Interview place: William Pound’s Office, MIT
Interview Date: 19th May 2011
Table of contents:
• Introductions; coming from MIT Sloan to India in 1964 (Pounds); research interests in IIM Calcutta (Bergstrom).
• Doing fieldwork and teaching at IIM-C (Bergstrom); remembering other MIT faculty at IIM-C in the 1960s.
• Teaching Production Management in Kashmir (Pounds).
• Student problems with applying the teachings to real life scenarios (Pounds); the Indian business environment.
• Factory strike on the first day of work (Bergstrom); political crisis in West Bengal in the late 1960s (Pounds); meeting Jyothi Basu (Pounds).
• Understanding institutional culture in West Bengal (Bergstrom); remembering David Ensminger.
• The political crises across the USA in the late 1960s; culture shock and settling down in Calcutta.
• Graduate students in Kashmir (Pounds); graduate students at IIM-C (Bergstrom).
• Similarities between MIT Sloan and IIM-C’s institutional goals versus the Harvard Pattern (IIM-A); contemporary convergence of ideals between US business schools (Pounds).
• Free market of faculty; current Dean of Harvard; rivalry and competition between IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Calcutta; Indian colleagues from IIM-C; remembering the first taught class at IIM Calcutta (Pounds).
• The infrastructure and facilities of Emerald Bower in the 1960s.
• IIM-C as a “foreign body” of business schools in India; Problems with class structures in Calcutta (Pounds); the effect of the political issues in Calcutta on the MIT Sloan/IIM-C relationship.
• The changes in how investing in India was viewed from the 1960s to the 1990s (Pounds); publishing research work based on IIM-C fieldwork (Bergstrom).
• The belief in the benefits of economic development (Pounds); early stage career development (Bergstrom); cultural commonalities and differences between India and China.
• Concluding comments about the interviewing process.
2011-05-19
IIM Calcutta
