By Our Special Correspondent

UNLIKE THE fly by night operators talked about in the article of “Management education: Dazzles to deceive” in the Goan Observer issue dated 28 th August, 2004, who teach nothing and only contribute to the army of underemployed, there are several “good” B-schools which cover an extensive curriculum, have many highly qualified faculty members, a well stocked library, extensive databases and excellent infrastructure. Yet, most of their alumni are unable to see any significant relationship between what they were taught and their practice as managers. They measure their gains in terms of the network created and because Indian B-schools do not insist on work experience as an entry requirement, an opportunity to do “live projects” that showed them how companies work. Very few of them become business leaders or entrepreneurs. In spite of the lip service to out-of-the-box thinking they all tend to think largely in the box.

So, what’s going wrong?
Management education had its origins in operations management and research. At the beginning of the 20 th century an unplanned intellectual coalition evolved between the emerging mass-production factory system and growing academic commitment to measurement, observation and the scientific method. This coalition made significant contributions to industrial productivity. Business education until the 50s emphasized industrial engineering and the institutions did not enjoy anywhere near their present status. Carnegie and Ford foundations pumped in substantial sums in the 60s and successfully raised their status. They upgraded content by, for example, pushing bookkeeping out of the curriculum and bringing in decision analysis. The emphasis was on research – empirical, quantitative, analytic research. While this approach did yield useful results in manufacturing and finance it has contributed little to the areas of general management, marketing, human resource development and innovation – areas that are today recognized as the keys to success for organizations. Also, the emphasis on analysis prevented the path finding ideas from surfacing.

But until the 80s it worked, at least for B-schools and their faculty. Management got rated as a significant academic area. Faculty was measured by the number of publications they had to their credit. This emphasis caused a shift in focus from producing efficient managers to writing academic articles unconnected with applicability to business. Publish or perish became the mantra and we now have mountains of “International Refereed Journals” where faculty send papers to add weight to their bio-data. Often these articles are no more than sophisticated statistical analysis that obfuscate basic issues. In fact a leading Indian Institute of Management does not consider the Harvard Business Review as a worthy carrier of faculty articles because it is too practical. Tom Peters or even Peter Drucker would probably not qualify as tenured professors! Consequently there is a divide between business and business schools.

In any case in today’s business scenario growth is no longer fuelled by large structured corporations but by upstarts and innovators. In this world we need much more than analytical skills. We need Vision, Values, Determination and Domain knowledge.

Domain knowledge would have to be acquired within the domain in which the manager works. No B-school can attempt to teach all areas from telecom to food processing and avionics to software development. What about the other three?

The Vision domain encompasses creativity and imagination and on longer term issues direction and purpose. These are not the same as objectives and goals, which management teachers emphasise. Vision is talked of mainly in terms of writing a Vision Statement for a company with the emphasis on how it sounds to the world. Developing a vision means using imagination and thinking about what one really wants to be and what one wants to build.

Values sounds very old fashioned. Most of us, including teachers, believe it’s all about winning and emphasise personal careers and starting salaries, whereas we need to teach future leaders about duty and responsibility. Even if this sounds Utopian there should at least be talk of professional responsibility and ethics as is done in medical colleges.

Determination is about energetic and unrelenting purposiveness, which could easily translate to stubbornness and pigheadedness. Remember determination means a propensity for risk taking. Determined people fight for their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming odds. Thereby they often fail but also create new worlds. But stubborn determination doesn’t go with the rationality that business schools teach.

Such ideas are often brushed aside because they seem to be anti-intellectual and anti-rational. In trying to build these abilities teachers would be telling students to trust judgment over evidence and intuition over reason. For most that seems a path to madness.

Then there are many who believe that though these may be desirable virtues they cannot be taught because “its in the genes” or because by the time they arrive as graduate students “ it’s too late”. But incremental improvement is possible and people learn swimming at 70. The real roadblock is that there will be no clearly definable content and teachers need a syllabus. There is also the justified argument that path finding cannot be taught. It has to be learnt from one’s life-crisis.

But if we are not able to help students in these areas can management education have any purpose in today’s world? In any case the B-school craze is essentially an American craze copied by a few others including India where we produce 1,10,000 MBAs each year. Many countries including Germany and Japan continue to rely on people from other academic disciplines who are expected to learn on the job.

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