THE publication of a new collection of his best work cements the reputation of the late Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School (LBS), who died last year.

At a reception to mark the occasion, former colleagues paid tribute to Ghoshal’s intellectual vigour. Gita Piramal, managing editor of the Indian management magazine, The Smart Manager, who co-edited the book with Professor Julian Birkinshaw of LBS, described Ghoshal as “absolutely mesmerising in the classroom”.

Ghoshal was, arguably, the most gifted of a highly influential generation of Indian-born business thinkers and teachers at the world’s leading business schools. They include Ram Charan, formerly at Harvard and now one of the world’s most sought-after executive coaches; C. K. Prahalad, co- author of the bestselling Competing for the Future; Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen; and Vijay Govindarajan, professor of international business at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.

“Often first-generation immigrants to the West, almost all of these thinkers have had first-hand experience working in typically chaotic Indian businesses,” says Piramal. Also emerging is a cluster of up and coming Indian-influenced thinkers. They include Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria at Harvard; Jagdish Bhagwati at Columbia; Mohanbir Sawhney and Deepak Jain at Kellogg. Business schools are also attracting more Indian students. For the first time, Indians are the biggest national contingent at Insead this year.

So, what do they bring to the management world? Is there a distinctively Indian school of management? Indian thinkers play down the notion. Their appeal, perhaps, is that they do not automatically regard the US as the centre of the commercial universe. They offer a different perspective on issues such as globalisation, shareholder value and even the purpose of business itself.

They share a keen sense of capitalism’s obligations. Prahalad’s most recent book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, for example, advocates a new approach to business to take account of micro markets among the world’s poor.

In the last few months of his life, Ghoshal revealed a growing dissatisfaction with traditional capitalism.

“A very different philosophy of management is arising,” he said. “We are moving beyond strategy to purpose; beyond structure to process; and beyond systems to people.”

Ghoshal was a passionate believer that management could be a force for good. As he observed with characteristic directness: “Asshole management is not inevitable.”

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