‘Go West, young man’ is how a writer exhorted American youth to seek their fortune. Today, in contrast, many multinationals are sending their managers in droves to the East — mainly to China and India — to gain experience in the future growth markets.

Chennai-based B-school Great Lakes Institute of Management is taking that learning very seriously. Its first post-graduate two-year management programme is focused on ‘emerging economies’.

GLIM founder and Dean Bala V. Balachandran says most B-school education today is still Western-focussed. But markets in the West are saturated and the growth markets in the future are in the BRICS region as well as in countries such as Indonesia. Balachandran says the school hit upon this focus also as a means to differentiate itself from the IIMs. This focus has worked, he says, as some students have even spurned offers from the IIMs to seek admission at GLIM. The institute, located 50 km from Chennai, has run a one-year accelerated MBA programme for the past seven years.

Executive Director, GLIM, S.Sriram, says the institute has tied up with top B-schools in China and Brazil for internships, in which GLIM students will get a chance to intern with a local company and undertake projects there. It may soon tie up with a South African school as well. It could even be an exchange programme, where students from these overseas schools study for a term at GLIM. “It’s going to be an immersive learning experience for the students of a new world order,” he says.

Emerging economies share a similar profile and have identical problems, which are different from the West. This focus, with local case studies, will help students understand these countries better in the framework of a general MBA programme. Sriram says it’s not just Western MNCs that need managerial talent with experience in the emerging economies. Several large Indian groups themselves have made acquisitions and run operations in these economies; they too need managers with local expertise.

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