Dr Raja Shastri meets students of PGDM 2 on 12 July 2010.

Dr Raja Shastri, an alumnus of MIT and HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL and an associate of Dr Philip Kotler visited our institute.  Dr Shastri likes to visit educational institutes wherever he travels. On his official trip to India as a global consultant in July2010, he came to IMDR and met the faculty and the students of the institute.

Given below are excerpts from his informal chat with students PGDM 2 class.

Q.HBS is known for the case method of learning management subjects. How are they conducted?
A: The cases are long and run into forty and more pages, and they are not illustrative cases to explain the concepts. They are well researched cases and cover all functions of management. One case can be approached from different perspectives and it challenges the critical and creative abilities of the students. There is no single solution so it makes the students work on innovative, out of the box solutions or may totally confuse them in their journey of learning from the case. The HBS courses are residential and students hardly get time to sleep! Students are expected to use their abilities of application, analysis and synthesis fully.

Q What is your experience of HBS faculty?
A: Michael Porter taught us Business Strategy. He used to mention the structure of the HBS building as an analogy to explain the position and status of Strategy in Management disciplines. The department of strategy is on the third floor, the departments of Marketing and HR on the second and Operations on the first floor. Hence strategic thinking takes a broader perspective and is a top management function and doesn’t take a functional view of business. I was fortunate to have the best teachers in every field and that made me a teacher as well. I spend 40% of my time in teaching at HBS and the University of New York  

Q You were an associate of Philip Kotler.  Do you think that theories of Marketing given in texts of American origin are relevant for countries like India?

 A :The theoretical framework of four Ps is relevant every where, but which one of the Ps is relevant to specific case or context is determined by the local situation that would not be captured in the general framework., perhaps the product and pricing is more important in developing countries that other Ps . In a local branch of HDFC in Gujarat it was found that the customers who were senior citizens changed the branch because of a change in ATM technology. The psychology of customers is entirely a contextual issue that cannot be addressed by generalized theories of Marketing. But Kotler’s book on Marketing mentions these local variations in the context of American companies and markets

Managers must develop their knowledge and sensitivity toward culture. Though born and brought in New York, I took great efforts to learn Indian languages and I know Marathi, Kannada, Bengali and other Indian languages quit well. Through language we can appreciate the culture well.

Dr Shastri expressed his wish to contribute in some way to IMDR and shared memories about Fergusson College and Pune that his mother had narrated in great detail in the past.

Dr Susheel Kandalgaonkar introduced the speaker and Ms Komal Kingrani of PGDM2 proposed a vote of thanks.