Building bridges
Management education should work more closely with the industry

By Somonnoy Ghosh
In many ways management education is quite unlike any other field. Primarily delivered as postgraduate and research programmes, it is very different from other mainstream postgraduate programmes. Many would categorise management education as belonging to the domain of professional education, such as medicine, law, chartered accountancy, or engineering. The similarity ends between these end at the fact that they all produce practising doctors, engineers or managers. As we would see in what follows, management programmes are very different from the other professional courses. And it is this difference that needs to be recognised by the three primary stakeholders — the business schools, the students, and the industry — for all the three to make the most of it.
Many of us might argue that the goal of business education is to build skills and competencies that would prepare one to take on the myriad challenges of real world businesses. In fact, aligned with this tenet, most business schools have increasingly relied on developing analytical tools and models and have advocated the use of reductionist approach to solving business problems. This is a fallacy, argues Paul Shoemaker of Wharton, especially when the complexity of business issues and the rate at which these are evolving has become so unmanageable. Stalwarts like Warren Bennis, O’Toole, and Mintzberg have also echoed this sentiment, in most measures.

What he and such educators are suggesting is that skills and competencies are alone not enough for effective functioning; one must develop what might be termed as the “wisdom” to deal with issues. Wisdom can be defined as understanding what options are available and the ability to differentiate amongst them and to choose the one that is best suited to a specific situation. It involves knowledge, skills, intuition, judgment and experience.

But if developing wisdom is a critical goal that needs to be recognised and adopted, it cannot be done by the ways that most B-schools in India have been functioning. It would require a greater alignment between the real issues faced by businesses and what management educators teach in their programmes. B-schools mostly stay as cocoons insulated from the realities of business organisations. I don’t count a guest lecture or a few interactions with working executives as being alive to real world issues. How many companies in India have active and ongoing collaborations with B-schools in solving their issues related to businesses and processes, or vice-versa? How many B-school faculty members are involved in conducting field research, as opposed to doing desk research?

A more relevant question is — why is a deeper engagement between organisations and B-schools so important? Let me attempt to answer this question. Most teaching material — such as books, papers, articles, case studies, etc — provides static content. On the other hand, the situations and challenges faced by businesses are dynamic and very different from what they may have faced yesterday. In addition, most papers, articles and case studies (which are mostly written outside India) deal with specific situations that may be contextual to location and culture, which may be very different from what managers in Indian organisations might face. While these teaching materials are important and useful, they are not enough. They need to be validated and supplemented by work done by Indian faculty members.

I am of course in no way suggesting that our educators are incapable. The best of the schools have very qualified faculty members who are experts in their respective areas. My contention is that for some reason not enough is being done to bridge the gap between the industry and academia. I am also convinced that there is every scope for B-schools and business organisations to collaborate to achieve tremendous improvements. It would be a truly win-win situation for both — academia will get enough opportunity to generate knowledge that is relevant and relevant, and businesses will get expert inputs.

— The writer is director, Indus World School of Business (IWSB).