The University of Arizona Alumnus / Spring 2008
PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST: Making Endowed Chairs a Priority
Amar GuptaEller College of Management
Thomas R. Brown Endowed Chair
in Management and Technology
Dr. Gupta’s 24-hour Knowledge Factory
by Ford Burkhart
Photos by Jacob Chinn
Outsourcing intellectual labor
Inside room 202-E at the Eller College, a remarkable factory seems to operate almost by magic.
Here, overseas elves — of a sort — can do your work while you sleep. You never have to work a night shift. You can report in at 9 a.m., and see what the factory has done for you during the previous 16 hours. Welcome to Dr. Gupta’s 24-hour Knowledge Factory.
The factory, the creation of Amar Gupta, is a working model of a theory. Gupta was lured to The University of Arizona after 25 years at MIT to dazzle the business world with new ideas for outsourcing and intellectual property. That’s exactly the goal of the Knowledge Factory. And for Gupta, it helps define what an endowed chair is all about.
“As an endowed professor, you have to be bold,” he says. “You have to have the courage to step where no one has trod.”
In his senario, he is developing management techniques and philosophies that may help reshape global business.
The Knowledge Factory will demonstrate how work can unfold in three distant places.
In this case, the American partner — such as Gupta — works on a problem for a day in the United States. Then a partner will pick up the work in Australia, and later a third will work on it in Poland. After each eight-hour shift, the problem is passed along to the west, using the latest electronic means and following rules that are still evolving.
“When you come to work,” Gupta says, “it’s almost like wonderful things have been done by magical fairies overnight.”
This concept, he says, reflects one of the biggest changes in business since the Industrial Revolution. In those distant days, human endeavors shifted from the individual shop to the factory, where work was broken down into smaller parts, and man was linked to machine.
New rules
Now, for America’s work to fold in with knowledge partners in places like India, China, and Europe, there will clearly have to be some new rules. The rules will govern things like reading an X-ray, processing a mortgage, and researching legal matters — three areas that are quite adaptable to the Knowledge Factory idea: distance medicine, accounting, and international law.
Gupta’s list goes on: auditing, banking, managing large chain stores, writing complex computer programs, designing new automobile parts, creating new pharmaceutical products.
In the past, he says, a village could enforce its codes in simpler ways, say, by denying a resident access to the village well. Now, in the global village, several layers of society will impose their will on the workshop. A shop in Arizona must conform to city, county, state, and federal laws, but soon global business will require a fifth dimension — what Gupta calls domain-specific guidelines, for such areas as medicine, accounting, and law. Various international bodies, such as the World Health Organization and World Trade Organization, he predicts, will respond to the tasks.
“We will have to come up with definitions of malpractice for professions” in order for collaborations to take place between China, India, and the United States.
He adds diplomatically, with a smile, “As the world drafts valid regulations for trade, we will have to realize that the United States will not always be the model seen as the best one for other countries.”
English, he adds, will grow in importance and become the global standard language, but Americans will have to learn quickly to work with people for whom many terms may have quite different meanings. Gupta tells a story about an American client who forgot a few mortgage payments. The man received a call from the mortgage company’s agent in Asia, asking why the payment was late. The client said, “I was on the road.” To the Asian, the words meant he was essentially bankrupt, living on the road, and the misunderstandings grew.
A cold bath in global reality
Gupta says an endowed chair should blaze new trails in the classroom. His class in entrepreneurship is itself a model of innovation, providing a cold bath in the reality of global business. The students ask the big questions, find the best sources, and shape the problem. Then they write about it in a way that will knock the socks off the real world when the paper is published on the Web — as all Gupta’s students’ papers are. Students know that others have found career doors opening when their papers went up on the class Web site. Why not them?
And what about grades? “I grade the paper based on what I learn about global services that I didn’t know before,” Gupta says, again with an impish smile. As a world expert on the subject, the students won’t get away with recycling old ideas.
Gupta has helped create several dual degrees at the UA, combining management with science, agriculture, optics, medicine, and engineering.
It’s this sort of teaching that he hopes will make the UA more competitive nationally for students of entrepreneurship.
In an endowed chair, he says, “you are supposed to think and to carry your ideas to students, to the entire campus, to the largest-possible audience.”
Earning $8 a month
Born in India, Gupta says he once earned $8 a month, yes, per month, in a summer internship with IBM. But he was fired-up to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science and ultimately wound up at MIT. There, in one year, he took 19 courses and did well in all, he recalls. The same year, he wrote two simultaneous dissertations, one for an M.B.A. and the other for a Ph.D., to learn the languages both of the “bean counters” and “the techies.”
Gupta established his reputation by proposing pioneering innovations. While still a grad student, he advised Citibank to outsource the development of banking software to India — and it worked. His novel ideas for presentation graphics helped shape the precursor to PowerPoint. He holds a patent for automated reading and processing of bank checks. As the founding co-director of an MIT initiative called Productivity From Information Technology, or PROFIT, he proposed using technology, rather than human eyes, to read the handwriting on checks, in particular the amount of payment, in ways that are efficient, fraud-resistant, and inexpensive. Those ideas are now central to paperless check-clearance systems being deployed around the world.
What drew him to the UA in 2004 was the chance to fill a professorship named for someone he says was much like himself. His business card reads Thomas R. Brown Chair in Management and Technology. Brown was a high-tech entrepreneur who helped start Burr-Brown Corporation in Tucson. It was sold to Texas Instruments in 2000.
Gupta has appointments in five UA departments. His colleagues say he is one of the most thoughtful, creative, and stimulating professors around. They say he takes a balanced approach to outsourcing and other contentious issues. A few have reservations about his ideas, but for him that’s all part of having an endowed chair.
“I’m here to shake things up,” he says. “Some don’t like it, but that’s what I am here to do.”
His main goal, he says, is to help the world answer a big question: “How can we construct a new method for people to collaborate across borders with former competitors? How can we design our work so there is no rich vs. poor, us vs. them? How can we bridge these gaps?”
And if his Knowledge Factory helps create happier families and reduce the type of cancer that is said to increase among those who work nights, he won’t mind a bit.
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