Article: Great Lakes celebrates a decade of promoting quality education

Leadership

Great Lakes celebrates a decade of promoting quality education

The management institute has emerged as a leading centre of excellence in the country

It is a month of celebration for Great Lakes Institute of Management as they celebrate their 10-year anniversary this year. At the Mumbai anniversary celebration, Professor Bala V Balachandran, Distinguished Professor of Accounting and Information Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Founder, Dean and Chairman of Great Lakes Institute welcomed a gathering of business and HR leaders, academia, students and media to an engaging evening.

In just 10 years, Prof Balachandran and his team managed to build a great institution that today has 4,000 alumni across the world, with campuses in Tamil Nadu (Chennai), NCR (Gurgaon) and plans to expand to Andhra Pradesh. Great Lakes has recently been ranked within the top B-schools to study in India by Business India as well.

Commenting on the achievements of the school, Adi B Godrej, Chairman of Godrej Group, remarked: “Great Lakes has turned into a great institute in a very short span of time. Institutes like it will add tremendous value to the country as India’s economic growth will accelerate in the next 10 years.” India needs more such initiatives to fulfill the talent needs of the country’s growth, he concluded.

Keki Dadiseth, former Chairman of Hindustan Unilever Limited, said that what Prof. Balachandran and his team had achieved in just a decade was “remarkable” and that was the result of the stature of the Founder and his interest in developing management education in India. He also complemented Professor Balachandran for being a great academician and a wonderful person. He also wished that the Indian diaspora produces many more educational institutes to meet the growing demands of the industry.

The evening was also an occasion to give recognition to Prof Balachandran and his contribution to management education in building the foundation of Indian School of Business (Hyderabad) and MDI Gurgaon. The evening also witnessed the launch, by Jerry Rao, of Prof Balachandran’s new book Dare to Dream.

Jerry Rao met Prof Balachandran in Chicago during his tenure in Citi, way before he started his own company Mphasis and sold it to EDS. In his concluding remarks, he mentioned that building companies is much easier than building an educational institution, as educational institutions by definition always outlive the founders and require generations of work. 

The school plans to have the final celebrations of the 10-year anniversary next week at Hotel Leela Palace, Chennai.

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Topics: Leadership, #Excellence

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