(Photo credit: KC Toh)

The Telengana row has hit the Hyderabad campus plans of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad and Xavier’s Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur yet again. In a Business Standard story, both institutes divulged that they had not been allotted the land promised by the state government for their campuses yet.

But the political squabble in Andhra Pradesh does not seem to have affected the Institute of Management Technology (IMT) much, which inaugurated its Hyderabad campus this week at Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal’s hands and will start delivering post-graduate and executive programs immediately.

IIM Bangalore on the other hand announced a new campus at Anekal, a town beyond the outskirts of Bangalore where it will offer executive education and incubate startups. Neighbouring IIM Bangalore at Anekal would be, hold your breaths, Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon’s Karnataka campus. Reports The Times of India,

“Choked for space at its 100-acre campus on Bannerghatta Road, IIM-B was eyeing land in Devanahalli for its second campus as it offered better air connectivity. The state has now leased 110 acres of land for a 30-year period in Anekal, which is on its way to becoming the hub of management education. Management Development Institute-Gurgaon, another top B-School, will open a new campus on a 50-acre land next to the IIM-B.”

(Complete story)

The Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi will finally have a residential campus in South Delhi with a capacity for 1,200 students in two years, reports Business Standard. No more ‘K-nags’ or D-school canteen paranthas for FMS students, but I’m sure a unified hostel will more than make up for being ousted out of the North Campus.

Women in management

The world is going beyond tweaking admission variables to get more women into the management profession. Apart from Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women initiative, UK this week flagged off an project called the ‘30% club’ which aspires to make the country’s corporate boardrooms have 30% women by 2015. Spearheaded by a bunch of women achievers in business, headhunters and lobbyists, the organization plans to work for its cause without pushing for quotas or affirmative action. The Guardian reports ,

Cranfield School of Management’s latest research shows that about 30% of new appointments so far this year have been women.

By September, every FTSE 100 company is being urged to publish its own target for improving female representation in the boardroom but with 14 among those 100 firms still having all-male boards, there is a long way to go.

Among the wider FTSE 250, the proportion of directors who are women stands at less than 9% and equality campaigners complain that women may be appointed as non-executives to improve diversity, but the hands-on executives running companies remain overwhelmingly male.

Why b-schools struggle to teach entrepreneurs

A Forbes article this week argues that despite the growing number of entrepreneurship courses, b-schools are still struggling to be effective at teaching the subject. According to the article,

… entrepreneurial firms and entrepreneurial problems are about something very different than management. Entrepreneurship is about tackling unknown problems or solutions, whereas management is about tackling known problems. As a result, rather than managing for execution, startups manage for radical exploration and that means the process to do this, even the people to do it, are radically different than for managing known problems. It is only in recent years that the entrepreneurial community woke up and began to argue that the paradigm is broken. When you are tackling something fundamentally unknown, you cant plan your way to successdoing so leads you to be overconfident in your guesses. Similarly, building out a team with VPs and CXOs of different flavors just wastes money and creates politics. And what can traditional marketing tell you about a market that may not exist? Yet millions of startups have fallen into the traps of acting like they were executing on known problems and they have failed as a result.