Raj Agnihotri was working for a subsidiary of Tata Group, India’s largest business conglomerate, when he decided to pursue a graduate degree in business administration.

If he was going to work in business, Agnihotri told himself, then he should have a better understanding of the business world.

Agnihotri, who wanted to attend a private college or university in the United States, was accepted at Oklahoma City University.

“I saw the greatness of the American higher education system — that rigor, that transformational experience, the professors, the campus,” said Agnihotri, who in July became the sixth dean of Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business. “I just fell in love with every aspect of what American education is all about.”

Agnihotri was not excited to return to the business sector after completing the master’s program.   The dean of the university’s business school quizzed Agnihotri about his aspirations..

“I said, ‘I want to be like you,’” Agnihotri recalled. “I told him that I really liked his approach toward things, toward people. He said to me, ‘Well, I’m an academician … you’d have to come to the dark side.’ We chatted some more and I decided to go for a Ph.D.”

Agnihotri began his higher education teaching career after obtaining his doctorate. Each stop included helping create or improving schools’ sales programs and courses.

“Wherever I was, I was at the forefront: Let’s create sales centers; let’s create initiatives where we can have more conversations between our faculty, our institution and the business community,” said Agnihotri, who grew up in India, the youngest of five children.

In 2017, Agnihotri presented research on the role companies’ sales representatives play in the gathering and use of information and how the information can help improve their job performance. The presentation was to a large group of people at a conference held in India. In the audience was an Iowa State assistant professor.

After the presentation, Agnihotri visited with the assistant professor. A few weeks later, Agnihotri received a phone call from Sridhar Ramaswami, an ISU marketing professor.

“He told me they were thinking about developing a sales program and would I come to Ames and share my thoughts on how to go about starting it,” Agnihotri said. “Little did I know about what else they had in mind.”

Agnihotri had never been to Iowa. What little he knew about the state was gleaned from the movie “Field of Dreams,” he said.

Agnihotri arrived in Ames on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2017. It was Homecoming weekend and the day after the then-25th-ranked Cyclones upset fourth-ranked Texas Christian University, 14-7.

“Everyone was happy,” Agnihotri said. “It was an amazing atmosphere.”

During his presentation, Agnihotri said everyone was friendly and inquisitive. He said he was struck by the long tenure of faculty members, many of whom had been with the university for 20 to 30 years.

Just weeks before Agnihotri’s visit, ISU had announced a $50 million gift to the college of business from Debbie and Jerry Ivy, both of California. The gift prompted the renaming of the business college to Ivy College of Business, ISU’s first donor-named college.

“There was good momentum occurring. I met Dean [David] Spalding and I saw his vision,” Agnihotri said. “I met the faculty and they were all like family members.”

A few weeks after his visit to ISU, Agnihotri was offered a job as director of the new Ivy Sales Forum that prepares students for a career in professional sales.

“I came here because of the people,” Agnihotri said. “I really liked them and trusted them. And they embraced me.”

In his new role, Agnihotri will oversee a business college with over 5,000 students, 240 faculty and staff, and a budget of about $70 million.

We recently caught up with Agnihotri and talked with him about his new role. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You were in sales for a couple years before moving into education. How have sales changed in recent years?

The foundation remains the same. No matter how you label it, how you dissect it, it comes down to relationships. That’s what matters is the relationship. How we nurture and build that relationship, that’s what has changed. It used to be that sending someone an email was considered rude. They’d say, ‘Why are you sending me an email? Can’t you stop by?’

As technology has evolved, salespeople and their customers’ conversations have evolved. When I visited customers, I would get their questions and then go figure out their needs and come back with a proposal. Those things are all gone.

Now, what I was teaching my students, you still ask questions but, believe it or not, businesses know what their needs are. Everyone has a customer relationship management system. They want to know how you are going to add value to the business.

The Ivy College of Business had a record enrollment of 5,197 students this past school year, which may be difficult to sustain. According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 3.4 million students will graduate from high school in 2041 compared with 3.9 million this past spring. How will you go about selling ISU’s business college to prospective students?

There are three steps. Number one is my role. What is my role? A storyteller. You cannot be a good storyteller unless you believe in your product. I am in the front. I am going to lead from the front. I believe in the Ivy College of Business; in what we are offering; in our faculty members; in the experience we can create for students. I am the best when it comes to storytelling about Ivy College of Business and Iowa State University. The trust I have in my product makes me excited and makes me confident.

When the enrollment drop occurs, competition is going to get tough. The market is shrinking … and that requires clarity – second point – of value proposition. I’m coming up with a clear value proposition for students, for parents. That starts from within. ‘Innovate at Iowa State,’ [an ISU marketing campaign] doesn’t mean innovate the product. Innovate also means how we teach classes; how we create experiences.

And third is return on investment, or ROI, which is job readiness. Ivy College of Business is going to establish itself as one of the most prominent institutions, with a focus on students and job readiness. We’re promising them that if they come to us, if they trust us, if they follow our guidelines, do the work inside the classroom and outside the classroom, then we will prepare them to be job ready. 

Three things: Storytelling, value proposition and job readiness.

What does job readiness look like?

That is something we are working on. We will have a task force that helps us with that. I do know that job readiness doesn’t just mean that we will find you a job. The goals are: Are you prepared for market competitiveness? Can you handle emotional pressures? Do you have both the hard skills and soft, or human skills? Do you have the technical knowledge of your major and are you ready to handle the team pressures of corporations and the way they operate? Are you ready to add value to the employer who is recruiting you? Is it going to take you a year to figure things out or are you ready to do the job? When a business hires our graduates, they will give them training but our students won’t have to spend as much time in that training and that’s real money for companies. We are going to create Ivy College of Business as almost a training ground so when companies hire our students, a lot of the training is already done.

You mentioned that you’re doing listening tours with faculty and others on the staff. What are you hearing?

They are working hard. We need to pay attention to the balance – the work-life balance. I’m learning that my job is not to just think about what the faculty and staff do but also their well-being. I’m proud of how much everyone is doing but I need to be mindful of that balance.

I’m also hearing, ‘How can Ivy remain competitive? How can I remain competitive when we have fewer students to draw from? We all want our jobs to continue, so how are we going to remain competitive’?

Artificial intelligence is another thing I’m hearing a lot about. People are asking if their job is going to change because of AI, what the marketplace is going to look like. There are also the ethical aspects of AI. That’s one thing our faculty members are really, really worried about and talking about. And they’re worried about it at every level. For undergraduates, how do we incorporate what is plagiarism and what is not? At the Ph.D. level, how much can they use AI? To write the manuscripts? Analyzing the data? The ethical aspects of AI are very important.

You’ve also been talking with business leaders. What skills do they say recent graduates lack?

Professional communication. A business leader told me that their new hires write memos and emails like they’re writing a text. They don’t know the difference between professional communication and friendly communication.

What does the next five years look like for the Ivy College of Business?

I’m a very lucky dean. I hear stories about institutions that are struggling or are not in healthy shape. Kudos to my mentor and coach Dean David Spalding. He did a wonderful job. I inherited a very healthy college with a very strong foundation. My goal in the next five years is not to do anything to mess it up.

As with anything, there’s always room for improvement. I’m aiming to make us healthier financially. My goal is to generate or create sustainable parallel revenue streams. What does that mean? It means changing our business model. Having another major is good, to a certain point. After that you need to start thinking about creating different verticals. Custom education, for example. Workforce development, we should be investing in that. 

Corporate-funded research. Those are the sorts of things that I call sustainable parallel revenue streams. We need to diversify where we are generating our revenue. We cannot just solely rely on tuition dollars.

You mentioned Dean Spalding. What is one of the things you’ve learned from him?

Don’t lose focus about why we are here – the student. If the student is happy, then we are going to be OK.

Will you continue teaching?

That’s the main thing I will miss. It’s not fair to students who would have me as an instructor. I will be pulled in too many different directions. I will try to find spaces, though, to make guest appearances.

What do you do in your spare time?

I’m a movie buff. I don’t have certain genres I like or actors or actresses. I just love fine work. A good movie is art, right? Any movie that tells a story in the most effective, compelling way is a movie I will probably love. As a family, we like to sit down after dinner and watch a movie. We taught our girls to fall in love with movies, too.

What’s your favorite movie?

That’s a tough question. I’d have to say “The Godfather II.” Also, “The Shawshank Redemption.” And, of course, “Field of Dreams.”

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At a glance

Age: 48

Currently lives: In Ames

Family: Wife, Manu, and two daughters, a junior in high school and a fourth grader

Education: Bachelor of science degree in electronics engineering, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India; master of business administration and management, Oklahoma City University, 2005; and doctorate in business administration with marketing concentration, Kent State University, 2009.

Work background: Senior sales engineer, Zenith Computers, (2000-2001); technical trainer/course coordinator, Tata Infotech Ltd. (2001-02); graduate assistant to department head, Oklahoma City University (2004-05); teaching fellow and Ph.D. student, Kent State University (2006-09); assistant professor, Towson University (2009-10); assistant professor, William Paterson University ( 2010-12); variety of teaching positions between 2012 and 2015 at Ohio University including chair of the marketing department; John Merrill endowed professor in consultative sales and associate professor of marketing, University of Texas at Arlington (2015-18); and dean’s fellow in marketing and director of Ivy Sales Forum (2018-22), professor, Mary Warner fellow and director of Ivy Sales Forum (2022-24), Morrill professor, Mary Warner fellow and assistant dean for industry engagement (2024-25); Raisbeck endowed dean and Morrill professor, (July 2025 to present), Iowa State University.

Other activities: Spending time with family

Contact: raj2@iastate.edu