Sunday Posts

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...

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...

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...

I am forced to think what quality means for an education programme through my day-to-day activities to develop and establish a high 'quality' MBA programme. The interactions with the Academic team tells me that better quality means greater resource allocation, more people, more computers, more books for the library etc. This may be correct up to a point and reflect the realities of the programme management, where one battle you want to win is the battle for the budgets. However, I am not convinced that once the resources are sorted out, 'quality' will happen itself. On the contrary, I have started believing that quality of a programme may not be linked to resources at all, once an adequate level of resources have been allocated. The example I shall use here is that there is an optimal class size. Let's say we throw more resources and reduce our class sizes from 30 to 20: I am unlikely to believe that this will mean better quality of the programme. Same goes for unde...

Nathan Furr makes a case for the E-School approach on his Forbes blog ( read here ) and against the traditional B-School approach. The key difference, following his argument, is seeing problems as opportunity and uncertainty as a given. While B-Schools keep talking about change, they have changed little (except becoming far too expensive) and collectively, the B-School world does not want the world to change. However, it is changing. We all know about technology. While the technological changes are being co-opted in B-School curriculum, it is not easy to cope with its social effect: The age of transparency. In the age of Wikileaks , it is important to be transparent: Instead, the B-Schools are trying hard to tell people that they must look authentic. The statement is self-defeating, indeed. However, that shows the key problem with B-Schools: They are too disconnected from life. The idea of E-School, hence, is important, and I would tend to agree that all Business Education must go tha...

The project I have worked on for a full year is coming into some shape now. We are going to shape up a school within a school - a specialist business school within the college which offers a range of courses in different subject areas. In a way, this is indeed something to feel good about. However, at the same time, this is a strange time to set up a Higher Ed entity in Britain, when the universities are in turmoil and there is a full scale clampdown on student visas. But this post is not about the business environment, but about my personal journey. The last year was my self-defined period of recuperation, from my burn-out experience from the previous job. I have traveled little: In fact, except a short trip to Malaysia and the Philippines, I have not traveled at all during the year. I have focused on just one thing - setting up of this school - and made building network within the British Higher Ed sector my first priority. I have also invested a lot of time studying about higher edu...

My work role is undergoing a subtle shift. In the first six months in my job in the college, I was mainly involved in strategic developments, which meant I dipped my toe into almost everything, from planning new customer service initiatives to talking to strategic partners overseas. However, since January, after the college recruited a new Managing Director, whose role includes everything business related, my role has changed into one overseeing the learning and teaching in the business courses of the college. Which I indeed love, it is in line with what I am studying at the UCL and something that I wanted to do: In a way, I am dead serious when I say I have retired from business. My own assessment of the job is that there is a lot to be done. We do a much better job than most other private colleges around, but there is a lot to be covered still. Private College industry in Britain is sort of a cottage industry, without much professional practices in recruitment, design of courses, eva...

Gary Hamel is seen delivering a lecture at University of Phoenix, the American 'Virtual' University owned by the Apollo Group. His central message is clear - management has fallen in a state of disrepair and needs urgent innovation. The question, however, is whether management itself will survive another century or it would dissolve into something else. That idea is less wild than it seems: Leadership has replaced management as the favoured term for the business gurus (with notable exception of Gary Hamel and his colleague at London Business School, Julian Birkenshaw, and Henry Mintzberg). But, here, Hamel's plea to bring back the humanity to business, make employees central to the agenda of the corporation, is linked with his faith in management. Despite the HR gimmicks that passed on as management innovation for last half century, businesses have lost its identity as a social organization and have come to be seen as a money-making machine, o...