Sunday, August 21, 2016

Assessing Performance of B-Schools: An Approach Using Data

The motivation to write this article came when I came across Section 197 Companies Act India (and learn data scraping using python! :P ) For the complete technicalities you may read this article. In a nutshell, it specifies a limit to what the Board of Directors and managers can be paid by a public company. And on top of that, this information has to be disclosed in the annual report.

Yes, a publicly listed company has to reveal what it is paying to its top management. My next step, was to search the report of one of the most prestigious companies in B-schools. And I was not disappointed.

Check out HUL's Annexure to the annual report (2015-16).
You will realize that it is a rich(no pun intended) source of data (check out the remuneration, it is mind boggling). And it got me wondering. Can I use this to see which B-school alumni is really on a roll? If I build this across multiple companies,will I find a coterie of institutes at the top?

This led me to writing a script which would pull names from such data and match it with their education. Following is the result-



This has been taken from top FMCG companies- HUL, ITC, Nestle,Marico, Castrol,Asian Paints and HCL Tech (the only non-fmcg company)

Interpretation


  • The results support common knowledge- IIMs and XLRI lead the pack.
  • But what is interesting to see is that IIM Calcutta and XLRI have a higher number of alumni at the top level as compared to IIM Ahmedabad. (Perhaps I should collect more data)
  • What is even more interesting is that Chartered Accountant's rule the roost and have a good amount of representation in all the companies. All the CFOs were Chartered Accountants.
  • All the HR heads belonged to XLRI
  • HUL employs the highest number of MBA graduates spread across all premier B-schools.
  • Even if the number of companies analyzed is not a lot, it is safe to assume that there is a cluster of institutes (IIM C, XLRI and IIM A) which has a strong presence in the FMCG sector.
  • It will be interesting to see if the newly established/emerging campuses (IIM K,I, SPJIMR) will be able to make a difference in this pecking order in future.


Caveats

1) There were many who had not put any information online about their education background. This lack of data can account for some inaccuracy in the result.
2) 7 companies and an overall sample set of 200 business graduates is a very small number
3) It was observed that MBA graduates formed only 20-30% of the total set. These observations are within this subset of MBA graduates.
4) There is a chance that wrong entries might be picked up. But this will become nominal as number of entries increase.

For example, an article by LiveMint showed that IIMA produced the highest number of CEOs in BSE 500 companies. It is slightly surprising since that trend is not clearly visible here.

Tech Corner:


It was the first time I extensively worked on python building a scraper and absolutely loved the Selenium driver. It makes it so much easier to build web bots.

If you want the actual script, do leave a comment and I will get back to you.  :)

Important Links 


1) Section 197 Companies Act
2) HUL Annexure report
3) Selenium-python docs