Business Schools Provide Integrated Personality Development: Dr CP Shrimali, MDI Gurgaon

This is the time for admissions and the beginning of the new session in Business Schools. The COVID-19 crisis means this year’s graduating class face setbacks in the form of frozen hirings, furloughed staff, a badly damaged economy and certain industries in free fall. IMF has made a prediction that the global economy will contract by up to 3 per cent in 2020, which is much worse than the 2008 financial crisis.

As unemployment rates go up and companies strategise to cope with the challenges imposed by the pandemic, what will the prospects be for graduating MBAs? To discuss the present and future scenario of B-Schools, BW Education hosted another episode of Wednesday Wisdom - "The Future Business Schools- What Will It Be?" in Association with BW Businessworld.

The key speakers were: Dr Venkata Seshaiah, Director, ICFAI Business School (IBS), Hyderabad; Prof Debashis Sanyal, Director, Great Lakes Institute of Management; Dr Bhimaraya Metri, Director, Indian Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli; Prof Mahadeo Jaiswal, Director, Indian Institute of Management, Sambalpur; Dr CP Shrimali, Former Director, MDI Gurgaon, Professor HR & Strategy; Suchitra Dantre, Assistant Vice President, HT MEDIA; Dr Annurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, BW Businessworld & exchange4media Group (Chair).

On what the B-Schools of future will be, Dr CP Shrimali said, “Business schools provide integrated personality development and therefore thinking about digital education is not adequate. In a business school, traditional teaching will continue but yes technology will have to be leveraged and ultimate focus has to be on competencies and capacity building because for any management graduate, for the kind of capabilities he possesses, and the business school has to provide that kind of capabilities among the students.”

Comparing this year’s admission process from the previous year, Prof Mahadeo Jaiswal, underlined, “Most of the B-Schools have completed their admission process, except some. We have completed along with other 9 IIMs but we do some special admissions for gender diversity, for that interview portion was left so now there are two components – written analysis test and the interview. Everybody decided to scrap that but we at IIM Sambalpur decided to go on and use an online method. We were the first institution in the country to take written admission tests using online systems. We took bold decisions and it was very successful. About 500 students appeared in a day time. This year, admissions have been more encouraging, we received more applications than last year.”