IIML: Towards Thought Leadership

One of the ways to judge a B-school for its worth is to look at its alumni. And IIM Lucknow boasts of having produced many a notable leader. Shanmugham Manjunath, Gayatri Iyer, Rajdeep Grewal, Bhuwan Gaurav are among scores of corporate luminaries to have emerged from the portals of this great institution. Students from IIM Lucknow are today serving with distinction in leadership roles in coveted positions across the world.

As the fourth IIM to be established, IIM Lucknow was the first of the four to have campus located on the outskirts of a city. With its well-maintained campus and verdant surroundings, IIML allows students to extend their activities beyond academics. In 2005, IIM Lucknow set up a satellite campus exclusively for Executive Education at Noida in the National Capital Region.

As one of the leaders in B-school education in the country that aligned its teaching to meet both local and global requirements, IIM Lucknow has sought to develop expertise in specific areas of management by creating centres of excellence in fields such as Agriculture, Business Sustainability, Leadership & Human Values, Internet Commerce Research, Enterprise Incubation and Marketing in Emerging Economies. The response to these centres has been overwhelming.

For effortless transition from the intellectual rigour on the IIM Lucknow campus to a life in a real organisation, students are inducted for summer internship programmes.

Considering that life on the campus is an important phase in their education and career, the students are challenged and taught to deal with real-time scenarios and situations.

The curriculum comprises 11 disciplines including Business Environment, Communication, Decision Sciences, Finance and Accounting, Marketing, Human Resource Management, Operations Management, Information Technology and Systems, Strategic Management, Agribusiness Management and Legal Management. Students are trained using a truly global method of teaching by a committed and deeply knowledgeable faculty. Routinely, there are interactions between the students, the faculty and the business leaders, which helps in moulding future-ready leaders.

The courses offered in the institute include Postgraduate Programme (PGP) in Management (PGPM), Agri-business Management (PGPABM), Business Management for Working Managers (WMP), International Programme in Management for Executives (IPMX), Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) and Management Development Programmes (MDPs).

The postgraduate programme at IIM Lucknow professes its credo to be: “Good practice flows from strong theory.” A two-year full-time residential programme, it is designed, as the institute’s claims, “to develop professional managers and with strong conceptual fundamentals and skills to manage businesses of the future.”

At IIM Lucknow, special emphasis is laid on inculcating corporate values and skills, crucial for the decision-making process. The institute also offers expertise in functional domains to gather business knowledge.

IIM Lucknow has created hotspots for specific sectors such as, Agriculture Management Centre, a centre of excellence in the area of agriculture; Centre for Leadership in Human Values; and Centre for Entrepreneur Development and New Venture Management. The idea here is to undertake pioneering work in relevant domains.

The diversity of options in IIM Lucknow’s curriculum is complemented by a breadth of activities outside the classroom. There are enough opportunities to participate in and contribute to a variety of co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.

The institute’s 4,500-plus-strong network of alumni are its ambassadors, spread all over the globe, holding top positions in industry and academia alike. They are a testimony to the institute’s focus on nurturing talent and the pursuit of excellence.