Lalu's got some lessons for Singapore !!!

Tuesday, April 29, 2008



Lalu's got some lessons for Singapore

New Delhi: After sessions with the top B-school brains (IIMs, Harvard, Wharton) right here at home, Lalu Prasad is all set to take the Railways’ success story and his unique brand of management outside the country.

The minister is headed for Singapore for a lecture at the internationally reputed Institut d’ Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) Asia campus on May 12. he will be talking to 350 MBA students.

Lalu will deliver his speech in Hindi, but possibly switch to English during the question-and-answer session that is likely to follow, officials said.

The minister’s visit to INSEAD — among the world’s top 10 graduate business schools — is in response to an invitation from its global dean Frank Brown and Asia campus head Professor Narayan Pant. Last year in November, Brown had come to India as head of an INSEAD delegation for a personal interaction with Lalu.

The Railways has a formal five-year contract with INSEAD for providing training to its senior officials on “customer strategies”. The B-school has designed training modules to empower the middle and senior-level management of the Railways with macro plan perspectives.

Over the past years, graduates from premier technical and B-schools across the world have thronged to India to hear Lalu expand on the theme of “economic rejuvenation with a human face”. This is the first time he will speak on foreign soil on the methods and processes employed by him to breathe fresh life into the near moribund structure that he inherited four years back.

And this trip promises to be the first of many. Lalu’s appointment diary is practically overflowing with overseas lecture assignments. An invitation is pending from the Paris-based HEC School of Management, while he is supposed to address American and Bangladeshi bureaucrats at Washington and Dhaka respectively. Early this month, he had to refuse a lecture invitation from the World Bank headquarters in Washington because the dates clashed with Parliament’s budget session.

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