On March 24, 2020, at 8:00 p.m., when Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown following the outbreak of the global pandemic, the entire Indian School of Business (ISB) community responded with alacrity. The pressing requirement and biggest challenge was to vacate around 800 students from ISB’s two campuses in two different states of India distanced by 1,800 kilometers within 24 hours, which was completed safely with a sense of esprit de corps. Like everyone else, even though we were not prepared for such an eventuality, ISB was at its agile best.
Since then, in the last 9 months (I am writing this in December 2020), although the early days were very challenging, slowly but surely, the school returned to near normalcy. After evacuating the students in March, we sanitized the two campuses, one of 90 acres (Mohali) and the other of 250 acres (Hyderabad); completed the existing classes for the Post Graduate Programme (PGP; which is equivalent to, and will hitherto be used interchangeably with, an MBA) and the modular programs online; achieved near 100 percent placements; continued and completed the admissions process for the new MBA cohort; had the virtual graduation program for the previous batch; started online classes for the new batch; and finally, brought in the MBA class of 2021 physically to the two campuses. This was made possible because of our financial stability; complete passion, dedication, and hard work from all the stakeholders involved; regular meetings with the full Board of Directors as well as smaller task forces; scaling up of infrastructure needs like information technology; and teamwork, frequent and transparent communication, and a deep sense of mission. All the above subsets broadly make up what can be termed organizational and individual resilience.
This chapter provides two perspectives: (1) what we did at ISB to attend to the immediate challenges imposed by COVID-19, that is, to maintain business continuity, and (2) what we, as management institutions, need to do to reshape educational offerings so that graduates are better prepared to handle the new normal that has emerged.
The first challenge, maintaining business continuity, has so far involved adopting hybrid/blended learning processes, combining online synchronous and asynchronous online delivery, and preserving interactive dialogue and the peer-to-peer learning that is the hallmark of teaching at ISB. This has had a differential impact on full-time versus modular programs as well as nondegree executive education. The faculty had been debating the adoption of blended learning for a few years and had implemented it in part in only one out of our four programs (the weekend program for working professionals was delivered about 20 percent online), but the sudden arrival of COVID-19 cut short the debates. We rolled up our sleeves and got going. This chapter catalogues the creative approaches we adopted to overcome some challenges – while others persist.