You can now become an alumnus of the prestigious Harvard Business School without spending a full academic year at the Boston-based Ivy League institution, thanks to its new senior executive leadership programme for India which, for the first time, allows the participants to get alumni status.
The new programme, ‘Senior Executive Leadership Program - India’ is aimed at senior executives with 15 to 20 years of work experience across function, industry or country and will start on July 17 this year.
Talking about the course, Das Narayan Das, Senior Associate Dean, Executive Education and Publishing and James J Hill Professor of Business Administration said, “We not only expect applicants from India but also from overseas to enrol for this course. We have seen interest from individuals coming from ecommerce and start-up backgrounds to big firms. We expect the batch to be a mix of MNCs, international students and public sector firms.”
Taught in four modules at the Harvard Business School campus in Boston and Mumbai over a year, the programme aims to transform accomplished senior executives into capable leaders who can drive growth and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
The course fee for the programme is Rs 30 lakh plus taxes as compared to fee of Rs 24 lakh charged by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) for its fulltime one-year postgraduate programme in management for executives.
“India is going to face the biggest dearth of middle-management executives. How do you manage that? We admit people don’t register. The admission depends upon a pool of applications. At times, one in three make it or it may be as high as one in two,” said Mr Das.
Harvard Business School also runs similar programmes in China with translation in association with leading Chinese universities.
For its fulltime courses on its Boston campus, Mr Das believes Indian students make their presence felt at Harvard in large numbers over the years and the growth is only improving.
IIM-A responds to The Hindu report
IIM Ahmedabad has said that a direct comparison between its PGPX programme and HBS’s Senior Executive Leadership Program is erroneous (‘What they will teach you at Harvard Mumbai’, The Hindu, January 8).
The IIMA PGPX programme is a decade-old, one-year fully residential programme for students with substantial work experience with approximately 600 contact sessions. In contrast, the yet-to-be launched HBS SELP is an executive education offering that proposes four modules (two off-campus modules of 10 and 11 days and two on-campus modules of 5 and 10 days each) with approximately 140 contact sessions, the institute said.
Further, entry into IIMA’s PGPX programme requires a formal application including submission of GMAT scores, while entry to HBS’s SELP does not have formal educational requirements. IIMA’s PGPX programme belongs to the category of one-year experienced MBA programmes, comparable to one-year MBA programmes offered by European institutions, such as INSEAD and IESE, it said.
“We believe directly comparing IIMA PGPX with HBS SELP is comparing apples with oranges and is likely only to cause confusion,” said Prof Sunil Sharma, Chairperson, PGPX, IIMA.
Published - January 08, 2016 12:00 am IST
