Flowers from seeds of tragedy the XIME story

Displaying entrepreneurial zeal and capability rare among academics, former IIM-Bangalore director Prof. J. Philip has nurtured the Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship into a nationally reputed B-school with campuses in Bangalore, Kochi and Chennai: Sujata Choudhury To celebrate its silver jubilee year in a purposive and socially beneficial manner, the Bangalore-based Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship (XIME, estb. 1991) inaugurated its third fully-residential campus in Oragadam, on the outskirts of Chennai, on July 29. The inauguration of XIME’s 90,000 sq. ft campus by R. Seshasayee, chairman of IT software and services major Infosys Technologies Ltd, has been widely welcomed in Tamil Nadu, which despite being ranked India’s #1 industrialised state (Business Today, October 10, 2016), is deficient in top-ranked business management institutes. This southern seaboard states most famous B-school is the Great Lakes Institute of Management, promoted by former Kellogg School of Management professor Bala V. Balachandran in 2004. The establishment of XIME’s third campus is a landmark achievement for Prof. J. Philip, who, after having served as director of the premier Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B, estb. 1973) from 1985-91, put his academic and administrative experience to good use by promoting XIME on a modest scale with an initial capital of only Rs.60,000 inside a nondescript asbestos shed in the compound of St. Martha’s Hospital in central Bangalore. Since then, displaying entrepreneurial zeal and capability rare among academics, Philip has steadily nurtured XIME into a full-fledged, highly respected national B-school with wholly-residential campuses at Bangalore, Kochi and Chennai with an aggregate capacity of 420 graduate students mentored by 50 faculty. One of XIME’s unique features is high gender parity with women comprising 56 percent of students in its flagship Bangalore campus. With the country’s six major IIMs (the remaining 14 are floundering in shallows and misery because of massive faculty shortages) admitting a mere 3,700 of the 232,000 college graduates countrywide who write the IIMs CAT (Common Admission Test) annually, under Prof. Philips leadership, XIME has quickly established a national reputation as a next rung B-school. The institute is consistently ranked within the Top 50 among the country’s 4,000 B-schools in the annual league tables of Businessworld (#40), Business Today (#49), Business Standard (#19) and Outlook (#35), while the Union ministry of human resource development ranks it #30. Over the past 25 years, the institute has become a happy hunting ground of corporates such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, KPMG, HSBC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Amazon, ICICI Prudential, Samsung, and Accenture among others, whose managers are regular visitors to its Bangalore and latterly the Kochi campus, giving the institute a 100 percent placement record. Although by IIM-A, B and C standards, XIME graduates average start-up remuneration is modest at Rs. 6.55 lakh per year in Bangalore and Rs.6 lakh in Kochi, several XIME alumni have risen to the top of highly reputed companies. Among them: Shailesh Menezes, country manager at Hewlett Packard; Chandan Mishra, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers; Abhijit Verma, associate director & partner, KPMG; and Rahul Maroli,…