Guest Lectures and Invited Lectures

 These are different from regular teaching that might stretch over 30-45 sessions. Therefore, you can approach it differently.

Create interest by either asking a question or have a good first slide. I tried it with a dummy visiting card created with Canva in one of my invited sessions. I included two or three different photographs, chosen for their impact, to create the card.

I used it at the Calicut Management Association invited talk..

Know your audience, and what makes them tick. Most people don't want a long discourse with you giving gyaan. Instead, share interesting experiences and leave the lesson to be drawn out by the audience. 

Thank the people who invited you. But for them, you wouldn't be there.

Use the board, if there is one. It creates interest.. 

If you can ask questions, even if rhetorical, it breaks the monotony. It can be a poll, where people have to raise hands to agree..

If it's a class of students, give them a small group task. Usually works..

Stick to the time given.

Managing a Business School- Alumni

Alumni Relations

These could be the most critical of the relations an institution may have. I am not kidding (not being a kid any more), but dead serious. The brand of their alma mater is carried by each alumnus/alumna for their career and the rest of their life after! Therefore, the institution or its office-bearers need to have a plan of action on roping in the natural goodwill that alumni feel for their alma mater. All great institutions in the world have active alumni support in terms of words and deeds. In India too, some of the better institutions, public and private, have a wonderful alumni network.

What Can be Done

In the pre-internet and mobile phone days, getting in touch and keeping in touch was difficult. Now, it is not. There must be a full-time body or committee headed by a faculty member of the institution to take care of alumni affairs- or relations, if you prefer that word to ‘affairs’.

There are several things one can do to make the alumni a vibrant and connected force. But you must remember to think of it as a human relations exercise, first and foremost, and not as a financial extraction exercise.

Chapter Meets

Regular opportunities that come every year, include a social gathering or chapter meet, attended by the institution head or faculty members, or both. This connects the alumni back like nothing else, except a visit by him/her to the campus. Since that is difficult, you must reach out. Maybe the costs of the chapter meets could be shared between the institute and the alums, but that is an accounting matter. The meets must happen regularly. If budgets are small, this can be initially a low-cost venue, and expanded into a more high-profile one after funding is sorted out. Sponsorship of these by alumni companies is an option.

We were able to attract 500 alums to attend chapter meets at IMT Nagpur (which I headed then), and about 650 of them at IMT Ghaziabad (which I was associated with later), in a year. The interactions were lively, and organised entirely by current students who had a genuine interest in linking up with their seniors from the institute. The alumni felt good, and came up with their ideas on improving their institution further in several directions.

Awards for Alumni

Distinguished alumni awards are another way to recognise the contributions made by alums to their organisation, to the profession, or to causes. There could be one at the convocation each year, and some at chapter meets too.

Admissions Interviews

Most Indian B schools have personal interviews for admission into the institution. You could invite select alums to contribute as a panel member to select future students. This is a sure way to improve ties with alumni, while increasing their feeling of ownership in their alma mater. We have successfully tried this in the IMT system, and at IIM Indore.

Guest Lectures

Most alumni would have experiences to share after a few years of work experience. What better way to get this into your classrooms than to invite them for a guest lecture? They would be very pleased to take a day off sometimes, and come to their institution for one. They also get to meet potential recruits if their company is in hiring mode. They may end up mentoring some youngsters regarding what career paths they should or should not take. A formal mentoring program can also be thought of, and implemented apart from this.

Seminars on a Theme

Themed industry seminars are something we successfully did at PESIT Bangalore. In one academic year, four such seminars were held on four different themes in HR, Finance, Operations and Marketing. These are eminently doable in cities, and also in other locations, for a modest budget. Many industry bigwigs including alumni can be the speakers. It forces students to think about trends in functional areas of management, and organise an event in their interest area too.

Merchandising

To alumni of any program, mementoes of the institute are very dear. US universities do a great job of merchandising mugs, t-shirts and a range of alma mater-branded stuff. We must learn to do this better.

Ambi's Talk

Ambi Parmeswaran is a good talker. He is with FCB Ulka and is an ad man to the core. Invited by a student team at Indore, he was speaking about connecting with an audience which according to him, does not read newspapers, and does not watch TV, making these media irrelevant. Yes, the young people is what he meant. An audience who are hanging out on facebook (if that makes me young, I am happy), or blogging, or tweeting (I am not sure if young people Tweet, though- I don't :)).

He gave examples of Nivea creating a wrist band (that came in a magazine ad) for kids on the beach which their parents could use to track them, in Brazil, and Oreo creating a slew of campaigns that came from crowdsourcing. He also mentioned a contest run by Amul that resulted in getting a lot of short films (we saw the winners) made by people for free-though it cost money to communicate the idea of the contest. Digital is not cheap, was an important message.

The other was that you may have to innovate and do something different. Like Bausch and Lomb conducting a model hunt, with a makeover given to winners that included their product- contact lenses. They did this at various campuses.

A good talk, interspersed with wit. Ad types are usually witty. Did I mention I once worked in an ad agency..very briefly?

Women of Substance

These are not mythical entities, but real ones. Three such accomplished women visited IMT Nagpur recently for a guest lecture.

Sandhya Sekhar was till recently, CEO of a unique Research Park near IIT Chennai. This is an initiative that leads India-based corporates to do research that is likely to transform products, services, processes, even raw materials, or fuels, with India in mind. Needless to say, original research is sparse in India, in most fields, so this is a great idea. It also took a lot of time and energy to sell the concept to all the funding agencies. But the baby was finally born, and is going great guns. Quite incidentally, Sandhya was a classmate at IIMB around 30 years ago.

Devapriya Roy is a recent friend I made after reading her impressive first book, The Vague Woman's Handbook. A great communicator, and a very friendly, unpretentious soul, she has another piece of fiction, The Weight Loss Club (weight loss has to be fiction, you might say). She has also modelled for Keo Karpin earlier, and is pursuing a PhD in natyashastra from JNU.

Ruchira Chaudhary is a consultant based out of Singapore, who does this for the likes of Michelin in the field of Organisational Development and allied areas of H.R. She was introduced by another classmate, a mutual friend.

Hats off to the likes of Sandhya, Ruchira and Devapriya.