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Are B Schools catering to needs of industries?

by By Dr. Goutam Sengupta 25 Apr 2014, 09:41 am

Industries seem to be losing craze for generic B-School education. At the same time, many of the B-Schools are also not realizing the industry needs. Results of these conflicting trends reflect in sharp decline of attractiveness of some of the B-School programmes . Number of CAT aspirants, which is an indicator of the market size has reduced to 1.74 Lacs in December 2013 in comparison with 2.14 lacs in December 2012, which is almost a 20% decrease.

Solution to this problem lies in the words of Philip Kotler, who  in his recent visit during March 2013 to India, said that “Indian B-Schools must get into more entrepreneurial and innovative classes instead of teaching managerial business” and further stressed that he shall like B-School students to go and sell products in the market-place as practices teach more than the theories. According to many people, business schools need to look hard at the legitimacy of what they are doing.  It makes lot of sense to teach future generations how Dell or Canon or Apple got things right.   Business schools seem to have a problem in doing this because ranking systems have drawn them into concentrating on ranking yardsticks, which is often backward than forward looking.

Hamel comments: “What we continue to teach in the business schools is a little bit like being a mapmaker in an earthquake zone. Never before has the gap between our tools and the reality of emerging industry been large.”At the centre of the criticisms and challenges facing management education is an apparent disconnect between the role of business schools and the expectations and experiences of industries. B-Schools teach this way because it’s the way the curriculum has been for the last 30 years or so. The big challenge is how to educate the future business leaders and how to meet the future challenges between the academic and the business world. The faculty should play a key role in this but most of faculty,  especially full-time faculty, are trained by the functional discipline based view, which is  narrow, very academic.

Industries are looking for winning strategies from management education, rather than mere theoretical knowledge. A core problem with business school curricula is that they have a ‘follower’ attitude, following age old traditional syllabus and thus there is an obvious gap between needs of today’s industries and the delivery of conventional B-Schools.

The moot question, therefore, is how to bridge the gap between the expectations and the delivery. Except in case of top ranking B-schools, there are no mechanisms to forge close relationship between B-schools & industry groups. The main strength of top class B-schools like Kellogg, Wharton, Sloan & Harvard is their strong relationship with industry through teaching, research, student placements, problem solving & case study preparation. The issue in India is to make this happen in case of relatively low ranked B-schools in the country, there

should be innovative  mechanism for developing effective partnership with industry in each B-school. The need of the hour for B-Schools is to translate its curricula from Management theories to Management Practices which are actually faced by industries. Faculties should orient themselves to this new culture of teaching so that the B-School students find themselves ready to take on the challenges of the industry when they enter them.

There is no denying the fact that every business seeks to implement good management practices and to attain the sense of fruition in return for them as the relation between success and good management practices is reciprocal. Thus, the better the management practices, the greater will be the achievements. Good management does its best to dwell on excellence on the basis of excellent practices. Flourishing of business is implicit in the art of good management practices, from this very perspective stems out overall success. Good management cherishes its people and treasures their talents while sustaining the quality of relationship. The concept of enhancing employee morale is not exclusive of its practices. Rather, it aims to build up their personalities and confidence with the creation of positive feelings among them, enhancing their competencies so as to create superior efficiency and effectiveness in the overall performance. Focussing on the entire organisation from a short-term standpoint to the long-term perspective, it forms a strategic vision and sets up strategies to implement them for the purpose of obtaining desired results, organisational effectiveness and efficiency.

Enlightened management practices transcend an organisation from efficiency orientation to effectiveness orientation, engaging people and other environmental forces in innovative and creative ways. Each effective organisation is unique in its own management practices. All over the world such organisations may be seen both in manufacturing and services sector. B-Schools must undertake comprehensive study or exploration into the ways they achieve their success in order to ensure learning and development of the students based on such case studies. This kind of exploratory research and their findings, may be on sectoral basis, are required to be undertaken by B-Schools on regular basis to provide appropriate knowledge to the industry professionals of today and tomorrow.

The importance of studying and analyzing global management practices that are being practically implemented in hundreds of organisations cannot be over-emphasised. It is these practices that are changing the way modern businesses are run and re-defining the parameters of success in every sphere of business in the fiercely competitive market environment. The dynamics of these management practices that are being followed by corporates are constantly being changed in conformance to the actual scenario. As a matter of fact, these management practices have been found to be highly effective and result oriented which are developed through the hard and tedious toiling of practicing managers. They embrace them for survival of their businesses shunning the application of age old theoretical premise, taking a leaf out of a few management  books or journals. To be precise, management theories taught by the B-Schools should emerge out of such management practices instead of the reverse method of developing the practice by following copybook theoretical knowledge. Here, it may be pertinent to mention Sumantra Ghosal’s quote “Bad Management theories are destroying good Management practices”.

(Dr. Goutam Sengupta is Vice-President, Videocon Group and Director, Calcutta Business School)