MBA SPECIAL..INDIA INC UNHAPPY WITH SYLLABUS

B-School Wisdom Out of Sync with Real-life Business

Institutes counter that a changing curriculum will address business complexities

A year after top Ivy League institutes in the United States began revamping their MBA programmes, in the process challenging decades of conventional business wisdom, India’s top-rung B-schools are attempting something similar. An overhauled syllabus with new subjects thrown in and old ones scrubbed out is expected to be ready for 2012-13 at many premier institutes. The Indian School of Business (ISB), Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), IIMKozhikode (IIM-K), and S P Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR) are some of the schools attempting to bridge the gap between classroom wisdom and business realities. Subjects like ethics, corporate social responsibility and management mantras from the Bhagavad Gita have made a debut along with hardship stints in backward villages and mandatory internships with NGOs.

That should come as soup for the soul of a battle-weary India Inc hunting for socially-responsible and innovative leaders, right? Not quite. The view from industry is that most of the changes in the curriculum are cosmetic and do little to tackle the root of the malaise at Indian B-schools – that they serve to create an elite social network and are clueless about the way business is run in real life. Senior executives say the top-tier schools, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), are out of sync with corporates and do not have enough good quality research emerging.

“Some executives I have spoken to find it hard to imagine that a student can grasp concepts of marketing without selling anything to anybody; or the concepts of operations if they have never spent time on a factory floor,” says Professor Srikant Datar of HBS, co-author of ‘Rethinking the MBA’.

The B-schools counter that India Inc is fixated on short-term goals, reluctant to provide information for research and has a limited knowledge base. “Our context is learning and not quarterly performance and that may be why there is seen to be no connect between our teachings and corporate life. But our corporates too are obsolete in their knowledge, yet we take their voices seriously,” says IIM-K director Debashis Chatterjee. “Each of us has different mandates; the shared space is defined by learning. That shared space needs to be explored,” adds the professor. IIM-K is doing its bit to become more relevant by cutting back 10% of its regular content and making place for unstructured thinking. The B-school is also working on breaking silos created in B-schools.

The Case against B-schools…

More like placement agencies & few management skills to impart

Not enough good research emerging

No connect between teachings and managing real-time business complexities

Classroom lectures waste of time

Curriculum not in pace with changing business environment

… which the New Curriculum Seeks to Address

Includes subjects like business ethics & CSR

Focuses more on out-of-class learnings

Deals with multiple cultures and BoP consumers

Emphasises on self-analysis and leadership humility

Aims to give global perspective

‘Not Possible to Change Overnight’

These silos typically have specialised faculty for operations, human resources, marketing and other such fields. “We decided to change curriculum so that these subjects are integrated in some way,” explains Chatterjee. The attempt, he says, is to ensure that when students get into a company, they are able to integrate different functions for one goal. “In fact, last year, 32 members of our faculty got together to teach one course over five days,” adds the IIM-K director. That is a step in the right direction, but many more similar measures are needed to convince sceptical Indian business heads. As A Mahendran, managing director of Godrej Consumer Products, says: “There is no real connect between the curriculum and managing real-time business complexities.”

K Ramkumar, group HR chief at ICICI Bank, derides IIMs as placement agencies. “Management is a skill and merely teaching organisational behaviour in classrooms is a waste of time,” he says.

The B-schools say it is unfair to expect a sea change overnight as the curriculum overhaul is still work in progress. Efforts are under way to de-emphasise a lot of what is referred to as the ‘normative’ part of courses and discussions within classrooms and including a lot more of the ‘subjective’ part; the latter pertains to dealing with people, learning how to negotiate and studying consumer behaviour. For instance, IIM-A has set up a ‘Negotiations Clinic’ course that is based on real-life experiences of negotiation episodes in organisations. At SPJIMR in Mumbai, faculty member Harsh Mohan says 60% of the curriculum is now focused on learnings out of classroom. These include attitude-building, rural visits, how to deal with multiple cultures and getting sensitised to people at the bottom of the pyramid. “We get our students to go and interact with organisations such as the Railways and municipal corporations to learn how to deal with unstructured environments,” explains Mohan.

ISB is looking at introducing revised courses to develop leadership traits and emphasise on self-analysis. It is offering more flexibility in the programme structure to allow students to customise their courses. The effort is also to impart a global perspective by teaching students to manage situations of economic, institutional, and cultural differences across countries.

“The second major review process will be completed by 2012 and implemented from academic year 2013-2014. We are in the process of collecting data from all the stakeholder groups and, once this is done, the data will be analysed and further deliberated by the curriculum review committee,” says an ISB spokesperson.

“The world has changed and we have now made it compulsory to review courses every year keeping the global economy in mind,” adds Debashis Sanyal, dean, School of Business Management of NMIMS.

Similar efforts aimed at more diversity are on at other premier Bschools. IIM-K exposes students to a ‘spiritual quotient’ the Mumbai Business School is introducing courses in philosophy that include along with the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads, eastern philosophies as well; and the Xavier Labour Relations Institute has a compulsory course called ‘ethical ways of running a business,’ for which it has professors who are not typical academicians but corporate practitioners. But could the problem lie less with the institutes and more with insatiable students? HBS’ Datar says the best students in B-schools want to join management consultancies and investment banks that offer top dollar. So B-schools automatically tune their teaching methods to pander to their needs. “B-schools are focused on teaching students to advise and analyse and are not preparing them for entrepreneurship, leadership and action-oriented innovative thinking,” says Datar.

Adds TV Mohandas Pai, former head of HR at Infosys: “It is just a case of demand-supply scenario and the hefty packages offered by investment bankers have set the tone for compensation. The corporate engagement at Bschools is superficial.”

Still Datar adds, “We cannot fault the students on choosing jobs that they think will give the right fillip to their careers.” Atanu Ghosh, visiting professor in business policy at IIM-A, avers that the career choices are out of the control of the IIMs. “We do have students who join the public sector but if a large chunk chooses a line that will determine their course of life and lifestyle, we can do little about it. It is a market-driven economy.”

Santrupt Misra, head of HR at the Aditya Birla group, says it is difficult to heap all the blame on either Bschools or on industry. “The current curriculum has not kept pace with the changing business environment, and limited research in our academia has aggravated the problem. I must also say that industry is not forthcoming in providing access to its research.” That has to change – and perhaps has already begun to. Says Leena Nair, executive director HR at HUL “We are now sharing case studies so that students are not dealing with a 30-yearold case. Instead of blaming each other, we should work together and influence key campuses.”

KALA VIJAYRAGHAVAN MUMBAI ET 19JAN0112~