This article was first
published in Business Standard on December 12, 2019; https://www.business-standard.com/article/education/explained-how-to-be-in-the-top-league-of-business-education-in-india-119120301339_1.html
Rigour versus relevance is a debate
that the B-schools need to engage in
Industrial revolution and rise of
large corporations necessitated shareholders to employ agents who worked
towards maximization of shareholders’ wealth. Business Schools globally played
an important role in imparting education to students that would make them ready
to manage and eventually lead these corporations. Technical knowledge was much
valued and management education naturally was skewed towards imparting them.
The advancements in technology
has made it easy for people to obtain hard skills as and when required. Similarly,
many of the jobs now performed by MBA graduates will get performed by machines
in the future. Some of the top global leaders have openly expressed that management
education needs to undergo changes to bridge the gap between what is required
in the real life versus what is taught in B-schools.
Speaking on education, at the
World Economic Forum (2018), Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, emphasised on the
need to move away from knowledge-based teaching to teaching the softer skills
like “values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others...”.
Similarly, Nitin Nohria, the dean of the Harvard Business School, admitted,
“anyone can teach you how to read a P&L or value a derivative; those kinds
of things have become commoditized. The bigger challenge is to teach America’s
future business leaders how to be curious, humane, and moral; how to think
outside the box about problems like funding the research for a new blockbuster
drug. And how to be strong enough to stand up to Wall Street when it demands
the opposite”.
In India too, the India skills
report 2019 stated that only 36% of the MBA students in the country were
employable. Further, hundreds of B-Schools across India are shutting down every
year due to lack of offers from recruiters. While a few top schools like the
ISB and IIMs are continuously re-evaluating the curriculum, marking themselves
with the market demands and innovating teaching pedagogy, the trends are
clearly shifting globally, and all B-Schools need to recalibrate their efforts
to remain relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously
said, “In academia, there is no difference between academia & the real
world. In the real world, there is”. How does a B-school bridge this
difference? For one, Engage with stakeholders to add real time
value to the community. Curriculum and faculty should be geared towards
integrating theoretical knowledge to practice. Maximizing shareholders’
perspective is now passé with companies aspiring to move towards a more
wholistic measure of performance like the Triple Bottom Line approach that
looks at people and community (social responsibility), planet (environmental
sustainability) and profit (the bottom line). B-Schools need to accordingly
reset curriculum, faculty and mindset.
Research is an important
component of all business schools. And rightly so. However, rigor versus
relevance is a debate that the B-Schools need to engage in. Warren
Bennis, a professor of management at the University of Southern California says
that “Business schools have forgotten that they are a professional school.” Not
all good researchers are good teachers and not all good teachers are good
researchers. Add to this a component of practical experience and industry
engagement. A healthy balance is required in a fast-changing world.
Letter versus Spirit-
Ethics class doesn’t make one ethical. Knowing risk management tools didn’t
prevent a Lehman brothers from collapsing. But knowing the consequences of not
acting ethically or knowing what is at stake if a wholistic assessment of risk
is not done, will act as a deterrent for people to take shortcuts. The school
must understand, communicate and practice the basic values that it stands for
and inculcate it in its students too. Strong personal and organizational values
aid people to keep pace with changing times with integrity and in an ethical
manner.
In order to be globally relevant,
B-Schools in India must truly globalize. Efforts to attract
sizeable proportion of international students, impart international experience,
design globally relevant curriculum, promote cultural diversity and bring global
faculty need to be made. Companies and marketplaces are global in nature after
all.
Hard versus Soft Skills-
Traditionally, management education has paid emphasis on hard skills and quite
neglected soft skills. With technology getting more and more adept at providing
on-the-go technical knowledge and soft skills proving to be vital to succeed,
increased focus on enhancing skills like negotiation, human behaviour, leadership
and structured thinking are needed. It is also important to allow students time
to think and reflect so that it becomes a habit and incidences of breakdown and
mental health issues can be avoided in the future.
Entrepreneurial- The
schools themselves need to have entrepreneurial traits of curiosity and
innovation. Executive education, new courses, flexible programs, online
programs and specialized programs need to be launched to keep pace with market
requirements.
In recent times, failure of many
global giants due to flawed risk assessment, governance lapses, and judgement
errors have raised questions about the effectiveness of the management
education as the leaders of many of these corporations were educated at the top
B-Schools in the world. Elite institutions in the US like Harvard, Stanford and
MIT have reported a drop in the number of applications in the recent years. The
Indian B-Schools can learn from these experiences and take proactive measures
to be top of the league. Yet, let’s not ape the West. The West is looking to Us.
Let’s tell them what we stand for. The East is the biggest market for global
companies. Let’s make leaders in India, for the world. The leaders who
understand these markets better than those educated in the US or Europe.
Views expressed are personal.
