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Our Faculty

St. Stephen’s Institute brings together a unique faculty roster to deliver the ADP, combining the forefront of academic research and management practice. Each module is helmed by a primary instructor, with contributions by guest lecturers chosen from among the ranks of successful executives.

D. Brent Smith (PhD, Maryland)

Associate Dean for Executive Education, Jones School of Business
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Leadership and Global Competitiveness

Brent Smith has led training sessions around the world including Europe, Asia and South America. Brent specializes in leadership and management development.

Sanjay Saigal (PhD, Rice)

Executive Director, SSIME
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Operations and Information

A St. Stephen’s College alumnus, Sanjay Saigal put together Mudrika Education, Inc. to jumpstart the college’s management education extension now known as St. Stephen’s Institute.

Suresh Krishnamoorthy (MBA, NYU)

Principal, CRC Capital Advisors
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Finance

Mr Krishnamoorthy brings over 27 years of experience spanning Information Technology and Financial and Investment Risk Management. He currently manages a boutique risk advisory firm focusing on asset allocation and portfolio risk. He is a graduate of IIT Madras (1984) and holds an MBA from NYU (1997).

Vikas Mittal (PhD, Michigan)

J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing, Jones School of Business
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Strategy

Vikas Mittal has been at Jones since 2007 and was previously on faculty at Katz Graduate School of Business and the School of Medicine, both at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University.

Mitrabarun Sarkar (PhD, Michigan State)

Professor of Strategy, Temple University and Visiting Professor of Strategy, Indian School of Business
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Strategy

Though he got his start as an entrepreneurial CEO in the media sector, MB is currently Professor of Strategy Innovation in the Department of Strategic Management, as well as Stauffer Research Fellow, at the Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University.

Michael Grojean

Professor in the Practice of Management, Jones School of Business
St. Stephen's Institute focus: Leadership and Global Competitiveness

Michael Grojean has been Leadership Policy Officer for the U.S Army as well as Director of HR for a 28,000 member organization. As in charge of leader development policy for the 1.4 million person active and reserve force in the US Army, he also authored the Army’s mentorship doctrine, critically changing the organizational paradigm of developmental relationships. At this time he is Professor in the Practice of Management and Executive Director for Executive Education at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

While the listed faculty are scheduled to teach in the 2011-2012 ADP session, SSIME reserves the right to make roster substitutions if unavoidable circumstances so dictate.

Other Faculty

Michael Grojean,
Professor in the Practice of Management, Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University

St. Stephen’s Institute focus: Global Competitiveness

Prof. Grojean’s research has been published in British Journal of Management, The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Performance, Leadership Quarterly, the Journal of Business Ethics and The Reader’ Guide to the Social Sciences, as well as numerous confidential internal organizational reports and publications. In addition to the publications noted above, Dr Grojean has made recent media appearances in the Guardian, the Scotsman, The Pat Kenny Show, RTE Radio, the Birmingham Post, Newstalk Ireland and BBC Radio. Dr Grojean was recently featured on www.guruonline.tv discussing practical leadership.

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Mitrabarun Sarkar,
Strategy, St. Stephens Institute
Professor of Strategy, Temple University and Visiting Professor of Strategy, Indian School of Business

The next generation of competitive advantage will accrue to companies that can create profitable business models around innovations that cater to underserved markets at lower tiers of the pyramid. Strategise to solve one big problem that India faces. Identify an intractable socio-economic crisis and break it into a series of smaller, constituent parts. Analyse how you can leverage your competencies to address some critical parts of the problematic value chain. Challenge your technical teams to come out with a 70-50-30 solution (70% of the performance at 50% of the price and 30% of the cost), and in your go-to-market strategies, leverage partnerships with the citizenship sector. As you gain scale, look for markets in developed countries that you can disrupt with more advanced technological generations of these solutions.

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Suresh Krishnamoorthy,
Finance, St. Stephens Institute

Principal, CRC Capital Advisors

Mr Krishnamoorthy is a fan of models but constantly urges caution in how models are applied and used. He sees many cases where a ‘neat’ model gets extended well beyond what its underlying assumptions would reasonably permit. Often, the results are not pretty. One example is the use of default models that were designed for use with Corporate bonds to rate credit derivtives such as CDOs.

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Sanjay Saigal,
Operations and Information, St. Stephen’s Institute
Executive Director, St. Stephen’s Institute

Since the 1950s, scientific and technological education has been the darling of Indian education policy-makers. In the Nehruvian vision’ the government controlled the “commanding heights” of the economy. Naturally, business education was not high among the priorities. Yet over time, quality MBA programs gained favor with credential-hungry students aiming for private sector careers. In the last fifteen years, private business schools such as the Indian School of Business (ISB) have begun to compete with the IIMs.

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Vikas Mittal,

Customer-centric Strategy Director, St. Stephen’s Institute

J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing, Jones School

People get committed to a project, and they keep investing in it even when it becomes very clear that they shouldn’t.
Why? In his research, Mittal examines not only how the risk level of a project and its stage of development-in other words, how far the project has progressed-influence whether people are willing to devote more resources to an endeavor, but also how awareness of those factors can help executives make better decisions. This is a new area of research. “In the past, people have looked only at whether there was an escalation of commitment,

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D. Brent Smith,
Assoc. Dean, Executive Education, Jones School

Smith has been a professor at the Jones School for eight years, aside from a two-year stint to teach organizational behavior at the London Business School, where he designed and directed many of their executive leadership programs. He has taught in the Rice MBA programs as well as Executive Education, logging more hours teaching leadership courses to high-level executives than any other fulltime faculty member.

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