GITAM Hyderabad, Director, Management: Dr.Vinay Kumar Interview

With over 23 years of experience in finance education and research, Dr.Vinay Kumar is a Professor of Finance at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, one of the premier business schools in India. He has also served as the Director of NMIMS Bengaluru, a leading private university, for two years, where he led the academic and administrative functions of the campus. He holds a PhD in Finance from Osmania University, and completed the Global Colloquium on Participant Centered Learning from Harvard Business School, and the Data Mining for Educators program from SAS Institute Inc. 

He has developed and taught courses on various topics in finance, such as corporate finance, entrepreneurial finance, financial markets, and financial derivatives, using innovative pedagogical methods and data analytics. He has also published multiple papers in reputed journals and conferences, focusing on the linkages between options and stock markets, especially in the emerging market context. His mission is to advance the knowledge and practice of finance, and to inspire and empower the next generation of finance professionals and leaders. He value academic excellence, global outlook, ethical conduct, and social responsibility in his work.

Currently he is holding the position of director for GITAM business school hyderabad, he is in the journey with GITAM to build curriculums and programs that are international in standards, with the aim to develop a doing culture, risk taking ability among the students.

You held key positions at various prestigious institutions throughout your career. What made you excited to walk with GITAM in the journey?

One of the key things is,I always wanted to transform students' life experience and learning. Gitam as a university, it is a prestigious and is also an aspirational universit.After Mr. Bharat took over as president, he had made quite a lot of changes. I thought his vision to actually transform this university to a global level university and to scale up to international standards. That is one of the things that I really felt is very fascinating, I could consider. 

When I talked to him, it was an encouraging sort of a discussion. So, I took this decision to come to Gitam and all the instruments are available for transformation. We are changing the curriculum, we are trying to put up new infrastructure. A lot of things are happening. We have very good students coming to the institute from all types of backgrounds and a transformation something that can change their lives is more significant here. So, I think that is a great thing working with GITAM, if I am able to change lives in some way, contribute to students' careers. I think that will be a great thing and I got a clear understanding about that. 

How do you balance the needs and faculty, needs of faculty, students and administration as a director of school of business at the same time? 

Fundamentally Gitam is getting into this transformative mode. Our standards are going to be global standards. All academics will be conducted in standards that are recognized around the world. Right now, we are in transition phase. When you scale up standards, all the people will have problem. Because now you have bigger things to achieve and our current standards versus the standards that we are aiming to actually achieve, there is a big gap. So,students will have problem. For instance, now we have made the attendance norm to be 70 percent. earlier it was not so. Suddenly, the students started feeling, “okay, what do we do with it?” A lot of people are held from taking examinations, which is going to put students community to inconvenience and their parents and everybody. 

Similarly, faculty standards have gone up, the research standards have gone up. Suddenly, they have to really work very hard to achieve those standards. So, in a transformative journey, how do you make sure that everybody is actually scaling up their potential to achieve higher standards? Now, that is the challenge that we are going through. In other words, you see the academic leadership, especially the transformative leadership is all about, how do you make sure that the other person understands that we have worthwhile objectives to achieve.

The objective is good and if everybody gets convinced, that this is something that we need to do, then the efforts will be in that line. All I have to do is to make sure that everybody understands the higher objectives that we have and what we can achieve.

That is the current challenge that we have and luckily students are now adjusting to new norms. Even the parents also are understanding that the university is trying to do some good things to the academics of the students. So, I think things are falling in line. Obviously the transition will take some time but we are fast changing ourselves into a global university.

What is that USP or differentiating factors that GITAM has, compared to other business schools in the nation?

The basis of this thing is MBA has become a very standardized product. So, should MBA be a same kind of a experience? Now, the point is, if you look at the IIMs, there are 20 IIMs and All 20 IMs do not follow the same curriculum. All 20 IMs do not have similar objectives to be achieved. So, in other words, similarly all across the world, MBA experience is different and it has to do with what an institute does to their students. So, we have also thought about it and we are now changing our curriculum.

Our objective is to make sure that we create more entrepreneurs. So, we are coming up with a solution for that. Also, the students who will join startups, who will join various new enterprises, existing businesses, how do you develop this entrepreneurial aptitude? so, one of the key differentiator for GSB Hyderabad, we are going to focus on entrepreneurial risk taking as a key curriculum policy. Including that in all the programs and this aspect is going to get highlighted. And risk taking as a culture will be promoted. That is one of the key differentiator and Second differentiator is we want students need to have global perspective.if I am in Hyderabad, if I have Hyderabad kind of a perspective, I lose the broader sight. So, how do we make sure that people who are studying in our school have a fairly good understanding about what is happening around the world, what kind of complexities are going to come now and in the future, so that you can gear up to meet those challenges. the global perspective is something with a very strong Indian view. One has to know how do we protect our Indian interest, given the global context is all about understanding business decisions. So, developing that is a very key important aspect of the curriculum. So, we will try to make sure that in every course to get this kind of a global perspective

Third thing is, how do you make sure that students are actually doing things that are taught? learning and implementing is a different thing. Doing should be a way of learning. We we are developing some courses that are going to be quite unique to Gitam And we are, the team of faculty members are working on these courses for next one year. So, our students will actually work While they are learning and develop things that are of significant to the industry. These three are the key focuses for our MBA program. One is the entrepreneurial risk taking, second is global perspective, third is doing as a learning culture .

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How well is Gitam focusing on maintaining industry relationships with companies in order to leverage them for live project training, Internships and placements?

As i mentioned regrading the entrepreneurial attitude, even if you are working in a company, if you only avoid risk you will never grow. A little bit of risk taking is a necessary and entrepreneurial risk taking does not only mean that starting a business. Even if you are working in a organization calculated risks are important for your personal growth and career. That is the theme of our course. 

About the industry relationships, Gitam is about a 40 year old institution and We have a good alumni connect Presence in the industry. We are reviving a lot of these connections and our placements are really good right now, But as I told you this is an aspirational institution. So, we want to do more. Next coming year we will have a lot of engagement activities and these engagement activities are will bring all types of companies to the institute. And it becomes a forum by conducting multiple conclaves to understand the aspirations of what the organizations are looking for and matching them with and our aspiration.

What is something an MBA aspirant who is looking to do a course in MBA can expect from joining GITAM?

One should come to GITAM and can expect being in a environment of global standards and perspectives, Taking up challenging careers And being a global citizen. I think the best place for you in Hyderabad is GITAM and the institute you will not be disappointed. 

What is the biggest challenges currently facing by B schools in general and how are you, as director, handling them?

The basic thing is there are many B schools a lot of them are standardised and they are not significant. we look at the top 25-30 business schools they are doing some great work including all IIMs and other top institutes. A lot of other schools are just handling MBA as just one more degree But you do not want to be one more degree kind of a school to really be a clear player in the nation wide business schools as we go along.

The challenges are fundamentally solving Indian problems. If you have a solution in Europe It May not work in India. The scale of solving the problem is very vast. The scale is absolutely mind boggling.They say infrastructure problem housing problem electricity problem, The expanding cities problem ,pollution problem everything is a multi dimensional complexity and of the problem is going to be huge.

Your problem solving abilities have to be very very different. The challenges are fundamentally we are not looking at the curriculum with this dimension. Curriculum should basically look at problems in the Indian way and Only then you will be you will be equipping our students with different skills. It is important that we have our own perspective about problems and one of the key thing is scale itself is very different. And it affects the operations of handling the problem as well. 

How would you promote experiential learning and practical application of knowledge within the School of Business?

Already lot of experiential learning is involved in our curriculum. Case based teaching is our primary methodology for teaching. We are already procuring Harvard business school cases in almost every course.The emphasis is already there. As i mentioned earlier, Doing and learning will be more emphasised with specially designed courses inside GITAM

What is your vision for the next for the future as the director of GBS Hyderabad?

More than vision we have a mission. Our mission is to produce change leaders for our society. , we want leaders who will change the lives the society and the business around us and they are equipped with this talent of transformative leadership. That is what our mission is, to develop these leaders who will solve our Indian business problems and become Indian business leaders.

The vision is going to be taken care If we do a significant work. we will be one of the best school and that is anyway going to happen on making sure that our the students who come out of Gitam business school Hyderabad will be change agents and Change makers in business.