Remembering Ganesh Prabhu, a friend and collaborator

It has been a year since Ganesh departed. It was as if Ganesh had negotiated the details of the departure time. His course was over, and the grades had been submitted. Ganesh liked to work out details. He would call me to check if I am available on a date ten months later. Initially, I would double-check with him if the year is correct. Slowly, I got used to it. My calendar would have a huge empty space followed by some slots that are blocked for a program with Ganesh. 

Ganesh's detail orientation stands out while talking to his old friends. Utkarsh Majumdar and Jose P. D. are two of them. They were neighbors in the IIM Ahmedabad hostel during FPM days. Jose continued to be his neighbor even at IIMB. Both of them collaborated with Ganesh through executive education programs, some of them lasting multiple decades. Ganesh would have worked out the program details, so it was easy to run those programs, they recall. For Jose, Ganesh was the go-to man to clarify any institute policy or regulation. And Ganesh would approach Utkarsh to check if a particular answer was correct, even though Ganesh had set the exam paper. 

Ganesh and I would meet often in the Staff Canteen, either for breakfast or lunch. For breakfast, he would come on his signature Ather 450. I asked him why he didn't walk from his house; it is such a green campus. He said "Naah" with such conviction, I didn't dare to ask that question again. Once, he seemed excited as we were approaching the canteen. I asked him if there was anything special. Ganesh said, it is Saturday, there will be masala dosa. He was fond of guessing the items during the executive program's special lunches. "There will be mutton biryani," he would declare much before arriving at MDC, "or Malabar fish curry." 

Ganesh would carry a serious face with his thick mustache ninety percent of the time. And, once in a while, he would burst out laughing, mostly at his own joke. I wouldn't have been able to guess that he was the prank master in the Ahmedabad hostel. Apparently, he went walking around dressed like a sardar and many people didn't recognize him. Ganesh was a big fan of Govinda during college days. It is not clear if he got any company for Govinda movies. At least once, he had pulled reluctant Utkarsh into watching one. 

Ganesh, Jose, and Rishikesha T. Krishnan joined IIMB together in 1996. Next term, in early 1997, Rishi and Ganesh offered an open executive program, Creating Successful New Products (CSNP). It was a big hit. The program led the duo to first study the challenges in product development in the Indian industry, and then they focused on the software product development. The study outcome was first published as a set of challenges faced by the Indian industry and later as a set of lessons from six cases in the software industry. Interestingly, many of the six software products studied in the paper twenty-five years ago still exist in some form. For example, Infosys BANCS2000 (now called Finacle), Ramco's Marshal ERP, and even the niche Urdu word processor from Concept Software are still around.  Subsequently, Ganesh ended up leading the CSNP program and ran with it till last year. I started participating as a co-teacher in the program in 2014, and we did one in November 2024; it was our last program together. 

Ganesh told me once that when he joined IIMB, he didn't enjoy teaching. But he liked research. And pretty soon, he got a paper in the Academy of Management Review, one of the most prestigious journals in management literature. This work was done in collaboration with Gerard George, who was at that time at Syracuse University, and the paper explored the role of Developmental Financial Institutions (DFIs) as catalysts of entrepreneurship in emerging economies like India. Looks like he didn't pursue this line of research. But this AMR paper isn't Ganesh's most cited paper; "Social entrepreneurship leadership," published a year earlier (1999), has three times more citations. This was way before social entrepreneurship became fashionable in India.  

By the time my interaction with Ganesh began in 2014-15, his research enthusiasm had come down, and he was enjoying teaching. At least that is what he told me. Ganesh's signature course for PGP was New Product Development. This is where he started using short video cases. In fact, he uploaded his entire NPD course on Vimeo much before the MOOC and IIMBx started. I borrowed some of the video cases from him. When I showed interest in the Zipline drone video, he would tell me how he uses it from timestamps 2 minutes to 9 minutes. If you ask him why, he would have a detailed reasoning ready. He also taught qualitative research for the FPM students for multiple decades. Ganesh was part of the doctoral committees of a couple of dozen students. Some of these relationships might have started from this course on qualitative research. Jaykumar, who had Ganesh in his FPM committee, remembers that his research direction emerged while discussing his qualitative research course paper with Ganesh. 

Ganesh was the placement chair three times. Perhaps this is where he built his intuition on career advice for MBA aspirants. We were discussing non-research writing, and he knew I blogged regularly. Ganesh said he doesn't write blogs. And then he added, "But I answer questions on Quora." And then he sheepishly added, "I have forty-eight thousand followers." I looked at him in disbelief. I find giving career advice very challenging. So, my admiration for Ganesh grew multifold. He was clearly a career influencer. 

Design Thinking took us to places like IIM Visakhapatnam and the Indian Oil Corporation in Delhi. This is when I discovered that Ganesh and I live in two different time zones while being in the same city. Ganesh used to start the two-day program, and I would start from the third session. Participants would ask me questions like, "I am a left-brain person, can I learn design thinking?" I realized that Ganesh had covered left-brain-right-brain stuff earlier. I carried a strong belief that the creative thinking-right-brain and analytical thinking-left-brain classification is a myth created by folk psychology. I attended Ganesh's sessions to understand his perspective. It prompted me to study this topic further and write a blog on it.  

Utkarsh remembers Ganesh as a deals man. He would keep track of who is offering the best deal in the town. I wanted to buy a laptop a few years ago. And Ganesh immediately had the top 3 suggestions ready with trade-offs associated with each of them. He was fond of Ather e-scooters. I used to call him first-day first-show Ather fan. He had 3 Ather scooters. And he had bought some of them on the day of launch. For most people, e-scooters are a recent phenomenon. Ganesh owned e-scooters since 2005. But he used to ride the scooter only inside the campus. Utkarsh asked me if I ever sat with him on his scooter. I hadn't. Apparently, Ganesh never crossed 40km/hr, causing irritation to everybody riding with him and driving around him. Ganesh could talk about the EVs for a long time. So I decided to interview him and uploaded it on YouTube. Even when Ola Electric had a fifty percent market share, Ganesh would tell me, "It will not succeed." He was plugged into the EV owners' network.  When someone asked him for advice on buying an e-scooter, he said, "Buy anything other than Ola." I used to marvel at his intuition.

As I was talking to Ganesh's friends for this article, the most surprising find for me was his passion for Hindustani Classical music. Like Rishi-Utkarsh-Jose, Vidyanand Jha was Ganesh's FPM batchmate at IIM Ahmedabad. But his association with Ganesh goes back even further. They both did an MBA at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). Vidyanand remembers they both attending all night classical music concerts, starting at the back row and then slowly moving toward the front as the night proceeded. Vidyanand wrote a poem on Ganesh in his condolence note.  

I had health issues last year. Stomach infections, weight loss, insomnia, etc. It resulted in my withdrawing from a course I was scheduled to teach in the June term. It was the first time for me. Ganesh was my sounding board. We had a program scheduled a couple of months later. I checked with him whether we should cancel that too. He was confident we would do it, and we did. He kept nudging me to take a second opinion. I eventually did, and the second doctor suggested that I didn't need any medication. And that's what I did, and slowly things came back to normalcy. Ganesh had this great gift of helping. We will miss him. May time grant Ganesh’s family the strength to move forward, carrying his presence in quieter ways. 

Acknowledgments:

Appreciate the inputs from Rishi, Vidyanand, Utkarsh, Jose, Jaykumar, and Kajoli.