Executive Interviews: Interview with Allan R Cohen on Staying on Top, Always
October 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Allan R Cohen
Edward A Madden Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College.

• Professor, you helped found the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Can you take us through those formative years in terms of aspirations and goals for a business school? When you look back upon creation, what is the sense of achievement like?
  The creation of IIM, Ahmedabad was an extremely entrepreneurial venture. A group of Indian businessmen, spearheaded by Vikram Sarabhai, was dissatisfied with the business education then available. They thought it was not practical, not conceptually sophisticated, too rote, and not very oriented towards producing effective managers. They had decided that the Indian university system was too rigid and bureaucratic to make the appropriate changes in curriculum or practices so they agreed to set up an institution outside of the university system. They managed to build alliances with the Ford Foundation, Harvard Business School and the Gujarat government. Six Indian professors with American PhDs were hired, and three Harvard doctoral students were hired as research Associates to create Indian teaching materials. A faculty member was also hired to lead the Harvard project.

  They were committed to creating an institution every bit as relevant to developing business leaders as Harvard was in the US. At the same time, IIM Calcutta was founded in partnership with MIT, following their more quantitative model of management education. The founding of these two schools was a bold move, since no one was certain whether the right kind of faculty could be found, right kind of curriculummaterials developed, right kind of pedagogical practices adopted, the right kind of student body could be attracted, the right kinds of jobs would be offered to the graduates, and so on. And could the attempt to bypass the university system actually work?

  Almost 50 years later, I am thrilled at how well the entrepreneurial experiment worked. The schools are the most selective in the world, their graduates go on to do great things, and they created a model for professional Indian higher education.

• If the word ‘Leadership’ is googled, 125,000,000 results pop out. Even after writing numerous books, articles, research and working papers, movies, etc., why does the leadership topic continue to engage the researchers’ imagination and creative pursuits?
  Leadership is an endlessly fascinating subject. You are correct that billions of words have been written about it, and continue to be. My own beliefs about why so much is written but so little of it is useful has to do with the nature of the phenomenon and the inherent limitations of language. The minute we talk about leadership, the idea becomes abstracted fromall the things that people in leadership roles actually do. Leadership is not executed on Tuesday morning from 10-11 AM; it is happening as leaders make decisions about strategy, marketing, government relations, accounting choices, and all the other things that have to do with the organization’s purpose. Of course, the way leaders treat people is a critical part of creating organizational effectiveness, but it is going on all the time, even when the leader is thinking about something else. Indeed, all leaders are “on stage” all the time, so that anything they do or say – or do not do or say – is interpreted and givenmeaning. Their action or inaction sends messages – intended or otherwise – to those in the organization. No one has found a very good way to talk about all these things at once, so we keep writing and theorizing and researching in hope of developing useful ideas. And of course, we have all experienced leadership all the time, from when we were babies following our parents, throughout our working lives. I believe it will continue to be an endlessly fascinating subject.

• What according to you are the differences between leaders and managers or leadership and management?
  The classic difference between leaders and managers has to do with setting out the future as compared to executing specific plans to get there. Managers are supposed to make the trains run on time; leaders decide where we should be going and whether or not we should even be using trains to get there. This distinction has a certain appeal but it is increasingly artificial. When organizations are confronted by rapid changes, new knowledge, and considerable uncertainty, then everyone at all levels needs to initiate some amount of leadership. Blindly following pre-set plans doesn’t work very well in contemporary conditions. And leaders are seldom the only ones with ideas for how to do things differently or better.