A of MBA

INNOVATION

SP Jain plans to give management students a sense of how to work with the bureaucracy.

SP Jain Insitute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) plans to send its students on assignments to municipal corporations, hospitals, railways, MHADA and police departments to learn the functioning, constraints and working strategy of these organisations.

Towards this end, it has included a programme called Assessment and Development of Managerial Skills and Potential (ADMAP), in its curriculum. The institute believes students will have a better idea on things like, who is the right person to be approached in these bureucratic set up to obtain speedy clearances on files, how to seek the co-operation of certain government officials for a project among others.

As part of the course, the students will also be assigned projects whereby they will have to work in teams. A professor will be the project manager supervising the teams.The novelty of the whole effort lies in the fact that this course aims to teach the 'Administration' aspect of MBA to its students.

"B-schools in India have been emphasising only on the business aspect of MBA. The administration aspect of a business has never been paid attention to. With the business culture changing rapidly, we thought of starting a course in administration which can give a holistic approach to the students," says associate professor Uma Narain of SPJIMR.

Narain, who was recently in Germany to present a paper on the subject at a B-school conclave, reasons that a manager in today's environment may never be able to succeed with the sole knowledge of marketing, operations and other such business concepts. Today's manager will succeed only if the person has the administrative abilities. And such abilities include the knack of getting things done not just from subordinates but even from external parties like government, police and other such agencies on whom the manager has no "real" authority.

The course also teaches students on validating the veracity of given data. For instance, while giving a loan, a banker will not merely trust the financial statements furnished by the borrower to understand his solvency. He would, in fact, go to the auditors, some other business associates, etc., with whom the borrower is linked, so as to validate the data.

The institute also plans to conduct theatre workshops for the students; real life movies on administration will be screened in the classrooms and students will be taken to ashrams and taught administration practices from the Geeta. The students will be also taught to work with difficult bosses.

For instance, they will be taught Roosevolts' style of leadership whereby its said that Roosevolt never sets clear goals for his subordinates. The students will also be taken to a village two months where they will be introduced to the working system in that village.