Sunday Posts

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, Peter Drucker observed. And indeed so: Strategy's rational aims and goals are all too often frustrated by ways of seeing and doing things in an organisation. Yet strategy gets so much attention and effort - and, indeed, one hires those fancy strategy consultants - while culture is seen as that soft thing that one can't really define, one can't really measure and ultimately, one can't do anything about. But culture comes from somewhere. It is not a given, an environmental factor that one has to live within. This is possibly the second misconception about culture, that it is an extension of the host society. Indeed, there is that influence of the host society, but an organisation's culture is just that and no more. While the host society supplies some of the precepts, an organisation's culture is a man-made thing, driven by the Founder or Senior Managers and shaped by the 'strategy' of the subordinates to live wit...

Business Schools are a great success story in Higher Education. What may have started as a Correspondence training was transformed by the establishment of University department in Pennsylvania with Joseph Wharton's money, to train the captains of American industry, in 1881. A generation later, with the founding of Harvard Business School in 1908, the whole global phenomenon has got started, though it took until 1954 for Cambridge University to start Management studies (which became a separate business school in 1995, while Oxford started its Business School in 1996). By the turn of the millennium, Business has become the most popular undergraduate subject, and increasingly Engineers and other technically trained professionals were coming to Business Schools to get credentialed. By this time, Business Schools became the most successful sector in Higher Education, with unparallelled prestige, and had developed an entire ecosystem of ranking, funding and accreditation of their own...

In my various conversations in India, I get to hear that business education is in crisis. The applications and enrollments are falling, and the MBAs from most institutions are not getting jobs that justify the effort, and investment, in an MBA. Several schools are up for sale, and everyone is generally pondering about the future. Most conversations are focused on the Quality Crisis - they point to the three or four top-ranking and extremely selective Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) still maintaining their value proposition - and most new institutions are desperately trying to replicate their strategies around them, often hiring people who leave or retire from IIMs. However, what gets missed is that this is not just a quality problem. There is a whole lot more here, though it is difficult to analyse this appropriately in a country like India where innovation and courage are not really associated with education. However, a good place to provoke a discussion is indeed to look...

Business Education in India is in some sort of crisis. The applicants for Combined Admission Tests are falling, indicating sluggish demand even for the top business schools. The lesser schools are in deeper crisis, their lack of placements making headlines in the newspapers.  There are a number of reasons for the dead-end that most schools are facing. Chief among them is perhaps lack of innovation, despite the changing marketplace. Indeed, the Indian regulatory structure is decidedly anti-innovation, and it rewards conformity rather than trying to do anything new. But, there are structural reasons for lack of innovation in the business schools - that they are really too small in most cases, with only a few hundred students at best! In turn, the small number of students is a result of these business schools depending on a narrow range of courses, MBA and its variants, and being completely oblivious of the fact that a large number of students may want to study business at the u...

Because businesses need more and more skilled people to do the jobs, they are the key beneficiaries of education. This has not always been the case - the Church and the Government needed educated people more than businesses until very recently - but in a secular society and with the age of small governments, that has changed. Today, the businesses are perhaps the largest recipient of the educated people, and for most students, education is about preparing for a career in business. Indeed, this does not mean that education does not have any other purpose, but it is best to recognise this changing perspective about education. What the educators should, or shouldn't, do in this changed context gets discussed all too often. However, what does not get proportionate attention is what businesses need to do. The businesses often complain that they don't get the trained manpower that they need to remain competitive, and they expect the education sector to deliver them what they ne...

Those who can't, teach - says The Economist (See the story ). The business schools indeed don't like the disruptive innovation business. Despite the impressive sway they hold particularly in the emerging countries, they are eager to hold on to the fragile foundational logic that MBA is necessary to lead a business, despite mounting evidence on the contrary. So, anything, like the company-run Mini-MBAs, that undermine the value of the business school business, is shunned. This is, however, head in the sand behaviour than anything strategic. The Economist sees the business schools suffering from two problems. One is about becoming too academic, with professors more obsessed with publication and academic prestige than teaching. This is a standard criticism of academic practice today, one that is easily countered. Teaching without research and practice is hardly the thing to do in a discipline like business. The Economist indeed concerned itself with the top-flight B-Schools,...

One of the colleagues asked during the Education Investment Conclave, which took place last week, what it means in practise. The question was directed to me, and my answer something to the effect that it means preparing the students so that they can be employable all their lives, not just get the first job. What I was thinking is that what goes on in the name of employability is so very lame, the writing of CV or preparing for interviews, all directed to somehow crossing the initial barrier into work, based on the implicit assumption that getting started is the most difficult thing. There may be some truth about the difficulty of getting started, but that's only half the story, if that. Employability isn't about just crossing the threshold into employment; in fact, in most cases, the employability problems start thereafter. The candidates don't get why it is so important to turn up for work at time, why you can't afford to lose temper, why you have to work in a...

Management Education in India is in crisis, and that's good news. Students have lost confidence in the mushrooming MBA schools because they do not work. They have stopped enrolling. The banks have become weary of financing these institutions. Every month, a few business schools are closing because their owners come to realize there is no easy money in this. Talking to people who own and run these business schools, one gets the impression that the students are at fault. They are not interested in learning anything, just the job at the end. At the time of admission, there is hardly any discussion about the curriculum, methods of education or even the faculty. The students want to know what is the kind of starting salary they can get after completion. This is indeed true, and this is indeed why there are mushrooming business schools. In fact, it is easy to satisfy students' demand for good jobs in the end, without a good education, as some business schools in India de...

Employability, in Higher Education, seems to be that one thing that everyone wants but no one knows what it is. Therefore, how to train for employability remains both open to interpretation and a subject of intense debate. I have had the privilege to see two sides of the debate in close proximity: Being in the For-Profit Education sector for many years, where employability is the key selling point, I have noted the disdain for such a trivial thing from the other side of the education divide. Things indeed have changed over time: However, sitting through a focus group on an employability training product very recently, I witnessed how uncomfortable university lecturers still are in acknowledging that it is something that their students may legitimately want as an outcome of their education. To be fair, employability was never a Higher Ed thing: Degrees, at a different time, almost always got a job for those willing. The professors, mostly a product of that era, is slightly perplexe...

We are working to construct a new curriculum for undergraduate business training, which will sit at the heart of the new education project we are pursuing. The key premises are simple: 1. We don't see undergraduate business training simply as a mini-MBA. Rather, this is an opportunity to situate business in the wider context of social life and knowledge. The students, rather than thinking 'everything is business', should understand the different domains - family, community life and government - in their own variety and complexity. 2. Accordingly, this training is less about 'how to' than 'why' and 'what' of business life and career. The undergraduate students, who still have many important life decisions ahead of them, would need this broader perspective than the graduate students who may have already made their choice. 3. Additionally, we shall put a great emphasis on the emerging realities of the business - the disruption of business as usu...

If one has to put markers to trace the rapid change in the British Higher Education space, some watershed events will stand out:  First, on 26th July 2010, it was announced that BPP University College of Professional Studies, a For Profit institution which was taken over by the US-based Apollo Group only a year earlier (August 2009), will be granted degree granting power, a first for private sector in nearly 30 years. This led to fierce criticism from the Public Sector Universities and Teachers' Unions alike, who criticised that this amounts to a foreign, albeit American, invasion of British Higher Education, which will lower standards and dumb down student experience. BPP came with a history of Professional Education, primarily in Law and Accounting, and there was resentment about blurring of boundaries between these disciplines and the walled garden of Higher Education, a preserve of the pure. Then, in June 2011, A C Grayling, a prominent philosopher and atheist, announc...

Let's call it the Employability headwind, which is causing trouble in education. There are people who say it should be obvious: A person goes to college to get a job! But, really, is that it? Do you think someone really toils through all those deadlines, disappointments, vexing moments so that they can get a job? To toil through again, under someone else's wishes, carrying out rather unimportant tasks through a lifetime perhaps? Even if we are talking about graduate jobs here (if we accept there is such a thing, they must be fast disappearing), it is likely to be short term. There is no more lifelong employment, it has already been told, only lifelong learning. So, what is this big noise that college must be solely for employment? Okay, I accept there is a difference between 'for employment' and 'for employability', and we should go for the latter. However, the former is the only indicator of the latter - we can't prove employability if the student does...

All my efforts over last few months have been directed towards setting up a global e-school. This is a term I picked up from one of the blogs on Forbes.com: E-School, as in Enterprise School, as opposed to Business School, is a place to learn the art of the enterprise, as opposed to the formulaic thinking that B-Schools usually represent. In short, it will be more art than science, greater focus on people than process, and emphasis on possibilities rather than the mechanics of accounting. If all this sounds wonderfully vague, it is meant to be. There isn't a formula that one can quickly follow in defining an E-School, because there isn't a precedence. What I talk about may sound more akin to a liberal arts college than a Business School. I see sessions on history, psychology and creative writing to be an integral part of what we may end up doing in the school. After all, the goal of the school will be to help shape entrepreneurial mindsets: It must start with a leap into u...

Finally, the partying over, and I am back to work. I have to get used to writing dates with '2012' at the end, but that always takes a bit of time. But there is a sense of a new start: 2011 was one year I could not wait to see the end of. This isn't new that I am seeking a fresh start, a break, both of the lucky sort and with the past. That, indeed, is the spirit of New Year, when the world is assumed to have magically changed with the stroke of Midnight Hour, and, admittedly, with some expensive fireworks sponsored with public money. However, this year, I start with a sense of beginning, and ending, a certain wish of seeing things through an year. That is sort of new for me. I now know that I want to be in Higher Education. The career change decision I took several months ago seems to be working and I enjoy what I do. I see prospects here, both in Britain and elsewhere, and I believe this suits my temperament and skills. I have now worked hard to get started in private...

I was out at the RSA again this morning to listen to a panel discussion on Corporate Ethics. The panel represented an interesting combination - Wendy Harrison, Programme Director Ethics and Compliance, Shell International, Dan Currell , Executive Director of Corporate Executive Board, Matthew Gwyther , editor, Management Today, and Patrick Donovan, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer of Airbus and Chandrasekhar Krishnan, Executive Director of Transparency International - and the discussions were effectively steered by Matthew Taylor , RSA's Chief Executive. The background of the discussion was research undertaken by the Corporate Executive Board , covering more than 30 countries and over half a million executives. Ably presented by Dan Currell, the research explored various issues around corporate ethics, including what makes people tolerate bad behaviour and what may be the effect of corporate corruption on shareholder value. The essential point made was integrity is good ...

Dr. Kendall, the Programme Director of the MBA programme in a management college in the city, was recently advised by the accrediting university that the ‘student experience’ in the course must improve. During a recent conversation, the students told the University representatives that there was very little interaction outside the classroom hours between the tutors and themselves, and often they felt that they had been rushed through the programme. They also indicated that they felt that there wasn’t enough library resources, and they were not sure that the programme was preparing them adequately for a career in business. There wasn’t a straightforward solution available to Dr. Kendall. First of all, his was a Higher Education programme in the midst of a Professional Training college, where most tutors were adjunct and they would not commit extra hours outside the contracted time for student contact. Library resources were hard to come by, as this wasn’t something the colle...