Prof Rakesh Godhwani of IIM-B and Prof Soumendra Bagchi have recently published books. In a first of sorts, we got the professors to review each other’s books.
Below is what Prof Rakesh Godhwani’s review of Prof Bagchi’s book titled – Election Campaign – A strategic theory.
Prof Soumendra Bagchi
Soumendra ‘s effort of writing on a topic that is one of the most talked about topics, especially as India gears up for the 2014 general elections is commendable. I am not much of a political science student and really don’t enjoy the political debates on television or newspapers. But as a practitioner of management, I fully realise the importance of government in economy and business. Soumendra has written about the ABCs of an election campaign from an angle that looks at a strategic framework to explain it better.
And as a young academic myself, I must emphasize the amount of research put together to compile this book. Just check out the notes on every page and the bibliography towards the end.
The book is about 130 pages and I took less than 2 days to finish reading it. It was an easy read and the author has written it in a very simple style that is very apt for everyone. The overall approach is very academic and it almost appears to be a research paper.
The book has 12 chapters which take the reader through the machinery of an election campaign. I never knew that there is so much science behind it. In every chapter, Soumendra has done a marvelous job to first lay out a concept, and then demonstrate it with a practical example from Indian politics or history as well. My favorite parts of the books are the various quotations that serve as garnish on every page.
In some sense, Soumendra is not only a researcher and an academic, but has used his creative side extremely well too. Each chapter is served as a dish straight out from a gourmet kitchen and if you ask me, I first savored the garnish (the quotes) and then dived into the dish. In some chapters, Soumendra brought in the leadership styles as well and I found that very educative . I really liked that Soumendra did not dive deeper into the Indian politics and just focused on the framework of a campaign.
As the head of alumni affairs at IIM Bangalore, I noticed some of my own alumni join political parties and run for elections in the recent times. I also feel that Soumendra can attempt to write another book that is a sequel to this one and can give a more “how to” guide for aspirants to start their own campaigns. I would have also liked to see some more insight in how technology and modern paradigms like Face book, social network will impact the campaign moving forward as they are increasingly becoming a very important external factor in how we are living today.