ISB's Quarter-Century Bet: Leadership Over Legacy

Ask Madan Pillutla about the number everyone else wants to talk about, and he waves it off before the question is even finished. In two years, the Indian School of Business has climbed from 31st to 12th in the Financial Times Global MBA ranking – the kind of jump that would send most business school deans would have no trouble trumpeting. Pillutla, ISB's sixth dean and a professor at London Business School for two decades before taking the job in 2020, calls it so much noise. 'You do have to pay attention to them in some sense,' he says of rankings, 'but we should not take them literally.' What he'd rather talk about, as ISB marks its silver jubilee with events in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, London, and multiple cities in India starting in mid-September, is something less flashy: the unglamorous, repetitive work of fixing what he calls 'the plumbing' – and why he believes India's next economic leap depends on doing exactly that kind of work at national scale. THE FOUNDING BET ISB is 25 years old this year. Its success, in the early days, was not guaranteed. The school launched in 2001 without government backing and without a legacy university structure behind it, an arrangement Pillutla insists was more happenstance than manifesto. 'Not being part of the government thing was just incidental,' he says. 'We enjoy the support of the government in a lot of different things that we do.' What he considers the real founding decisions were about concentration of power – and the deliberate avoidance of it. The founders raised money from a wide group of donors rather than one large benefactor. They brought in a consortium of academic partners instead of anchoring to a single foreign school. They built a board drawn from professionals across India's top companies, in sectors from FMCG to banking. 'No one person or no one institution would have disproportionate representation or power within the school,' he says. He considers that model – not the school itself – ISB's biggest export: proof to other Indian institution-builders that quality doesn't require a single powerful patron. The second founding bet was on faculty, where Pillutla says there were no shortcuts allowed, even when it meant moving slowly. 'It is very difficult to go from good to great,' he says, paraphrasing one of the school's founders. 'You have to be great from the get-go. You can be small and great, and then you can be big and great. But if you're big and good, you can't become big and great.' The same standard, he adds, applied to the physical campus from day one. That instinct toward restraint shows up again when Pillutla is pressed on what he'd change if he were starting ISB today. He doesn't hesitate: he'd grow slower. The founders' ambition, matched to the sheer scale of India's talent pool, pushed the flagship one-year program to expand quickly. Filling seats with outstanding students was never the hard part, he says, but the rest of the institution had to scramble to keep pace. 'I would have grown more slowly than what the school grew,' he says. Some critics still push him to expand further. His response: since he took over, the one-year program has shrunk, not grown. WHAT'S ACTUALLY DURABLE So what is actually behind the FT climb? Pillutla's answer is deliberately unglamorous. He places ISB's MBA program realistically among the world's top 20 – with a top-10 finish as a fair aspiration, not a guarantee – and argues that rankings swing on small, largely uncontrollable inputs. History backs him up. ISB actually hit 12th once before, in 2010, then drifted back into the 20s for more than a decade – evidence, if anything, for his own point that a single ranking is a noisy signal rather than a steady trendline. What he considers durable is something rankings only partly capture: outcomes. 'What alumni of the school have gone out and done is remarkable,' he says. 'That is a testament to the attractiveness of ISB for a whole group of talented people.' He's careful to credit the raw material as much as the institution: 'We can claim that we are transforming them in some sense, but we also have to be humble enough to know that real talent is coming our way.' The internal work, as he describes it, is about compounding that talent rather than manufacturing it. A recent curriculum review, for instance, gave students more flexibility to shape their own course of study around where jobs and careers are actually heading. That outcomes-over-optics logic extends to entrepreneurship. ISB alumni have gone on to found or lead more than a dozen unicorns, including InMobi, India's first, along with Moglix and BigBasket. Pillutla attributes the pattern to two forces working together. The first is selection: the school's earliest cohorts were made up of people who could have attended more established institutions but chose to bet on an unproven one instead – a self-selected pool of risk-takers. The second is design: entrepreneurship was treated as a core strength from ISB's earliest years, built into the curriculum and backed by dedicated labs, an incubator, an accelerator, and a network of alumni who've since become venture capitalists and angel investors. 'It's a happy mixture of selection and the treatment that we're providing,' he says. THE AI QUESTION On artificial intelligence, Pillutla is candid about ISB's pace, and unapologetic about it. 'I'm not unhappy about the pace of some of these changes,' he says, 'because we don't want to be a little careless – we think through very carefully what actually is fundamentally changing.' He's convinced something genuinely different is underway. 'This is not like any other normal thing that has happened in my lifetime.' The school's working answer, still evolving, is focused on identifying what stays 'uniquely human' – critical thinking, sound judgment, the ability to ask the right question – and building courses around more experiential, open-ended learning rather than material AI tools can already deliver. Every faculty member is being encouraged to build an AI tutor to accompany their own course, freeing classroom time for material that goes beyond what a textbook, or a chatbot, can already provide – an approach Poets&Quants covered through Sanjay Kalapur's work using AI in his ethics course. Pillutla expects it will take another three or four years before the school settles into a new equilibrium. The deeper institutional question, he says, is how ISB builds the capacity to keep reinventing itself at a pace it's never had to sustain before. THE NEXT 25 YEARS Pillutla's sharpest argument is about India's economy broadly, not ISB specifically: that leadership talent, not capital or ideas, is what's holding the country back. He points to a stark gap between India's best-run companies – he names Hindustan Unilever, ITC, and multinationals like Nestlé as examples – and everyone just below that tier. 'The top 10 percent of Indian companies are so well managed, so well run,' he says. 'But then you go a few steps below, and the drop is huge.' An MBA, in his framing, builds a specific kind of professional mindset: an understanding of a business as a whole system, and the discipline to allocate resources efficiently. He argues that mindset is largely absent outside India's top corporate tier, and that the gap shows up as waste – citing infrastructure and construction projects, where he says work often begins before planning is finished, then gets torn up and redone, in contrast to the far more front-loaded planning process common in the West. Given India's existing strength in engineering and quantitative fields, he calls deepening managerial capability 'low-hanging fruit' for the country's growth. That thesis is what shapes his answer for what comes next. If the founding bet was proving India could build a world-class, independently governed business school without government patronage, Pillutla says the next one is more ambitious still: turning ISB into an engine for management education capacity across India, not just within its own campus. He says the school has made real progress on two fronts he set out five years ago – working with government to sharpen public-sector decision-making, and building out entrepreneurship – but has yet to deliver on a third promise: becoming the institution that trains other institutions, at a cost accessible by Indian standards. His reference point is Harvard Business School's role in shaping management education well beyond its own classrooms. 'That should be the model for us,' he says. 'If one ISB in 25 years has not inspired 10 more ISBs, then there is something else we need to do.' It's not a new idea for him. Shortly after taking over as dean, Pillutla told P&Q in 2022 that he wanted ISB to help India's roughly 5,000 MBA programs and thousands of undergraduate business courses improve their materials and teaching, partnering with state governments on online courses within 18 months. Four years later, he says, that piece of the plan is still the unfinished one. 'What we've not done yet, which is what I promised that we need to do,' he says, 'is become the school that increases management education capability in India.' DON'T MISS A NEW DEAN & A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE INDIAN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS and IS THIS THE AI TUTOR THAT BUSINESS SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR? © Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.