SPJIMR Inaugurates PG-EMP’s 75th Batch

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s SPJIMR inaugurated its 75th batch of the Post Graduate Executive Management Programme (PGEMP) recently.

PGEMP is a 21-month modular programme for working executives which aims to build general management talent from high potential functional managers. The programme is based on SPJIMR’s guiding philosophy of influencing practice and promoting value-based growth. SPJIMR has successfully run its Executive Management Programme (PGEMP) for the last 18 years.

The programme is designed for high potential functional managers with 5+ years of work experience. PGEMP facilitates fast track career growth of these executives and makes them capable of shouldering general management responsibilities. It helps create a cadre of change agents for the company and a leadership pipeline from within.

The faculty members who teach in this programme have a rich blend of academic and industry experience. PGEMP has an innovative pedagogy and curriculum based on an experiential learning model. PGEMP has a unique TLAP model that involves Teaching, Learning, Application and Capstone Project which builds problem-solving skills, gives wider exposure to understand various aspects of business and enables greater visibility and recognition within the company.

Accredited by AMBA, SPJIMR runs 5 batches of PGEMP in a year i.e. in the month of January, February, May, September and November with a class size of on an average 50 participants in a batch.

The event also witnessed the launch of a coffee table book through which we traveled back in time to understand the roots and the genesis of one of the most unique executive management programmes – a programme that has made a difference to the lives of the people associated with it. Relevant to the real world, the divergence in approach inspired people to question themselves, shed their inhibition and scale new heights. The book is an attempt to present some of the stories of people who believe in the enduring power of continuing education, crafting thoughts and creating leaders

The event further saw a colloquium on the topic 'Executive Education: Staying Current in the Digital Age', attended by PGEMP advisory council members and senior members of PGEMP partner companies. The colloquium was an attempt to discuss and deliberate on the content and delivery of the through a rich blend of opinions from the corporate and academia.

In this era of exponential growth companies and their leaders have to stay abreast of the current wave and be future-ready, therefore signaling the need for advancement in their knowledge and capabilities. This means management institutes imparting such education need to continuously upgrade their pedagogical models and curriculum in order to keep up with the changes in the digital age. 

The guests along with SPJIMR faculty and PGEMP staff were put into four groups which served as think tanks to deliberate on the following four themes:

• Hard Skills: New knowledge/ Analytical skills required for leaders
• Soft Skills: Required for tomorrow’s leaders
• In company mentoring: How to create more effectiveness
• Ethics and Sustainability: New dimensions in the digital age

Jayant Balan, CEO Voltas-Beko steered the group presentation emphasizing how ethics can be a zero multiplier and said, “Whatever an organization does, it only takes one deed to bring all the effort down to zero.”

While leaders could utilize positive reinforcement and constant deliberation during decision making, the power of storytelling can create the right mix of respect for the leader and fear or unethical consequences. Additionally, his group emphasized how awareness of legalities, art of making timely disclosures and case based imparting of ethics based doctrines can be incorporated through the institute’s curriculum, thus creating ripple effects in the corporate arena on a broader basis.

Making a case for the need for soft skills in business leaders, Vinod Singh, Head HR – Galaxy Surfactant spoke about improving the emotional quotient, and the ability to drive a purpose-driven culture within the organization. Social media etiquette, handling employees from the gig economy and the capability to influence through technology were also considered to be instrumental to create relevance and agility in leadership.

Ashish Mathur, CIO – All Cargo Logistics spoke about the importance of hard skilling the leaders and employees of an organization, also how the ability and willingness to learn has a huge role to play for the same. His team urged the institute to introduce key tools across the spectrum to all the participants as a core subject so that they take back higher levels of tech based knowledge and raise their intellectual benchmarks with respect to their subject and interest areas or corporate domains. Interestingly, the group also espoused the need for providing a structure to the peer learning by formalizing lectures/ presentations by participant experts to impart knowledge of their core area for the benefit of their batch mates.

Deepak Shetty, EVP, JCB India presented his group’s thoughts about the ways in which the institute could leverage the company mentor relationships. Some key points that this group raised were about breaking away from the conventional norms. Participants should choose their company mentors by way of merit and capability. In order to rope in more relevant capstone (live-company applied) projects by program participants, inputs from organizations in terms of the requirements could be sought. This group also emphasized making mentor meets more frequently, held at diverse sites (including within various partner organizations), and incorporating some value addition in terms of some expert talk by a guest speaker. To augment buy-in and engagement by mentors, the potential for learning portals, workshops/trainings in mentoring skills, calendar-based faculty-mentor meet as well as felicitation and recognition for meritorious performance were highlighted.

Dean, Dr. Banerjee concluded the session with a vote of thanks and reflected upon his idea of training the trainers and providing a value proposition to the advisory council members in order to create a mutually symbiotic relation between the institute and the distinguished partners. The forum was wrapped up with a promise to create a learning and experience-based educational model at PGEMP which can enable executive management education embed inflection points along the productivity curves and performance curves of partnering organizations.