Life starts at 22, with 22 lakh, screamed a newspaper headline sometime back. Business schools (B-schools) all across India are back with a bang.
The Class of 2005 has seen the demand supply scenario tilt in their favour. With the Indian economy looking up companies are falling over one another to get hold of the latest crop coming out of the business school farms.
With everything looking so good this is hardly the right time to pop the question, 'What plagues management education in India?' and get labeled as a naysayer.
MBA programmes in India are now at the pinnacle of their popularity and it is very easy to get caught in the hype and the hoopla surrounding them and keep postponing this inevitable question.
But by the time we start addressing this question it might be too late. As the last few lines of a famous nursery rhyme go, 'All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.'
B-schools are being accused of irrelevance and of doing a poor job at preparing their students for the corporate world. Students are being viewed as customers by B-schools.
This has led to a situation where business values are driving academic agenda leading to B-schools pursuing circular fads, compromising on values and the very character of higher education.
Given all this, in this article we try and look at what plagues management education in India.
American view of management
Business Education as a subject was first offered by the University of Pennsylvania, which set up its bachelors programme way back in 1881. In the year 1900, Dartmouth College became the first to offer a Masters Degree in Business.
Harvard University followed suit in 1908, with a programme titled Masters in Business Administration. Since then, the US B-schools have largely dominated management education. This fact has led to the B-schools in developing countries, like India, aping the B-schools in the United States, as a model for business education.
Management Education in India is nearly fifty years old with the first university departments being set up in the early 50s. The first Indian Institute of Management (IIM) was set up at Ahmedabad in 1961. During its formative years IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) was helped by Harvard Business School.
IIM Calcutta, which was set up in 1963, received assistance from the Sloan School of Management.
IIM-A, under the influence of HBS, pioneered the case study methodology of teaching in India. Thus started the American influence of management education in India. Right from using their cases to their books and even their examples.
Even after more than five decades of the first management institute being set up in India, most B-schools continue to use American textbooks for practically all the subjects. Philip Kotler's Marketing Management is the best example. The lack of good Indian text books leads to students getting a very 'American view' of management.
The lack of appreciation of an Indian context remains one of the biggest banes of management education in India. The American view of management is too bureaucratic, confrontational and rigid -- with too much emphasis on the individual.
This can lead to adverse consequences in an Indian scenario, which values moderation, relationships and trust. Students, most of whom have no or very little prior work experience take this as the gospel truth.
The part of the blame for this lies with the faculty of the management institutes of India, who in all these years have not been able to write a few good management textbooks.
The lack of individual accountability at some of the best B-schools in India, has led to a situation where once a person joins a B-school as a faculty, he/she is well entrenched. This explains why there are a surprisingly high number of non-performers along with a few out standing performers even at the best B-schools.
Lack of experience
The way of handling subjects in classes leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the Indian B-schools fail to attract good faculty and most of them who teach do not have any industry experience. At the same time most of them do not make any efforts to get over this drawback through keeping themselves updated on whatever is happening in Indian business.
When they explain concepts in the class, they lack conviction as they are unable to give relevant examples. As The Economist (May 22-28, 2004) reported, it is easier to train a practitioner in classroom teaching or handling a case rather than make pure academics appreciate management concepts.
Unfortunately, in India, the best people do not get into academics. They want to work in the corporate sector or go abroad for higher studies. This trend will continue as long as the salary differentials remain high.
Most of the institutes (this includes many of the so called B grade institutes) have very few permanent faculty. Most of the teachers are visiting faculty who are paid by the hour and who teach at more than one B-school. They have fairly short-term orientation and this acts as an impediment to their teaching and the learning process of students.
Management by analysis
As per the Compact Oxford Reference Dictionary, the word analysis means 'the separation of something into component parts.' And that's what B-school education seems to have become all about.
Few B-schools take an integrative approach to management education. Almost everything happens in terms of functions (marketing, finance, human resources management, operations, systems and so on), be it teaching, curriculum design, recruitment or for that matter research, in Indian B-schools.
A lot of generic strategies are taught, giving the students a view that 'management is analysis.' And this leads to a situation wherein students think of management as something generic, which far removed from context and experience.
Generic analysis can never substitute for specific experience. This lack of synthesis is very disturbing. Each of the separate functions has taken root and stand apart from others. This leaves students with a highly compartmentalised view of management.
As Henry Minztberg (in his book Managers not MBAs) says: 'Within their own contexts, managers have to put things together in the form of coherent visions, unified organisations, integrated systems, and so forth. That is what makes management so difficult, and so interesting. It's not that managers don't need analysis; rather it's that they need it as an input to synthesis, and that is the hard part. Teaching analysis devoid of synthesis thus reduces management to a skeleton of itself. This is equivalent to considering human body as a collection of bones: nothing holds it together, no sinew or muscle, no flesh or blood, no spirit or soul.'
Indeed, the situation is paradoxical because here we have organisations trying to break down the walls between the compartments and the B-schools valiantly trying to reinforce the same. A new structure that encourages synthesis rather than separation is needed because when one starts working problems do not crop up function wise.
With so much stress on analysis the most important characteristic of profession of management, action, is missed out on.
Action requires interpersonal skills, teamwork skills, negotiating skills and political skills. Unfortunately the B-schools do not do a good job of teaching such skills. The mastery of these skills requires a lot of practice and most B-schools are designed without practice fields.
With management being viewed as analysis management programmes largely attract individuals with undergraduate training in commerce, economics, mathematics, engineering and other sciences.
The B-schools have no place for students from humanities and it is in these fields that imaginative styles of thinking strive.
The fact that a large majority of MBAs get into (or at least aspire to) financial services and consultancies is a by-product of the management by analysis phenomenon.
In such jobs, MBAs get an opportunity to apply all the techniques they learnt at the B-school (as a smart Alec once remarked -- 'to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail') and provide advice without running the risk of facing the consequences.
It also explains why MBAs hesitate to get into manufacturing companies. Working for a manufacturing company requires a lot of business sense, man management skills and above all technical knowledge. Further, the fact that MBAs do not want to get their hands dirty explains why India's B-schools throw up very few entrepreneurs.
Negative attitude towards behavioural coursework
It's been observed that B-school students have negative attitudes towards courses such as business ethics, human resource management and organisational behaviour.
Students essentially view these subjects as a Jargon Dump. This attitude towards the behavioural sciences seems puzzling given the fact that CEOs and recruiters have expressed concern of the lack of social skills and relatively poor attitudes among the newly recruited management trainees.
What makes this even more puzzling is the fact that business management students more likely than others view their education as a stepping-stone into the corporate world. So they should be acquiring skills and knowledge, the corporates feel are the most important.
One possible explanation for the lack of the same could be the fact that corporatates say one thing and turn around and do exactly the opposite in decision-making situations. So when these students start working this is the attitude they carry to their workplace.
Most of them are thus perceived to be on the weaker side when it comes to these so-called soft skills.
High salaries: Dominant value proposition for B-schools
The dominant value proposition that B-schools offer through their MBA degree is the enhancement of careers of those who enroll. And the enhancement is measured in terms of salaries the students command when companies come visiting on campus.
The MBA degree is seen as a package whose high price offers the students a promise of improved income prospects. The Web sites of B-schools and their advertisements talk about the pay packets that fresh MBAs command. The fact that most of the times starting salaries are overstated is another issue.
How many other professions go to town highlighting the starting salaries of their graduates?
As one MBA we spoke to remarked: 'The train of hope reached the land of opportunities. All of us understood that these formative years of our life could either make us or break us depending on the importance one attached to this time. All this was there at the back of our minds. But what brought cheer was the thought that we away from our nest will dance our way to an MBA degree and get to choose from a couple of jobs which are well paying.'
The media also plays its part in the entire game by exaggerating on the economic benefits of B-school education. (The screaming headline with which this article starts is a case in point).
There are many implications of this careerist approach to MBA. First and foremost it leads to a situation where students are not interested in learning for its own sake. This leads to cases where in faculty at times has to dumb down course content and inflate grades to keep students happy.
An institute that fails its fee-paying students is essentially putting its future revenues at risk. Moreover having promised its students great jobs the B-schools have to attempt to deliver great career results, and in the process they transform into placement consultancies rather than being educational institutes.
If these concerns are not enough, B-schools are increasingly unable to impart the right values to their students. And what is education if it cannot impart values?
The placement mania makes MBA students regard jobs and salaries as the be-all and end-all of things. This attitude is inculcated into very bright, young and impressionable students right from the time they enter the B-schools.
Instead of imbibing a spirit of idealism and developing a strong desire to change the world for the better, students leave their B-school after graduation, totally obsessed with making money and progressing in their career.
In the worldview of things, an MBA is an economic man, Homo Economicus, obsessed with his own self-interest and ready to maximise his own personal gains. Homo Economicus is never satisfied and always wants more.
This has also led to greed being raised to some sort of high calling. As Minztberg, Simons and Basu point out in their research paper titled Beyond Selfishness: 'Beyond material goods lies an inner sense of what is good. Beyond calculation lies what is judgement. Indeed is this not the essence of responsible management? To judge the difference between short term calculable gains and deeply rooted core values?'
If students attend B-schools simply to get well paying jobs -- the fact of the matter being that most of them do -- then they subject themselves to disappointment if they do not find a job that pays them a high salary.
In contrast, if students are interested in learning the subject matter, they are less likely to be disappointed by circumstances like the vagaries of the job market over which they anyways have no control. They are also likely to do a better job at course work than trying to copy paste their way out of any situation.
By trying to attract students with interest in the subject, B-schools reduce the need to emphasise on placements and the job finding process.
Expectation mismatch
Most B-school graduates have little or no prior work experience, but they do have a concept about the workplace in general, which does not match with the actual. MBAs walk into the corporate world with stars in their eyes, having not seen the real corporate world; their idea of work is always glamorised.
In his latest book, Mangers not MBAs, Henry Minztberg says: '. . . companies generally do only two things of ultimate consequence. They make things and they sell things. Not market things, not analyse things, not plans things, not control things. These support the physical making of something or the provision of some service, and then getting some final customer to buy or use it. It can thus be said without great overstatement that MBA programmes take people who have hardly ever made anything or sold anything and then make damn sure that they never will.'
B-schools make students believe they are there to revive organisations, change cultures, launch new products, etc. In reality, no such decision is ever taken by anyone but the top management. So being in a situation wherein an MBA is asked to undertake a task with no opportunity to improve the organisation's fortune hurts.
MBAs are famed to want to run things immediately. They do not want to take time to learn the practical skills that are required to manage.
So what is the way out? MBAs who know what they want out of their education and their career in the long run are the most well prepared to handle the situation.
Those who just do an MBA because everyone else is doing the same can see symptoms of existential vacuum creeping within the first few years of their working. This phenomenon also shows that people do not think deeply enough on their motivations of getting an MBA degree.
Commoditisation of knowledge
Management education in India used to be largely government regulated for the first few decades of its existence. Competition was absent and profit was not a motive. The demand for management education swiftly rose in the country in the late eighties and the early nineties after the Indian economy opened up.
The best B-schools in the country did not expand fast enough, choosing instead to maintain their elitist image. So this led to the mushrooming of B-schools (more than 900 on the last count) all over the country. Many a time the B-schools are just located out of a few rooms.
They hardly have any permanent faculty and make do with visiting faculty. The sad part is many such B-schools have the required verification from the All India Council for Technical Education.
This raises the question -- are these B-schools seriously interested in imparting quality management education or are they just trying to make a quick buck?
It has been argued that the market will take care of the situation and only the best institutes will survive and rest will be confined to the dustbins of history. But by then the damage would already have been done. Imagine being an alumnus of an institute, which no longer exists. The demand for good management education far exceeds its supply and this explains its commoditisation.
Students graduating out of the lesser B-schools end up with jobs for which an undergraduate degree would have sufficed. This has led to the bar for such jobs also going up with people preferring an MBA than a simple graduate.
In closing
Today many B-schools find themselves under attack. Their curriculum, faculty and pedagogic methods are all attracting sharp criticism. Some critics even argue that the only role that our best B-schools play is screening out good students through a stringent admissions process.
There is even a suggestion by some cynics that the IIMs should restrict themselves to conducting the Common Admission Test and leave it to the industry to give the selected students the appropriate training!
But despite these looming clouds on the horizon, B-schools continue to be in a state of denial. Many management professors strongly believe that it is their training which makes the students great.
Further, a two-year MBA programme on an average costs about Rs 3 lakh. Add to that the opportunity cost -- i.e. the money the person would have earned if he/she would have worked for two years.
And if one gets into a B-school at the 'wrong time' (like many students of the batch of 2002 found out), even jobs are hard to come by. And it has not been proven that MBA graduates do better at their jobs than they would have done with exclusively non-academic training.
So if there are so many things which are not right about management education in India, the question to be asked is 'Why do companies still keep going back to recruit MBAs?'
The fact of the matter is that the situation is self-perpetuating. Since people who make the hiring decisions are MBAs they keep going back to their alma mater and other B-schools. They like to see images of themselves in the people they recruit. An association gets formed because of this and based on the performance of other alumni from these institutes.
Do companies visit B-schools for the training they provide to their students or because of their admissions process? Mostly companies visit campuses because that is how everyone else recruits. It seems to be the 'in thing.'
All said and done, they do find some smart kids there and they don't know where else to look for them. Whether they are smart because of the training provided to them or because of the elimination process doesn't bother them.
The other reason on why they recruit is the sheer commoditisation of MBAs. Companies recruit MBAs for positions where they used to earlier take graduates simply because there are so many available. Unfortunately many times these companies cannot fulfill the aspirations of young recruits.
The reputation of management education as a whole could slip if the present generation of MBAs later judges that their education was not worthwhile. If the spate of articles in the media on this is any indication the process has already started.
Some significant and painful changes have to be made. Changes that will require us to broaden our concept of what constitutes teaching, to think beyond grade point averages and course credits; to invade the sacred territories of the current 'core disciplines'; to import new kinds of faculty from psychologically distant fields; and to design a whole new MBA experience not just curriculum.
Globally, consultants like McKinsey and Mercer do recognise these weaknesses and are spreading their recruitment net much more widely. In its February 2004 issue, the Harvard Business Review pointed out: 'An arts degree is now the hottest credential in the world of business.'
There are still other companies that take graduates from different streams and then train them in house on management subjects while they work for them.
In India, some employers are already looking beyond B-schools and casting their nets wider among departments of commerce and economics in the better universities. Some of these universities have fairly stringent admission processes, even better than those of our B-rung and C-rung B-schools.
As a starting step, recruitment from all streams seems to be the way to go. Why is it that we feel that an M.A in Economics or an M.A. in Psychology cannot work in a corporate environment? It is perhaps time companies started thinking of recruiting talent and not degrees.
Vivek Kaul is Research Scholar, ICFAI University; and Hasan Ahmed is Senior Executive, HRD, Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (AMUL).
More from rediff