'B-Schools Do Not Help Develop Enterprise Skills'

What they dont Teach at B-School

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL

How many business leaders have B-schools actually produced?

I created a quote while building my thoughts on what B-schools don't teach or, alternatively, what they must teach: "Dreaming is intrinsic to the vision of the future and when someone who matters to us realises his dreams, it inspires others to dream and strive too. The cycle of dreams is what keeps each of us and the world going."

My dreams during B-school days were about the future joys and challenges that the corporate world will bring.

But after 16 years of actually living the life of a corporate executive, I realise that B-schools did not even acknowledge the power of dreams, let alone prepare us for working towards realising them.

They have done well in producing meritorious technocrats, functional experts, analysts, and academicians of repute.

But I am tempted to ask, how many JRD Tatas, Narayana Murthys, Jack Welch or Bill Gates have they succeeded in producing "" business leaders who dreamt of the impossible, built businesses that were ahead of their times and steered and sustained them in leadership positions by sharing their own dreams with the people in the organisation, while they shared their people's.

B-school curriculum clearly misses out on two ingredients of great business leadership "" skill sets called "enterprise" and "force multiplying people power".

Management students are groomed in a closed system of a limited, predefined curriculum, a patterned, modelled and controlled stimulus response structure that does not prepare you for diversity and the complexity of real-life business situations or to think out of the box.

Though the case-study method of teaching and summer internships are factored in to build application skills, much of these are executed within a theoretical framework.

Case studies are often solved with references from text books and summer internship projects are built around data collection and collation.

If anything, this mode of grooming and education regiments its products into overly relying on data and facts for decision making. And theory is often used to rationalise the thinking behind their decisions.

The current model of management education is not geared to develop enterprise skills.

Enterprise in action to me looks somewhat like this: it is a function of blending intuition with knowledge, changing leadership mindset to take risks, institutionalising cumulation and collective value of the experience of experts, and finally by making people dream big for themselves and for the organisation without fearing failure.

B-schools need to reinforce that day-to-day management is not akin to cracking a theorem or equation where objectives, inputs and output, steps and the process is known.

Please do not try to fit patterns to situations that seem similar, or force a similarity perception to fit the theory "" use intuition to see dissimilarities hidden somewhere. And if you can't see one, create it.

This is how innovations happen "" by following intuition and by taking the risk of converting the intuition into an offering that delights your target.

Also, being able to leverage and harness people strength is a big gap in our management education resulting in sub-optimal team orientation, cross-functional interactions and synergistic superior-subordinate relationships.

It begins with the stereotype in B-school admission processes, evaluation systems and an excessive emphasis on individual competition and excellence.

I have seen more newspaper reports about how high the average compensation package of a given class in premier B-schools is rather than on extraordinary approaches adopted by any B-school in its selection process, curriculum, or any industry and social value-addition by its students, faculty or alumni.

So what must B schools do to produce better managers?

Insist on at least a year's work experience before students join a B-school, which ensures that they understand the theory in real-life perspective.

Encourage unconventional solution visualisation to case studies "" reward multidimensional / lateral approaches to solution seeking.

Encourage the concept of enterprise through ownership and real life exposure.

Increase the duration of the course to 30 months, with four internships of two months each, two stints each in different companies, owning assignments in two different functions in each organisation "" one that is the chosen specialisation and another in which the candidate has scored low . This will also enhance real life work exposure.

Make students write down their dreams. This will foster a spirit of encouraging dreaming and following your dreams "" the most critical ingredient of evolution and bringing the future before its time.

Sudhanshu Goyala is executive vice-president, marketing insights, Pepsi Foods. He did his MBA from the University of Poona in 1987. The views expressed here are personal.