“ISB to launch a centre of excellence in strategic Human Capital
Hyderabad: The Indian School of Business (ISB) organized a Thought Leaders’ Summit on: ‘Shaping the future of Human Capital Strategies: Priorities in Education, Research and Learning’, here at the ISB Campus today.
The objective of the summit was to seek industry partnership in building practice relevant content for Strategic Human Capital Management and help enterprises drive value-adding Human Capital programs for the future.
The Summit was held in partnership with Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Singapore Management University (SMU) and was attended by several CEOs, CXOs and CHROs form leading companies in India.
In his keynote address, Mr D Shivakumar, Group Executive President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development, Aditya Birla Management Corporation, opined that the human capital strategies must incorporate critical aspects and dimensions concerning education, research and career. “I think if we could successfully institutionalize a human capital index for companies, it may bring the desired results”, he said.
Dr Richard Smith, Academic Director, Master of Human Capital: Leadership, Singapore Management University, opined that with the growing orientation of “Evidence-based Management,” we are at a critical juncture for academic and business leader collaboration in advancing the theory and practice of Human Capital – and India is well positioned take a global leadership role in making this happen.”
Professor Rajendra Srivastava, Dean, Indian School of Business, in his address, said that ISB has started work on building thought leadership in the strategic Human Capital area and will provide industry relevant offerings in research, education and in-career learning in Human Capital management .To this end ISB has already incubated a Human Capital & Leadership Initiative ( HC&LI) and the same will be grown into a full-fledged centre of excellence in strong partnership with industry and global schools. He said that with this view Chandrashekar Sripada – a leading HR veteran from industry – has been appointed as the Practice Professor, OB & Strategic Human Capital who will also drive the HC&LI at ISB, as its Executive Director. The Dean, in his welcome address, urged the need for integration of theory and practice in the area of human capital, for which there has to be a strong collaboration between industry and academia and the approach has to be multidisciplinary.
Professor Chandrashekar Sripada set the context for the Summit and said the country urgently needs many high quality centres of education and research to advance Human Capital Leadership and help enterprises create greater value through Human Capital. He explained that ISB will partner with leading Indian and Global Schools and will offer cutting edge curriculum, state-of-the-art-pedagogy and industry relevant applied research – to train next generation HR professionals as well as future-ready People Leaders. He urged the industry leaders to forge meaningful partnership with business academia and support research in the inter-disciplinary science of Human Capital Management. He said it will be the endeavour of ISB to get CEOs and CHROs to partner better and give a greater strategic focus to Human Capital strategies for sustainable outcomes.
The Summit deliberated six top topics of human capital management, viz. human capital strategies for the digital era; building global organisations by managing across borders; measuring return on human capital; architecting leadership development for the future; fostering workforce diversity and inclusion; and building organisational agility.
The 35+ thought leaders and experts attending the Summit actively discussed and deliberated on the themes and expressed the need to continue the dialogue to drive better outcomes.