Beyond the sum of parts

BOOK BRIEF

Business education need not be driven by specializations of finance, marketing and so on, according to TT Ram Mohan, a professor of finance and accounting at the IIM-A, and author of Privatisation in India: Challenging Economic Orthodoxy.

If there's a single book you recommend that all business school students read right now, which would it be?

Peter F Drucker's book "" Management: Tasks and Practice.

And why Drucker?

Once you get into a B-school, you get to study various specilised aspects of management ""like finance, human resources, and marketing, among others. But you do not get a holistic view of the business enterprise as an entity. In B-school, you study in pieces, and they do not teach you how it reaches society at large. One needs a wider prespective.

Is this book not taught at B-schools?

The irony is that you study two years in a B-school, and they do not teach you anything written by Drucker, the father of management. One could also read The Principles of Management which is a concise version of the same book and is good enough to read.