Buy time with Mr. Murthy
By Pulkit Sharma

If there was an award for publicity stunts, the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Andhra Pradesh would get a gold medal. While the ISB is highly regarded and has ‘associations’ with Wharton, London Business School and Kellogg School of Management, like every good capitalist it wants more. ISB has just launched a fund raising scheme which will benefit it more than the charity itself.

The Indian School of Business (ISB) charges $40,000 for its MBA programme. 

ISB has just announced a ‘Shadow a CEO Program’ to raise money for charity apparently motivated by the Joy of Giving Week. ISB has managed to rope in Adi Godrej, MK Birla, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and even tech icon Narayana Murthy.

The idea is to ‘auction’ a day with these respected CEOs to raise money for charity. ISB is so concerned about raising money for charity that it has restricted the bidding to only current students.  No free market here.  And for some reason, ex-students who are well settled in corporate careers and who could bid more and raise larger amounts for charity are also excluded.

The results of this ‘Shadow a CEO’ auction would be announced in January 2010. There are many socialistic controls on this bidding to spend a day with one of the 16 CEO’s.  The highest bid will not necessarily be accepted.  That decision is left to an ISB ‘panel’ committee.

While there are many students who would genuinely love to learn from masters like Narayana Murthy and super biotech boss Kiran Mazumdar, the fact is that there are only some students who can raise some funds to bid.

Only winners in this?  The ISB brand which has managed to garner much free publicity by managing to convince many highly regarded CEOs to donate their time to charity. To be fair to the Indian media, many ignored this story because they saw through this publicity stunt. Other winners are the handful of students who have the spare money (family money?).  Last but not the least; the charities will get some money.

What are the odds that ISB will ever reveal which students won and how much money this ‘Shadow a CEO’ actually raised for charity?  ISB, please tell the public in January, 2010, about how much money this scheme donated to charity.