical clarity in all we do.
This identity needs to be backed up by strong aspiration and drive. Without that we simply won’t have the intellectual and physical energy to overcome the obstacles that will inevitably come in our way. Almost all successful people have a certain perseverance and doggedness that differentiates them from others who give up along the way. Trying to achieve thought leadership is no different.
Choice of problems and focus are also critical. We need to work on problems that are of importance to India but have wider significance. The unique strengths of (Indian) business groups are of interest within our country, but also to managers elsewhere because they call into question some of the “accepted wisdom” on the demerits of conglomerates.
“Bowling alone” is unlikely to work. We need to find good collaborators who complement our skills. JR found them in some very talented and capable doctoral students. Others might find them in colleagues within India or abroad.
I haven’t taken Prof. Ramachandran’s permission to write about this. But I am confident that he won’t mind as long as this acts as an inspiration to many others!
[The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.]
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Rishikesha Krishnan
(The author is the Director of IIM Indore. Previously, he was the Professor of Corporate Strategy at IIM Bangalore. He received the Thinkers50 innovation award last year. He is the writer of ‘From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India‘ and co-author of ‘8 Steps to Innovation‘. He blogs on http://jugaadtoinnovation.
We are privileged to begin a new weekly column titled ’Jugaad to Innovation’ by Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan, Director – IIM Indore.
(This work was originally published here)
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