Ravi J. Matthai

Ravi John Matthai (1927–1984) was a management education administrator, noted for establishing Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He was the first full-time Director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and is said to have been the person most responsible for setting the culture of the Institute. He was the son of John Matthai, the first Railway Minister and later Finance Minister of independent India.

Ravi was educated at The Doon School, Dehradun and later graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. (Hons.) in Economics. . He began his career at a Calcutta based firm but later moved to the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta in 1963 as Professor of Marketing.

In 1965 Matthai was invited by noted Indian Institution builder and scientist Dr. Vikram Sarabhai to join IIMA as its first full-time Director. He was 38 years old at the time and did not have an advanced academic degree. Yet, over the next six years, he set the foundations for an institution that was to grow into a top-ranking management school in India.

A number of reasons are attributed to Matthai's enduring influence on IIMA:

After six years as director, Matthai announced his decision to step down and stay on as professor. He gave two reasons for doing so:first, leaders of academic institutions tended to use their positions for career advancement at an adverse cost to the institutions;secondly, it was important to establish the principle that the director’s position is not hierarchical; he is only first among equals, which was characteristically bold of him, given the cultural milieu prevailing in leading academic institutions at that time.

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