November 6, 2010

Madhukar Shukla on Social Entrepreneurship

Madhukar ShuklaProfessor Madhukar Shukla has been part of the faculty of XLRI, India's premier Business School, since 1990 where he teaches Organizational Behavior. He has worked with the National Productivity Council and Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad and served as Visiting Professor at ESADE (Barcelona), Spain during 1993-94. His fields of special interest include Organizational Design, Organizational Change and Development, Learning Organizations and Management of Creativity. His books: “Designing Organizations” and “Competing through Knowledge” remain relevant and well thumbed through. For the past few years it is his passion for Social Entrepreneurship (read his article in Wall Street Journal here) that consumes him.Madhukar gets the kind of adulation from his students that only rock stars and film stars get from the paparazzi. You have to visit the Madhukar Shukla Fan Club on Facebook to understand the kind of hysteria he generates among his students and XLRI Alumni across the world - many of them got re-connected to their alma mater after Madhukar set up his unofficial version of Alumni networks across the years. Since the time he joined XL and we met - he has been a friend ever since. Full disclosure, I am a fan too.Says Prem Rao ('74 batch alum) about Mad Shuks as his students call him, "Madhukar has done more than anyone else has ever done to bring together the alum of XL- across generations!". Madhukar was in Bangalore for about 10 days, giving us enough time to talk about books, music, people, films, poetry and of course his all consuming passion for building social entrepreneurs at XLRI. Here are excerpts: