SANKARAN M.

After serving in the Indian Railways for 21 years as a mechanical engineer, consultant to Aqaba Railway Corporation, Jordan, and a trainer in the Indian Railways' Staff College at Baroda, Sankaran opted for an academic career, taking his doctorate in Business Policy and Strategy. He left Indian Railways in 1990 and joined the IIMA, the premier management school.

Sankaran was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University in the year 2000. His areas of interest include strategic management and competitive strategy, leadership, global competitiveness of industries, corporate governance and strategies for family businesses. He has been teaching the core course on strategy for the MBA programme at IIMA since 1990, and an elective course on leadership titled “Leadership: Vision, Meaning and Reality” from 1997. The latter course, based on study and interpretation of literature, is an immensely popular and highly acclaimed course, with 146 out of 170 students of the Second Year MBA registering for this course.

He has been conducting a four-day management development programme for executives titled “Organizational Leadership for the Twenty First Century” again based on readings from literature from 1999. Sankaran has also conducted a similar programme for the executives of Tata Motors and for executives in Sri Lanka. His current research interests have been in the field of family business management. His paper (co-authored with another person) won the award for the best paper on family businesses for 2003 awarded by the Family Firm Institute, Boston, U.S.A. Another paper won the award for the best empirical paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Small Business Institute, Clearwater Beach, Florida, February 11-15, 2004.

He has done extensive work in the telecom sector. Sankaran has been a consultant to the World Bank and ODA, U.K. in the field of social development programmes and has anchored training programmes for several organizations, some of which are:

• Coca-Cola India
• Ballarpur Industries
• Bharti Telecom
• Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited
• Tata Iron and Steel Company
• The Park Group of hotels

He has also taught in the programmes for Idea Cellular, Tata Motors and Vijaya Bank. Sankaran has written a number of cases, mostly dealing with issues in strategy, and published 13 papers in national and international journals. At present, he is a full professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a member of the Centre for Telecom Policy Studies (CTPS) at IIMA. He is a Member of the Inter Ministerial Advisory Committee on Universal Service Support Policy for telecommunications, Department of Telecommunications, Government of India.