Women at Business School. HHL Professor Vasanthi Srinivasan portrait by Financial Times

[HHL gGmbH - 22.07.2013] Vasanthi Srinivasan, who holds the new ICCR Chair of Corporate Responsibility & Governance at Germany's HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management is portrait in this week's ‘Women at Business School' series by the Financial Times. Professor Srinivasan's chair is kindly supported by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), an institution affiliated to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. In an interview with the Financial Times, Professor Srinivasan, who acted as Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and as Chair of the IIMB Center for Corporate Governance and Citizenship, gives insights into her academic work as well as into her role as a woman in the international business school world.

Key areas of interest: Diversity as well as Human Resource Management

Professor Srinivasan's field of research as well as teaching is on Diversity as well as Human Resource Management. Some of the questions she focuses on are: What do organizations do to engage women more effectively? How can women pursue careers in a manner that the human capital is effectively utilized? And how do the societal and the structural elements support or hinder women to continue at the workplace?
Currently, together with colleagues from India, Professor Srinivasan is researching on women on boards in India. Besides other topics and in her role as chair of the Center for Corporate Governance and Citizenship at the IIM in India, Professor Srinivasan also focuses on the question of how do we make young MBAs more sensitive to create responsible businesses and what is the role of business school faculty in this area. The Bangalore-born Professor runs a website for anyone interested in ethics, responsibility and governance called www.teachcsr.com. The site has about 600 members, many of whom are academics.

At the German HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management Professor Srinivasan teaches in the full-time M.Sc. as well as MBA program. The dominant focus of her course ‘International Management Competencies' is to build ‘culturally intelligent' managers for a highly interconnected world. In her course ‘Human Resource Management' she adopts a General Manager's perspective and provides perspectives on HRM philosophy, systems, policies and processes that enable people-related decisions in organizations. In the course ‘Corporate Responsibility in a Globalized World', Professor Srinivasan attempts to equip students with the relevant understanding of concepts of business ethics and teaches how corporate responsibility can be realized under different - and often adverse - empirical conditions.

Pledge for research that is meaningful and impacts society

In the interview with the Financial Times, the holder of the ICCR Chair of Corporate Responsibility & Governance at HHL speaks about challenges for today's business school landscape. Professor Srinivasan in this context calls for a fundamental examination of the curriculum in business schools. She says: "We have crossed the threshold of sustainability and the ongoing economic crisis has shown us that there are no actors and bystanders in a global economy. All of us are at the same time perpetuators and victims of the economic system. How can we fundamentally alter the manner in which we frame the thinking for the future? How do we do collaborative cross functional teaching? How do we ensure that we do research that is meaningful, relevant and rigorous that will impact society?”

If you can't shine like a star in the sky, try to shine like a lamp in the darkness

Asked for a piece of advice, Professor Srinivasan says the following: "My teacher in the seventh grade wrote in my school autograph book "If you can't shine like a star in the sky, try to shine like a lamp in the darkness”. A professor at the university quoted Gandhi, ‘Be the change you want to see around you'. I think these two pieces of advice have helped me in good stead through my career.”

Here, you can read the full 'Women in Business School' interview online at the Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/business-education/women-at-business-school

HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management

HHL is a university-level institution and ranks amongst the leading international business schools. The goal of the oldest business school in German-speaking Europe is to educate effective, responsible and entrepreneurially-minded leaders. HHL stands out for its excellent teaching, its clear research focus, its effective knowledge transfer into practice as well as its outstanding student services. The courses of study include full and part-time Master in Management as well as MBA programs, a Doctoral program and Executive Education. In the 2012 Financial Times Masters in Management Ranking, HHL's full-time M.Sc. Program was ranked 1st in Germany and 11th in the world. This renowned ranking also awarded HHL first place worldwide for its focus on Entrepreneurship and second regarding the graduates' future salaries and for its Corporate Strategy specialization. HHL is accredited by AACSB International. http://www.hhl.de