Reshaping Management Educations For Future Leaders

With a plethora of B-schools that opened up in India over the past two decades and the many who were existing before, most of them are an utter disappointment. A look at their lack of proactive preparedness for the 21st-century concepts shows that they have failed utterly in their purpose of existence.

However, the mad frenzy of that sinking feeling that a formal management educational qualification will fast-track jobs and career-path is what also propelled and still propelling a generation of parents to pay up for their kids’ education.

In this endeavour, management schools have turned into a good business and in doing so, have failed the generation. But for a few outliers, the woefully low standards of management education, right from content to methodology to delivery is only matched by the various attempts in so-called educational ranking by various brands, including the media houses. It’s a jamboree out there.

MBA, sadly, seems to stand for Much-Below-Average. The decay of academic excellence sounds like the death knell of quality management education. Especially at a time, when the global trends around the management concepts are fast-changing and testing the theories espoused in the previous century.

Reality shocks expectations
The theoretical thinking is that the industry and academicians would work together, progressively and collaboratively, bettering the learning standards and delivering value to all stakeholders. This has been more than a pipe dream - worse off than dreaming to send the first Indian to Mars by 2025.

The industry has not shown much interest in participating in the academic pedagogy upgrades or content development or teaching as visiting faculty; while academicians have not showcased much of high-quality primary research and industry consulting attempts and hence deliver their lectures from the altar of old notes and presentations.

The management education currently seems to be hell-bent on putting students through a conveyor-belt approach. Put them through multiple semesters, same subjects &/ specialities offered for past many years is still par-for-the-course: Marketing, finance, human resources, operations. Few of the schools also have specialised industry-focus like retail, banking, oil & gas, energy, pharmacy, etc. The usual process of case studies (most of them outdated &/ redundant), multiple assignments, regular exams or tests, classroom-based rigid training - all over two years is expected to make the minds of the students blossom with eagerness and inquisitiveness. Most of the lecture notes are even available online. In most cases, it depends on the quality of the teachers if they can help the students shine in real life qualities and not just in theoretical learning (or cramming).

The accepted verdict about a 'good' management program, in general, seems to be its placements and the respective institutes’ proclamation of the highest salary it could place one of its students. Very few institutes speak transparently about the mean & median of the placement salaries, and the benchmarking with what’s offered in the industries they placed their students in.


Outdated regulatory bureaucracy
Technology & industrial disruptions are a given; history has demonstrated that large disruptions impact societal values and influence behavioural changes. While humans have adapted themselves to newer normal with every disruption, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR) is a bigger disruption. It has enormous potential to do positive for humankind. And have a trail of downside risks including disruption in conventional methods of employment, thereby drastically reducing the number of jobs available in the eco-system and increasing the urgency to retool the entire education and skilling thinking & methodologies.

In today’s times, the question of an old-school regulatory framework for management education seems self-defeating in itself. After all, if the market mechanism can drive up better quality standards and serve the student community better, consequently helping the industry get better-trained ready-talent, forceful bureaucratic interventions are not needed. And even assuming market mechanism is not effective to be at times, the 20th-century ideology that few among the society have to govern the rest won’t solve for issues in the tertiary education system. If any framework can bring in consumer rights protection and enhance continual-learning offerings, it would be welcome. The outdated ideology of trying to be a watchdog with pedantic methods would not serve anyone, especially the students.

The regulatory framework like helicopter-parenting, for lack of speedy reinvention, has hurt the education industry by allowing for status-quo as a sign of existence, and mere-incremental progress as its hallmark. Meritocracy of qualitative teaching aspects does not necessarily find high weightage in this journey so far. It is the 'control & influence' aspect of this regulatory face, that the industry can’t even take action on a poorly performing staff or the academic institution itself. Education and learning don’t seem to have any correlation.

Regulatory decay of sorts, over the decades, has allowed the ugly head of academic jealousy, petty politics to damage the moral fabric of what should have been the pillar of GDP-growth, and what should have aided in nation-building.


Excellence in academics & academicians
We should revamp our education pedagogy with the aim to inculcate multiple skills to each individual, as part of the mainstream education system. For this to be successful, we also need to upgrade our teachers' development program, which is currently dinasourous at best. With both of these initiatives, the education framework will give respectability that skilling is a formal part of it and not an alternative to mainstream education. Teacher upskilling & industrial training modules and also having adjunct faculties who work in their domain sectors will help bring market content.

B-schools are using an outdated curriculum, having less focus on skill-building, unable to establish 'industry connect' and failing to inculcate attributes that are valued by today's employers such as problem-solving and decision-making skills, leadership, work effectively as a team member, intrapreneurship, and the ability to grasp and manage complexity and dynamics in organisations and in the profession.

The students have been thronging to the business schools for many years and we have seen in India, the mushrooming of many new institutions every year, offering management programs. This has had an effect on the availability of quality trained teaching talent, which is a huge disservice to the cause of education.

Teaching involves hunger for knowledge, passion, commitment and hard work. Teaching is not a substitute for not getting any other job. At the same time, not every successful manager can be a good teacher or vice versa. How do we train sufficient management teachers to impart knowledge?

For example, a full-professor with a PhD qualification would have finished her/his graduation 2 decades ago. Imagine if you are a computer science professor and expected to teach robotics or AI or ML today. And yet in order to offer the latest in say a B.E (AI) program, where would regulations bring in such professors?

Students preference of subjects will be influenced by what Industry onboards as essential knowledge set along with critical skill sets as added bonus. No wonder, we see a decline in some traditional courses in management schools. For example, today the skill sets that are in need are writing a business plan for an ideation pitch or effectively demonstrating an idea for venture funding.

Experiential learning is where students benefit from applying their knowledge to real-life challenges and the companies gain fresh insights from bright young minds. With both students and corporate recruiters demanding fundamental changes to drive entrepreneurial thinking, management schools wanting to survive this onslaught will adapt quickly.


Genesis & generational-shifts
World’s first program in 'Master of Business Administration' began at Harvard Graduate School of Business & Administration in 1908. The earlier business schools catered to the need of the industrial companies. Even the management schools at large universities are named after leaders of the industrial era. For example, Alfred Sloan, the ex CEO of General Motors adorns the name at MIT Sloan. Faced with volatile demands for business education & multiple global events like world wars, volatile economic cycles, political upheaval, and Global Financial Crisis 2008 over the previous 100 years, Harvard added new initiatives for experiential learning. These included Field Immersion Experience for Leadership Development (FIELD) projects, Tech Simulations, Flipped and experimental classrooms, Introspective exercises and many more.

The Third Industrial Revolution companies of the 20th century used physical components as inputs to produce goods as output. Their capital investments were inland, machinery, factories. Their OpEx was in labour, raw material, fuel and repairs. The role of the business manager was to ensure that their plant and machinery lasted longer and if they could control OPEX and maximise labour productivity.

The businesses in the Creator economy are a different breed altogether. They don’t have issues of plant & machinery, and their investments and operating costs are more about talent bench strength. Yet their ability to grow their business in quick time and to a global scale is phenomenal.


Education in the VUCA world
Business schools in 2021 are under immense pressure from prospective employers for different kinds of skill sets they expect the students to possess. Every job onboarding is expected to deliver results from day one and meet targets flawlessly. And a topic not spoken much about is “entrepreneurship”, which many youngsters are looking to grow in. Can our run-of-the-mill case studies prepare students to succeed in a world that is changing faster than cases can be written? What are the gaps in those cases?

The rise of new-age startups & knowledge-centric gig-economy roles is adding to the changing business landscape. None of those startups or businesses has had any precedence or textbook to learn from. How can cases are written 10 years ago be relevant today? The changed context makes the content irrelevant. The Covid pandemic has also shown that no case study can be treated as an updated playbook and those could not help decision-makers by offering any ideas.

In this age of Industry 4.0, business disruption is evident from the fact that 54% of the Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 are extinct (remember Kodak ?) and many others that could feature in the 2030 list may not have been born yet. McKinsey’s study suggests that the average lifespan of Standard & Poor's 500 firms was 61 years in 1958, which now stands at less than 18 years. It also believes that, in 2027, 75 per cent of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 would have disappeared. Can we prepare management students for the future with the help of cases with vanishing examples?

The management education must progress from algorithmic learning to meeting the fundamental way corporations look at skill sets needed as essentials - problem-solving, empathy, creativity, empathy, leadership, strategic thinking, understanding technological progress and disruption, crisis management, ability to thrive under chaotic & dynamic world, and dynamic decision making. After all, it’s the VUCA world we live in, and yet we teach steady-state management concepts.

In a data-driven world powered by digital technology, companies are constantly evolving. Because management education is to prepare business leaders of tomorrow, we need to dynamically align curriculums with the ever-changing demands of the workplace.

Future business leaders will require skills that will help them tackle current and future business challenges, including a digital mindset, a focus on continuous learning, the ability to make data-driven decisions, and critical thinking. Meritocracy, design thinking and out of box ingenuity would be the play of the century and not mediocrity or subservience that we subconsciously teach in most of our management schools.

The education industry - be it for-profit or not-for-profit - has to reimagine itself, reshape its present plight; to be able to be relevant to the industry, itself, and students alike. Therein, lies the biggest challenge. For its stakeholders’ inertia is their biggest blinder.

The education sector is the only one where the consumer (student) becomes the product (alumni to attract future students). To disrupt or damage is the tell-tale sign. Time will tell if the management education industry will become a tale.

Srinath Sridharan

Columnist Strategic counsel for over 27 years, with leading corporates across diverse sectors. Independent Director across multiple sectors. Advises organisations on the intersection of finance, digital, consumption economy, GEMZ (Gig Economy, Millennials, gen Z) & ESG. Coaches & mentors senior leaders. Active engagement across industry-growth policy conversations & public policy issues. Visiting faculty at various management schools and with regulatory learning centres. Prolific media columnist across topics he works with. He is also the Editor and co-author of ‘Time for Bharat’ (book on public governance). Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. Posts all published work at https://srinath.blog