The Opportunity :

A rare founding leadership role at one of India's most ambitious new universities one built not to replicate the existing system, but to challenge it.

This university is establishing its School of Management and is searching for its Founding Dean. The person appointed will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity: to design and build a management school from first principles, with full institutional backing, in Gurgaon.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage what exists. It is a role for someone ready to build what should exist.

The Institution :

The university is a new, independently governed institution located in Gurugram.

It brings together different schools under a single academic framework. The deliberate convergence of the different disciplines is structural. Every student, regardless of school, develops fluency across different domains before they graduate.

The institution is backed by over a decade of proven practice in creative education, with strong industry relationships, a validated curriculum philosophy, and an established record of graduate employability. It is now making a deliberate transition from institute to full university with a new campus, new regulatory recognition, and a planned expansion that makes this founding moment particularly significant.

What makes this institution distinctive :

- Pedagogy built around practice, not passive learning. Courses are delivered through live projects, real client briefs, industry immersions, and applied assessments - not just lectures and examinations.

- Interdisciplinary by design. Management students work alongside other disciplines on shared challenges.

- Industry embedded from Day 1. The university's Gurugram location is deliberate, making employer relationships, live project partners, and placement networks easier to build.

- Selective, not mass-market. The institution is deliberately not a volume player. It is building a reputation on outcome quality, not intake size.

The School of Management :

The School of Management offers undergraduate and post graduate programmes across specialized domains. Each program is designed for a specific career pathway in the modern business economy.

The school will be small in its founding cohort and intentional in its growth. Quality of outcome - measured by graduate employability, industry reputation, and alumni achievement is the growth metric, not student numbers.

The Role :

The Founding Dean is a member of the university's executive leadership team. The mandate is institution-building. It is equally an outward-facing role of personal conviction the Dean is expected to take the stage and present the school, its pedagogy and philosophy to external stakeholders. Approximately 60% of this role is academic leadership; the remaining 40% is external focussed - in boardrooms, corporates, at schools, and broader forums building the brand of the school of management.

Core Responsibilities :

- Own the academic identity of the School - ensuring its founding philosophy is present in every programme and every course design, year after year.

- Lead faculty hiring and development identifying, attracting, and building a cohort of practitioner-educators who bring real-world credibility alongside pedagogical commitment.

- Lead the school's contribution to the university's Academic Council working with peer Deans to ensure the institution functions as one integrated university, not three parallel schools.

- Build the schools brand and external reputation - through partnerships, public positioning, faculty visibility, and graduate outcomes - anchored by the Deans own public presence as the institutions most credible voice.

- Represent the School at the senior leadership level, contributing to university-wide strategy as a founding member of the executive team.

- Carry the schools case to prospective students, parents, and school counselors the marketing team will organize the platforms and pipeline the audiences; the Dean is who stands on stage and converts interest into conviction.

- Evangelize the schools curriculum directly to corporate India - visiting companies, speaking to business leaders, and making the case to hiring organizations that graduates from this school arrive better prepared than those from conventional programmes.

Candidate Profile :

The single most important qualification is evidence of having built something meaningful from the ground up - a venture, a programme, or an institution. Institutional seniority and academic publications are not substitutes for this.

Required :

- 20+ years of progressive leadership experience spanning education and industry.

- A genuine conviction about what excellent management education should look like - shaped by practice, not textbooks.

- Experience leading and developing high-performance teams in environments that reward initiative over hierarchy.

- Working knowledge of India's higher education regulatory framework - UGC, NEP 2020, NAAC - sufficient to navigate it without being defined by it.

- Genuine comfort operating in both academic and corporate settings - this role moves between curriculum design sessions, faculty mentoring, boardroom pitches, and industry engagement with equal ease.

- A live, activatable network spanning Indian industry and/or global business education - relationships with companies, sector leaders, and institutional peers that can be converted into live project partnerships, and placement pipelines from year one, not year three.

- Platform conviction and public persuasion - the demonstrated ability to walk into a room of sceptical parents, ambitious students, or senior executives and leave them convinced; this role carries significant, ongoing personal-presence requirements.

Strongly Preferred :

- Experience building or leading programmes at institutions that have departed from conventional models of management education.

- A public profile - conference keynotes, industry advisory roles, published thinking, or media presence - that gives the school immediate external credibility upon appointment and extends the Deans reach as its chief advocate.

- Exposure to globally recognised non-conventional business schools or programmes (whether as a student, faculty member, or visiting practitioner).

- International professional or academic experience.

Process : This is a confidential search. All applications and enquiries are handled with full discretion.

Reporting : Reporting to Vice Chancellor; accountability to the Founder.