From the Dean’s desk: Dr. Nilesh Khare, Dean Jagran Lakecity Business School, Exe Education and Head IQAC Prof. Of Strategy.

I have interacted with Lakecity Brew Readers before, it is my pleasure to do so again.

What makes a business school internationally benchmarked in quality education?

Programme design, syllabi, pedagogy, experiential learning, committed and engaged faculty and students, rich conversations and experiences, and executive functioning skills that students can walk away with. Not only just a degree, or the first job from campus, but also the ability to learn and build a career and succeed in life whether as a manager, leader, or an entrepreneur.

I am delighted to share with Lakecity Brew readers that Jagran Lakecity Business School has been on the path to be internationally benchmarked in quality management education.

You would be proud to know that:

• We bring international quality content, experience and pedagogy.

o Our newly revamped curricula and partnerships with Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), access to HS talk video series https://hstalks.com/, E&Y and Wadhwani Foundation’s National Entrepreneurship Network brings world-class content and allows our classroom to be flipped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

o HBP, E&Y, Wadhwani foundation also offers an opportunity to earn add on certificates. For example, students in MBA and BMS programmes can earn course completion certificate in up to 6 courses from HBP.

o Last semester our MBA and BMS students had business simulation from a world’s leading firm (https://www.cesim.com/simulations/cesim-global-challenge-international-business-strategy-simulation-game) as a part of their strategy class. This adds to the virtual experience in managing a business, forming guiding policies, collaborating in a team of managers, and taking decisions. We will soon have a workshop from AIMA on another simulation.

•    Our academic partnerships are strengthening our global quotient.  

o We have expanded our professional partnerships and offerings. In addition to BBA Honours (Strategic Finance) in association with CMA, USA, we now bring BBA Honours (Accounting) with ACCA of UK (a body similar to ICAI in India).

o Our efforts are paying off. We are in the final stages of a partnership with California Baptist University (CBU), LA, USA https://calbaptist.edu/.

 CBU has agreed to offer our UG students’ access to admission to 1 year accelerated MBA, or 2-year programme leading to MBA. This admission will not require either GRE or GMAT. It will simply be based on English Proficiency tests, performance at JLBS and, admission norms at CBU.

 Please note that usually, it requires 4 year UG degree for PG admission in the USA.

 There are other universities in the US, and other countries including in Dubai, UAE that are currently under consideration for similar tie-ups. 

o Similarly, ACCA will offer waiver in 6 courses, and further progress with ACCA courses will lead eligible candidates on a path to not only ACCA qualification but also to a PG from the UK.

• Choice based credit system now allows MBA and BMS students to earn specialization, or a combination of majors and minors across HR, Finance, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and soon Business Analytics.

• We have improved our industry interaction; CXO visits and access to them is more frequent now.

• We will also begin to offer MBA and PG Diploma in Entrepreneurship and Family Business in evening/weekend the only mode.

• Our enhanced partnership within JLU will bring joint programmes with Hospitality School and elective courses from Media school.

• Our faculty colleagues have been preparing on the material recently included in the programme. Some come from institutes of national repute. Faculty also have a pool of international faculty ready to mentor them. Indeed as I write this we are gearing up to host a German Professor who would teach with us for 15 days in February.

• Last but not the least we are increasingly getting to hear from recruiters who are willing to visit us, and offering better jobs and starting to our students.

But most importantly our culture is shaping up in the direction that makes international quality. All our key stakeholders—students, faculty, University administration, and parents— understand and seem more committed to a higher bar on academic rigour and quality, collaboration, transparency and fairness.

We are not alone in this journey; we get tremendous support from JLU community, fellow JLU schools, and management. Enthusiasm and understanding that JLBS community—students, parents, staff and faculty— bring every day is our strength. I am personally grateful to everyone and continue to count on your feedback, support and guidance.

JLBS has travelled some distance and has miles to go. Given the support, understanding, conviction, enthusiasm and passion, I am sure we all will make JLU proud.  

Jagran Lakecity University's Leadership Advisory Board

The JLU Leadership Advisory Board will compromise group of young leaders representing the business, political, academic, government and development sectors who will provide thought leadership and strategic advice to the University’s Governing Body to shape the future direction of the university.

The Board will lend its energy, knowledge and influence to support JLU’s vision, recognizing that business, government and industry are important stakeholders in the growth and continuing success of JLU. The members will serve as ambassadors for the university externally and will bring valuable industry perspective ensuring that our degree reflects current development and industry skills requirements.

Mission:

Leadership Advisory Board members will seek to both facilitate and enable the achievement of the JLU vision, mission and objectives by leveraging their professional networks, their profile and reputation and their energy, experience and influence to:

·      Serve as a source of independent advice to the Pro Chancellor with regard to strategy and external relations;

·         Increase engagement with the business community (and vice versa);

·         Increase the relevance of our teaching and research agendas;

·         Build links between JLU and its other stakeholders;

·         Raise the profile of, and build, the JLU brand and reputation;

·         Engage with students and alumni.

Mode of Operation:

The Board will have maximum of 15 members and will be chaired by Pro Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University. The members will meet twice a year.

Members:

1.      Abhishek Mohan Gupta, Pro Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University

2.      Nirav Khambati, Partner, Kaizen Private Equity

3.      Kapil Wadhawan, Chairman & Managing Director, DHFL

4.      Vinay Singhal, Co-Founder & CEO, WittyFeeds

5.      Shekhar A Bhattacharjee, Founder & Group CEO, SkillTree Knowledge Consortium

6.      Ira Trivedi, Indian author, columnist and yoga acharya

7.      Farhan Ansari, State Mentor (MP & CG) & Vice President, Reliance Industries Limited

8.      Manish Kumar, MD & CEO, National Skill Development Corporation

9.      Sonal Dabral, Group Chief Creative Officer & Vice Chairman, Ogilvy

10.  Vipin Jain, Managing Partner, TLC Legal

11.  Jaivardhan Singh, Member of Vidhan Sabah, Madhya Pradesh

12.  Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst, Founder & CEO, Greyhound Research

13.  Bhaskar Ranjan Das, Head Of Markets ( South Asia), CIMA Global

14.  Dr Nilesh Khare, Dean, Jagran Lakecity University

15.  Diwakar Shukla, Head Partnerships, Jagran Lakecity University

The minutiae of Jagran Lakecity Business School: Dr. Nilesh Khare, Director, JLBS

Jagran Lakecity Business School (JLBS) is a flagship business school at Jagran Lakecity University (JLU). While JLU, via its School of management, has been offering management education for the last 4 years, JLBS’s arrival underscores greater ambition to build an internationally benchmarked business school. And we have been evolving in that direction.

Thanks for inviting me to share our journey via Lakecity Brew. This is a great way to reach out to a larger JLU community and the outside world. I would like to share a few specific areas where we have made a good beginning.

Pedagogical Benchmarking 

Starting in Jan 2018 we are emphasizing greater use of benchmarked and innovative pedagogical practices in management education. Adoption of Smart AI Books on Learning Management Platform from the world leading publishers, a greater use of case studies including from Harvard, group assignments on real-world problems and presentations, and frequent interactions with industry experts are likely to provide needed impetus on rich content, and experiential and applied learning so often missing from Indian management education system.

Student engagement

We strongly believe that students at JLBS are apprentice managers and business leaders. We are moving to practices where most of our initiatives on the ground would be lead, delivered, and even conceived by student teams. This offers students great opportunity to be responsible, plan in real task contexts, run operations, face uncertainties, and experience and demonstrate leadership. Experiences such as these will help students discover hidden talents, build confidence, learn from failures and grow. This would be good on their CVs, help them tell great authentic stories in their job interviews, and make them attractive to employers. I am very proud of our student team that recently delivered very well on what they called JLBS Reboot, 2018— introduction to even semester, new initiatives, and changes at Jagran Lakecity Business School. Student placement and Industry relationship team have also taken its role to the next level. Of course, we do have individual achievers from academics, to entrepreneurship, to sports.        

Executive Functioning and Employability

While the JLBS makes its best efforts and has been increasingly more successful in attracting companies for internships and placement, we recognize that students’ interests and their careers go beyond the first job available from campus. We are explicitly focusing on building executive functioning capabilities that help select and monitor behaviours that facilitate attainment of goals and employability. This will help our graduates in succeeding beyond securing a job on campus in whatever they would choose to do from entrepreneurship, running their family businesses, to building a meaningful career as a professional manager/leader. The shift in conversation from mere campus placement to Executive Functioning and Employability has begun to help students take the ownership of their CVs—portfolio of knowledge, skills and experiences they would accumulate during their time at JLBS. Mentoring process is based on executive functioning approach and helps students recognize their goals and work toward them in supporting and encouraging environment. In addition to in curriculum regular classes for Career Enhancement, students now have access to services from external partners to hone soft skills and capabilities such as business English, Reasoning, and Quantitative Skills.  Among others, JLBS has also brought in Chicago Based firm that uses AI enabled custom Learning Management platform that focuses on improving scores on placement tests. It also strengthens executive functioning.

Exposure, Out-reach and Capability Augmentation

We are very proud to share that our Board of Advisors now includes very imminent academicians, and industry leaders from USA, India and a few other parts of the world. Over the next one to two years, JLBS stand to greatly benefit from active and deeper engagement with the board members. 

We are also in the process of setting up Board of Studies and faculty mentor panel that would include people of competence from academia and industry primarily from India and USA to help us with curriculum and program design and develop our faculty on an ongoing basis.  

We are actively looking at augmenting our faculty strength. We are very excited to share that some of our visiting faculty members from this semester would bring significant real-life work experience as business CEOs from India and USA. We expect quality faculty to join our ranks as full time or at-least in adjunct capacity in coming months.       

Our outreach efforts have begun to show some real engagement on the ground that would offer international and quality domestic exposure to our community. We recently hosted a short visit of cultural student exchange team from Missouri, USA. We are looking forward to more student and faculty exchange programs and International Immersive Degree programs in partnership with institutes such as University College London.

       

Working longer, harder, and smarter

JLBS realizes that if we were to set stretch goals and achieve them we need to work longer, harder, and smarter. We now have extended timing from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm for our regular classes. A good management education program is not a 9 to 5 job for either a student or a faculty. We have shared a break from 12:45 pm to 2:30 pm for common activities and industry interactions. Our alternative working Saturdays are marked for FDPs and research. Research focuses on faculty and PhD students, but it is open to all. We are very proud to be a part of JLU. It allows us to dream big. JLU offers us great support. We hope to make it proud of us too. I hope to continue to share our journey as we march on. Lakecity Brew you are doing an awesome job. Keep up the good work. Thanks a lot for the invite.

Joining the 'JLU family' straight from Ohio, USA: Dr. Nilesh Khare, Dean Executive and Distance Education.

We are happy to welcome our new colleague in the leadership team, a consultant, academician and corporate trainer; Dr. Nilesh Khare. He has joined us as the Dean (Executive & Distance Education), Professor and the Director, Jagran Lakecity Business School to help lead the University's initiatives in executive and distance education from scratch and help accelerate Jagran Lakecity Business School's journey on the path of leading business schools in India. Dr. Khare hails from the Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. He taught at the Fisher for about 6 years and earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration (Strategy major) in 2010. He has also earned MBA (Finance and Marketing), CFA, and BE (Electronics and Telecommunication) in India and was awarded a gold medal in CFA Beta Group along with national scholarships.

He has advised leading corporates in India, UAE, and USA on strategy formulation, evaluation, and implementation. He conducts corporate management development programs focused on strategic management areas and has worked with a range of institutions from startups to MNCs across Industries. Some of his Indian clients include Taj Group of Hotels, VSNL, Marico Industries, Times of India group, BPCL, and DHFL along with management consulting firms such as PwC, KPMG South Africa, and the Henley Center.

Dr. Khare is passionate about teaching business and corporate strategy, international business strategy, and strategic change and innovation management courses at MBA and undergraduate levels. Over the last 6 years, he has taught in Dubai, USA and as a guest lecturer in India including IIM.

He has consistently presented his research at the most prestigious international conferences in his field. He has done research in areas like strategic management which focuses on clarifying and integrating theories that informs firms about 'boundary decisions.’ These decisions are related to issues such as vertical integration, outsourcing, offshoring, strategic alliances, and diversification. Additionally, he has also conducted research that examined boundary choices of public, commercial, quasi-commercial, and NGO organizations in the context of poverty alleviation and public services. In particular, his work focuses on microfinance context.