The 'New-Normal' in Management Education at AIMA, 20th March, 2014
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Managing Turbulence in Management Education: Aligning with the Needs of the Industry Plenary Session: V ”Reviving Management Education: Leadership Engagement and Sustainability”
Transcript of The 'New-Normal' in Management Education at AIMA, 20th March, 2014
Managing Turbulence in Management Education: Aligning with the
Needs of the Industry
Plenary Session: V
”Reviving Management Education: Leadership Engagement and Sustainability”
The ‘New-Normal’ in Management Education
Prof. Ranjit Goswami,Dean (Academics) & Officiating Director
“Best and worst of times”
• ‘Turbulence’ (n): Violent or unsteady movement (air/water/fluid); a state of confusion, disorder, agitation, choppiness…
• Management professors are smart in advising others: – How to convert your weakness/threats into
opportunities
• ‘Needs of the industry’ – surely yes, but not with a myopic ‘quarterly-profit-maximization’ motive– Lead/lag, & ethics – income inequality– Impact of Business Ethics/CG:
• inversely proportional to corporate scams?
Thanking for the invitation & … issues
• What are the leadership challenges faced by the Directors of B-schools today?
• Can ‘sustainability’, including economic ones, and quality of education go hand in hand?
• Why is Student engagement a big challenge in most of the B-Schools today?
• Strategies to revive past glory of admissions and employment in B-Schools.
Key Questions: Who leads, who lags?
• Asking the right questions more important…
• ‘A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.’
• Sociologist E. DigBy Baltzell (1955) on Bell’s concern of converting technical employees to managers
• Ref.: The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone
• The New York Times, June 15, 2010
Training Vs. Education
• “This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.”
• Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)
B-Schools: Ahead or behind the curve?
• Synchronic versus diachronic relevance of management studies in rapidly changing VUCA world.
• Three relevant questions to ask:
– Does management education lead practicing world?
– Does it lag the practicing world?
– How much is the gap – widening or shrinking?
• Summarily, are we ahead of the curve or behind the curve?
Information age…Google as a verb, for search
Source: generalcomics.com
‘I've had students tell me that they couldn't have graduated from high
school without Google. I correct them to say 'without search.‘
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
A Faculty from The West Speaks…
Eric Schmidt, August 4, 2010
• ‘Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003…
• Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.’
TechCrunch, August 4, 2010
Are we ready for this generation?
• GS Elevator Gossip @GSElevator 4 Feb 2013
• (A fake, satire account on: ‘Things heard in the Goldman Sachs elevators do not stay in the Goldman Sachs elevators’)
• ‘#1: why the **** do people with smartphones ask me questions that googlecan answer.’
Same generation that is used to…
• ‘#1: Checking your phone after someone else pulls out their phone is the yawn of our generation.”
• GS Elevator Gossip @GSElevator, June 2013
• ‘Mobile users can't leave their phone alone forsix minutes and check it up to 150 times a day.’
• Mobile technology consultant Tomi Ahonen, in a study commissioned by Nokia, 2013.
Developing Multiple Perspectives…
• Lawrence Summers sees education as: – ‘Education will be more about how to process and
use information and less about imparting it.’
‘What You Really Need to Know’ The New York Times, January 12, 2012
– Before ‘processing’ comes ‘finding andinterpreting’
– Ability to see ‘trend’ among ‘noise’
– Ability to differentiate ‘propaganda’ from‘information’
What exactly is good teaching?
• ‘What exactly is good teaching?
• (A professor) years after encountering it that he (or she) had been its beneficiary, stated
• “I had learned without knowing it almost, how to see three sides of a twosided story.”
• I wish I had said that.’
• Stanley Fish, Student Evaluations, Part Two
• NYT, June 28, 2010
Relevance of research?
• faculty members ‘have too little incentive to produce usable research. Oceans of papers with little genuine insight are published in obscure periodicals that no manager would ever dream of reading.’
• ‘Those who can’t, teach’
• The Economist, Feb 8, 2014
• Differences from other two professional fields ofstudies:– Medicine: The Lancet
– Or Yale Law Journal…
– HBR is not a ‘peer-reviewed’ journal per se…
‘Professors, We Need You’
• ‘A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance.’
• Nicholas Kristof, NYT, ‘Professors, We Need You’,
• Feb 15, 2014
Not as pessimist as following…
• ‘Today an 8 year old asked me how to achieve world peace. I told him world peace was like Santa Claus: doesn't exist and never will. #Crying’
@Fake_Kissinger In twitter
The supply & the demand side
• Out of 15K global B-Schools, 4000 are in India
• Average costs of doing an MBA/PGDM, without state grant, lowest…to $2k in two years
– Except couple of hundreds out of these 4K
• ‘Garbage in, garbage out’: in vast majority of B-Schools
– In regulation to policy
– In faculty quality
– In student quality
Revisiting the questions…1• Can ‘sustainability’, including economic ones, and
quality of education go hand in hand?– Has to be operationally viable
– With 15:1 Student : Faculty ratio, and assuming faculty salary 20-30% of expenses, not viable at less than Rs. 4 lakhs/annum of pure tuition fees.
– Without quality, there cannot be operational of economic sustainability.
– Must go hand-in-hand, quality has ‘no costs’ & ‘costs’.
– In a hypercompetitive, & job-less growth market, not enough for survival
Revisiting the questions…2
• What are the leadership challenges faced by the Directors of B-schools today?
– Constant review of curriculum and courses
– Updating, training, capacity building of faculty
– Moving away from bookish knowledge to topical online relevant practices
– Aligning evaluations in line with learning objectives.
– Following WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, Reuters, NYT…
Revisiting the questions…3
• Why is Student engagement a big challenge in most of the B-Schools today?– Reminds the shift, post Gutenberg’s printing press,
from hand-written manuals in The Church to printed books.– Peter Drucker, Beyond The Information Revolution,
The Atlantic, 1999– Media consumption habits different– Students consume media from handheld devices, (e)
books are another learning media today.– Twitter generation – brevity – beyond 140 characters
– ‘Attention deficit syndrome’
Revisiting the questions…4
• Strategies to revive past glory of admissions and employment in B-Schools.– The economy cannot accommodate 4000 B-
Schools• Even if economy bounces back to near-double digit
growth rate, unlikely in new-normal global economy
– Entrepreneurship is the key.
– Stress on original thinking, critical thinking, analytical abilities…• From macro-to-micro, think-and-do cycle.
‘The Times They Are A-Changing’
Bob Dylan
Overall, a sense-and-respond approach than having a fixed view, and thereby strategy, of the future…
‘…thankfully I am out of time. Thank you very much for your patience. I'd
be happy to answer - or possibly evade - your questions.’
On Twitter: RanjiGoswami
