Business school education has many positives, the most important being the opening up of the mind.
At B-school, we are exposed to a wide cross-section of subjects ranging from economics, sociology, anthropology, humanities and so on, to those more directly related to our careers such as marketing and finance. But having spent years in the corporate world, I can say that such an education is by no means complete.
The biggest difference when it comes to real life situations, as opposed to the ones in classroom, is perhaps that one seldom finds them black and white, with purely logical choices to make in hand. Often, one has to strive for a sound workable solution depending on the situation. This requires some getting used to.
Another important aspect when it comes to real life is that what one makes out of a strategy is equally important as the strategy itself.
In other words, one’s execution skills are crucial and can make a huge impact. Often disproportionate amount of time is spent in finely chiseling a strategy, while ignoring the whole process of implementation, which is often quite complex.
The way curriculum is structured in most business schools, we get limited exposure to managing teams. Group-work in campus do give us some exposure, but that’s not enough. The whole paradigm of getting extraordinary output from an ordinary person is one of the real challenges and linked to sound execution.
Finally, in a business school set up, we do get to appreciate the concept of leadership in full measure. We get to know about some left-brained stuff about leadership, or of case by case examples about leadership behaviour.
The whole piece about interdependencies, continuous learning, and adopting to dynamic situations as demanded by leadership behaviour, is understood when one goes through successes and failures at work.
B-school education is the beginning of a learning process rather than the culmination of the process of making great managers or leaders.
Arnab Banerjee graduated from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in 1987
