The irony of the B-school system

B-schools are essentially 'body of knowledge'-oriented and they do a great job of delivering this in a time-efficient fashion. However, the irony of the B-school system is that we have 'specialists' teaching people who are doing an MBA to become 'generalists'.

To balance the large load of domains such as accounting, finance, marketing, HR, production planning and so on, the student needs to take extra courses in strategy and policy.

When you get out into the real world, the chasm between the domains and the high-level courses creates serious execution challenges. In effect, the coherence between broad business knowledge and functional excellence is missing.

As a leader, you set the mission, the direction and strategy but often, you find that the organisation is not in sync. And you are left wondering why the strategy failed.

In retrospect, that time spent at B-school didn't really prepare you for this. My time as a CEO in a consulting marketplace dominated by strong players taught me that if you are not true to your strategy on a day-to-day basis, you can generate long-term chaos. This happens silently and is, therefore, tougher to notice. But there are several approaches to resolving this.

From a cultural standpoint, having your middle level managers involved in strategy is a good way of aligning action to direction. But at the transactional level, there is need for speed. So it is critical that processes, too, speak the same language.

To ensure that strategy does not get diluted, you need to set the policy or the right rules.

To motivate and reward people for the right results, the compensation plan needs to be aligned as well. So the entire aspect of connecting ideas with activity requires diving into functions wearing a strategic suit.

Another way of implementing this coherence between strategy and execution is to create a strategic marketing team. This team must consist of people who are battle-hardy but can think strategically.

The right team can ensure that all activities across the value chain are strategically aligned.

These people will forever seek out ways to differentiate all activity across sales, pre-sales, delivery, support, HR management and recruiting.

Ultimately, the source of competitive advantage lies in how a company does a variety of things uniquely, better than competition.