WhenDiscussions A re Superficial And Lack Depth You Are Likely To Be Disappointed. All The More So When The Speakers Are So-called Experts In The Field!

Last week(on 10/04/13), I happened to attend a one-day conference on Challenges of Management Education    organized by Kerala Management Association(KMA). It  had Prof. Joe Philip, a well-known figure in the management education field in India and Founder and President of Xavier Institute of Management & Entrepreneurship(XIME)  as  the key-note speaker,Mr.T.P.Srinivasan, Vice-Chairman of Kerala State Higher Education Council as the chief guest with an array of directors, deans and professors  representing the major business schools from Kerala and particularly Kochi as panelists for discussions.

As somebody who has been associated with management education for the past 18 years or so,I was very happy to attend the programme when nominated by my institution. I had great expectations about the whole programme and expected to come out more learned. With  people like Prof.Philip speaking, I should be excused if I had such expectations. But alas! I was disappointed to the core at the end. How could such an eminent gathering with deep roots in management education, only touch the silly issues of management education like mistakes in question papers, repetitions in question papers, projecting autonomous PGDM courses as lone solution for most of the troubles etc. Barring  one or two speakers from the panelists, majority were in a selling mode of what their institutions offer than trying to list out the challenges that management education faces today. Some spoke about the importance and insistence of English speaking among students as  the one important thing that scores for them. Please note nobody talked about the necessity of communicating well. If English is a must for management education, only a few countries in the world will have business schools and management education. And Japanese people will never make good managers.  In fact one of the problems which most of the fresh MBAs face is that they lack the ability to communicate with the employees  they handle or the customers they deal with in their languages. Unfortunately too much of hype is being created about the importance of English in business education in India.

I would have expected the conference to debate and discuss issues such as:

1.The business education as a professional stream. MBA education is classified as a professional one, like medicine, engineering or accountancy. But do they get the professional exposure which students of other professional streams get? It might please be noted that if you want to become a doctor, you have to have a specific educational background(like MBBS Degree),if you want to become an accountant, you must have completed chartered accountancy course and nobody will make you an engineer unless you have an engineering degree. But to become a manager, no degree like MBA is mandatory and some of the best managers in the world are not necessarily MBAs. So the onus is on making MBA education relevant to industry so that industry will come looking for them to appoint them in managerial jobs.

2.Education Vs. Training Dilemma. While this was discussed on the periphery, no concrete discussions happened. Are management institutions expected to train the students at the MBA level enabling them to get their first jobs or have they to implement an educational process which will take the MBA graduates for the long haul as they progress in the organizations.

3.Why there is too much of hype about MBA education? Does it require  or even deserve the attention it gets now? Is there any big difference between other post-graduate courses like MSc or MA or LLM etc? Doesn’t it create an unusual air around the passing out MBAs as something of a unique species?

4.The private, autonomous Vs. University  affiliated institutions. What are the pros and cons? Shall education(and the future of students) be left to the vagaries of the market? A number of institutions have chosen to close down many of their branches in various locations leaving the students and faculty members high and dry. Even the company which took over them with the explicit intention of furthering their interests is in doldrums. While autonomy may be good, what kind of stringent regulations must be binding on them?

5.Are we producing MBAs for domestic use or export? While some of the MBAs may  migrate to western developed world with the opportunities arising from globalization, the primary aim must be to create a qualified set of talented people for taking up managerial positions in India. Management being basically a social science, the context in which they are expected to operate is very important in the course curriculum. By and large, there is an overemphasis on western methods and examples in majority of the MBA curriculum. And while lots of things from the west are blindly copied, the most important and valid aspects get neglected. This is dealt in more detail under the next point.

6.The experienced Vs. fresh debate. My research shows that  the average age of people who enter MBA education in most of the well known ivy league schools in the west vary between 28 and 29,with about a minimum of five years of experience. This essentially helps them in having a different perspective about business education. They can be more focused in the selection of electives and also can bring lot of organizational context and pragmatism into the classroom. Lot of diverse experiences get shared in the classroom, making classroom more lively. Faculty members also benefit a lot from such classrooms, widening their horizon. In India, 99% of the students except may be in ISB and a few IIMs join MBA as fresh undergraduates.

7.Shall students be treated as customers? Many institutions today treat students as customers for the simple reason that they pay the fees. This  actually puts the institution in a weak, supplier position trying to please the students in all respects. This is a flawed assumption. Students are the raw materials the institution processes for the transformation into finished products. Of course, the institution incurs a cost for the transformation process, and somebody has to bear the cost for this processes. Since the real customers, the industry which recruit them, don’t pay the institution, the institution charges the cost to the students who in turn get it reimbursed by the industry.

8.How can there be better institutional-industry interface? The current model of MBA curriculum does not give much opportunities for students to get industry exposure. In most cases, it is usually  a maximum of two months of summer project between the first year and the second year. With the students having no exposure as against experienced candidates in the west, this is actually worrisome. I feel the industry and institutions should sit together and evolve a new model where the students get exposure to industry before they decide on which area they should specialize in.

9.Is institution responsible for placing students? Primarily institutions should  focus at making students employable. The institution should absolve from taking the onus on placing the students. Most of the time, students are assured of placements during the admissions process.

10.Can we have so many MBA institutions producing large number of MBAs every year? The institutions have mushroomed, leading to poor quality in every respect. The large number is largely the result of the hype created about the MBA education. Once we take a strong decision to reduce the hype and treat it as another professional educational stream, much of the hype will die down.

The organizational/corporate equivalents of prominent characters of Mahabharata

Even though I have yet to read the Mahabharata fully, the stories and characters of the epic have always impressed me and influenced me. Of course, I have read a number of discourses on Mahabharata, starting from Kuttikalude Mahabharatham(Children’s Mahabharatha) and many books written on various characters of Mahabharatha in Malayalam or translations into Malayalam from other languages like Hindi, Marathi etc.A chapter, which was part of SSLC Malayalam syllabus from a book(Bharataparyatanam) written by the great critique from Kerala,, Mr.Kuttikrishna Marar was the starting point. The moment I had some money saved from my monthly hostel allowance, I procured the book and must have read the content at least 10 times. I have always been impressed by the intellect, determination , love and care of Devabratha (who later  came to be known as Bhishma for the sapath  or pratigya he took for taking care of the interests of his father),by the heroic deeds of Arjuna & Karna, the friendship of Duryodhana, the dharma way of Yudhishtira, and of course the naughty but all encompassing and dispassionate view  of Krishna……..The list is endless. And what impressed me more that each of these characters represented many aspects of the good or the bad, the right or the wrong  or some kind of traits that exist in human beings.

Many  might have thought that these were stories of the long-gone era, but as a discernible observer of organizations, you may find that many of these characters are alive and kicking. And in today’s ultra-competitive environment that exist between corporations or other organizations or between people of the same organization, you may find the existence of the full-blown modern versions of them.

If you observe your organization, you may find a number of these characters existing in your organization. You may find a  Sakuni, in you midst, who tries to instigate many around them with their at times even innocent-looking comments or remarks. Anything happening around them , they try to interpret in their own negative ways and even advise some others  with how to interpret them. Organizations have their own Duryodhanas, who fall prey to such interpretations or advices. For example, the Sakunis  may spend a lot of time analyzing mails send by others  and  attribute meanings which the sender might not have even imagined to exist. They influence the receivers of the mails with the unfortunate connotations leading to a spat or at least a misunderstanding between two friends. Even though  Duryodhanas are more straightforward and dharma-oriented(according to me more so than the Dharmaputra / Yudhishtira), they are highly influenced by the likes of Sakuni who knows where  and how to tickle their  weak spots).

Of course, the organizations have their own Bhishmas, who puts forth their verdicts as the final word on dharma. Taking the email simile, the organizational Bhishma may even put strictures on whether such mails be sent or who to mark copies.

The organization also may have Viduras, who takes a dispassionate view of everything and just serves the King as they  are duty-bound; they may do so even when they know for sure that the King is not necessarily doing the right thing.

Disclaimer: If anybody in any organization identify him/herself with any of the characters mentioned above, it is only accidental, even though it might validate my analogy.