Madhu Viswanathan
Loyola Marymount University
“At Loyola Marymount University, Madhu Viswanathan designed a semester-long course on Business for Good that reaches about 800 undergraduate students each academic year, including all first years and transfer students. In this course, students work in groups to understand low-income customers, identify a problem, design a solution, and develop a business plan that meets triple bottom lines. Students use multi-media content develop in this stream of work and also conduct virtual interviews with low-income individuals across the world. Totaling 3,000 students in the last four years, this course was scaled during the pandemic through purely online, then hybrid, and now in-person modes. Undergraduate students confront a variety of challenges in their very first year in this one-of-a-kind, new-to-the-world course recognized by Financial Times for responsible business education in 2024.” – Noriko Sato Ward
Madhu Viswanathan, 62, is Professor of Marketing at Loyola Marymount University. He is also Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
His research programs are on measurement, and subsistence marketplaces. He has authored several books including Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008), Subsistence Marketplaces (2013), and Bottom-Up Enterprise (2016).
He founded and pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, taking a bottom-up approach to poverty and marketplaces through symbiotic academic-social enterprise. He founded and directs the Marketplace Literacy Project, pioneering consumer, entrepreneurial and sustainability literacy education that has reached more than 100,000 women across four continents.
He has taught courses on research methods, subsistence, and sustainability to thousands of students in-person and on-line. He has created innovative curricular content for educators and learners relating to bottom-up immersion, design, innovation and enterprise.
He is Founding Editor-In Chief, Subsistence Marketplaces – a journal and web portal. He has served on the Livelihoods Advisory Board of UNHCR. He served as Faculty Advisor for the online iMBA, University of Illinois (2015-16), leading the team that launched the program, designing and implementing key curricular policies and innovations. He has served as Chair, Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group, American Marketing Association; Secretary-Treasurer, Society for Consumer Psychology; Associate Editor, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing; and Director of Graduate Studies, Business Administration, University of Illinois.
His work has been recognized with more than 20 international awards and recognitions for teaching, research, lifetime achievement, and social entrepreneurship.
BACKGROUND
At current institution since what year? Fall, 2019
Education:
- PhD (1990) – University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Major – Business Administration (Marketing), Minor – Psychology.
- Bachelor of Technology (1985) – Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (now Chennai), India.
List of Undergraduate courses you teach: Business For Good, required for all first year and transfer business students at Loyola Marymount University
TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR
I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …
I played competitive Bridge at the national level in India …
…while in an undergraduate program in engineering. I felt that Chess was like engineering and Bridge was like the social sciences. I liked how each deal in Bridge needed both statistics and psychology and the inherent uncertainty enabled anyone to compete against even the world’s best, at least on paper. And so I applied for a PhD in marketing as I thought Marketing involved psychology and statistics (there was no Internet at that time). This path primarily educates a person to be a professor, something that seemed the very natural thing for me to do, without much of deliberate thought. Bridge was also a window into myself. I like variation and discovery processes; hence my bottom-up approach to subsistence marketplaces, each of which are so distinct.
Something similar happened with research very early that must have had an influence. In my very first quarter as a research assistant in Fall, 1985, I was able to see patterns in some data on business-to-business that led to a coauthored paper at a very good journal.
What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it?
How bottom-up design is distinct from design thinking and human-centric design – in scope (goes beyond consumer to community and larger context) and vantage (bottom-up first in every phase)
How bottom-up marketing expands the boundaries of marketing; for instance interweaving bottom-up with the macro-level; translating vision for change to customized purpose in different contexts.
If I weren’t a business school professor, I’d be …
- I have no idea; meant for only this role in some ways
- A travel agent (or so my wife says), given all the international immersions I have organized for my students and my work globally
- An inspirational speaker(!?), with condolences to my audiences
- A social entrepreneur
What do you think makes you stand out as a professor?
- Empathy; every student is somebody’s child and a human being first
- Unconditional belief in every student’s infinite potential
- Educational experiences that are based on the research and practice that I pioneered on subsistence marketplaces
- Bottom-up approach – letting students connect the dots for themselves, sometimes across the world
- Exposure to a world they are typically not used to; subsistence marketplaces globally
- Empowering students to focus on grand challenges and solutions in unstructured environments filled with uncertainty
Our learning experiences did not change during the pandemic, other than the mode of delivery. This is because, for almost two decades, we have challenged students to understand needs and design solutions in settings and scenarios where “all bets are off,” i.e., subsistence marketplaces.
One word that describes my first time teaching:
Trial-by-fire
I joined the doctoral program at the University of Minnesota in Fall of 1985 immediately after completing a degree in Mechanical Engineering in India. I had literally no knowledge of business, or the US culture (or Arctic weather). I took some business classes as prerequisites for the PhD, which included one 10-week course in Marketing in the spring of 1986, after which I went back home to India for three months. With about two weeks to go for the Fall semester, I learned that I will be teaching (not TAing) two sections of principles of marketing of 60 undergraduate students each. I was literally a chapter ahead of the students. I am grateful that no student complained, and I hope it was because I made a sincere effort. I don’t recall being particularly nervous in any teaching or presentation setting since. That was trial-by-fire that instilled confidence and laid the foundation to teach a wide range of students over the decades.
Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor:
- A place to learn how to crawl, and walk, but ultimately run and fly on one’s own
- The immense potential to create one’s own journey (I figured it out for myself)
- The space to be both rigorous and relevant, idealistic and realistic, theoretical and practical, diagnosing and addressing or solving problems.
- A place where one does not have to be bound by specific ways of thinking or theoretical paradigms
Professor I most admire and why:
Professors – Terry Childers, Kent Monroe, Ronald Paul Hill, Richard Bagozzi, Clayton Christensen, Stuart Hart, and CK Prahalad.
Educators – John Clarke, Ronald Duncan, John Hedeman, Ramadhani Kupaza
Pushed boundaries and created new frontiers in what they did and were open to new ways of thinking and/or played an important role in my journey
TEACHING BUSINESS SCHOOL STUDENTS
What do you enjoy most about teaching business students?
Diagnosis and cure; Theory and practice; Needs and products; Challenges and solutions
International immersions and virtual immersions including observations and interviews
Innovative bottom-up process of understanding needs, designing products and developing business plans encompassing immersion, emersion, design, innovation, and enterprise
Field research in subsistence marketplaces
Sustainability and business
What is most challenging?
- It is not so much challenging but I tell my students – “I cannot pay attention for you”
In one word, describe your favorite type of student:
- Self-motivated; takes ownership and initiative but also allows others to do the same
In one word, describe your least favorite type of student:
- I just don’t think of students that way. Each student is on their journey and I don’t know where they came from or where they are headed. But I hope I can have a miniscule positive impact on where they are going.
When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as …
- Consistent, fair, and generous; I do not look for distinctions without a difference.
LIFE OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
What are your hobbies?
- Competitive Bridge
- Movies and streaming shows
- Cooking
- Travelling
- Connecting or reconnecting with people
- My social enterprise of marketplace literacy (not a hobby but what I do in my leisure)
How will you spend your summer?
- Travel to four continents I hope; Puebla, Mexico; Tanzania, India, United Kingdom
- Train educators to teach marketplace literacy in low-income communities
- Visit places and interact with people
- Go on a Safari to Tanzania and Kenya
Favorite place(s) to vacation:
- India
- Tanzania
- Mexico
- United Kingdom
Favorite book(s):
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken
What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much?
- Twelve Angry Men (1957 version)
- Contemporaneous or in real time
- Different methods to see the “truth”
- Watching each time is like peeling next layer of onion
- Breaking Bad (the Gold standard in 50 hour movies)
What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why?
Melody – Mohammed Rafi, India; Frank Sinatra
THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this …
Integrative learning experiences (integrated across geography, culture, socio-economic levels, disciplines)
Courses with embedded international immersions involving field research
Sustainability as a guiding theme
Subsistence marketplaces as challenging context for learning experiences
In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at …
- Doing good as the path to doing well
- Being more bottom-up
- Meeting more than one bottom line
- Holding themselves to higher standards
- Being truly open to competition internally and externally
I’m grateful for …
- Love from parents, wife and son
- The freedom to chart my own journey as a professor
- Foundation provided by my universities
- Students and their desire to learn
- Generosity of low-income communities
- Dedication of my team members
- Support from colleagues and coauthors
- Support and encouragement of family and friends
DON’T MISS THE ENTIRE ROSTER OF 2024’S 50 BEST UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSORS.
