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Monday, March 21, 2016

Top Business Reads Picked by the Top PGDM College in Delhi

The best business reads list is always hard to frame. At the top PGDM College in Delhi, Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, the faculty team has prepared a list of business reads ahead of the competitive admission season to crack group discussion and personal interviews. While preparing this list we have also given due weights to the utility of these books for enhancing business acumen in addition to serving up as good pieces of literature on business and management. Here is the list of the top business reads and the key takeaways from these books.

My Years with General Motors
My years with General Motors, is written by the former CEO of General Motors, Alfred.P.Sloan. Sloan in his active years at the company was responsible for its tremendous growth and transformation from being a U.S. based automobile manufacturer to being a global company with footprints in the markets of Western Europe and Asia later on. His take on the big picture of the company as a whole, the working of the different departments of a company like parts of a well oiled machine and finally the vision of being a customer centric company rather than being a technology based one are the key takeaways. We refer to this book in the first semester during our lectures and believe it is one of the best references on papers like organizational behaviour or advance management concepts.

Better India Better World
Better India Better World, is a compilation of lectures delivered by the former CEO of Infosys, N.R.Narayana Murthy. Regarded as one of the doyens of corporate governance and business ethics, this book bases itself on the growth of the company during the early days. The business model is well explained. The famous Global Delivery Model conceptualized and implemented by Murthy and fellow founders like Nilekani, Shibulal, Gopalakirshnan and Pai is an eye opener for aspiring business leaders and managers even today. The PSPD model for risk mitigation and the virtues of business forecasting for sustainability are also key takeaways. At Ishan we recommend this book for papers like business environment, corporate strategy and corporate governance. Murthy’s intellectual class stands out like nobody else.

Thinking Strategically
Written by Indian American economist Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff from Princeton and Yale universities, this is a book that combines game theory with strategic management. We strongly recommend this book to STEM (science, technology, engineering& mathematics) students for the papers of strategic management and operations research. More than mere academics it shows how choice theory can be affected by the availability and absence of reaction function based outcomes in competitive situations. In our business lives we very often come across situations where we have to compete against a rival with two specific options such as attack/defend, lead/follow, innovate/imitate, etc. This is a great read for dealing with situations.

How Stella Saved the Farm?
How Stella Saved the Farm is an adaptation of the classic Animal Farm written by George Orwell. Penned by Chris Trimble and C.Vijaygovindrajan of Tuck School of Business, we recommend this book to students of humanities background. It is perhaps the ultimate fun way to learn people management, leadership, motivation, innovation and core competence from comic characters like Stella. Written in lucid language and simplified for young minds this is a book that shows that intellectual greatness in business management is about simplicity. The book is great for doing role plays and the best part is that each chapter ends with some questions for self study that can be of great help for interviews.

The Country of First Boys
The Country of First Boys written by India’s only Nobel winning economist Amartya Sen may not be deemed as a business book at all. It may also not be deemed to be a book on economics. The mistake is not in the definition of the book but in the notions that business school graduates and managers develop about economic development. Most business leaders in Europe and U.S believe that economic development is about liberalizing the economic system of trade and non trade barriers, financial and banking sector reforms and industrialization. The Asian model of economic development as applied in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand or even Hong Kong has the quality improvement of people at its centre. As the name of the book suggests economic growth in India does not reflect in gender diversity and thus conspicuously overlook women in economic development. It is a must read for group discussions on issues of growth, gender diversity, poverty, regional imbalances and welfare state.

Some of the best MBA colleges in Delhi NCR do well in academics and placement because of the education software that goes into administering marketable skill formation in students. Ishan is a top PGDM college in Delhi and the first graduate business school in Greater Noida.