'More than IQ, the emphasis should be on EQ'

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL: Nitin Gupta

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B-school to me was an extension of my undergraduate college and school education. Just like school or college, a management education gives you exposure to a wide range of subjects, and imparts plenty of knowledge, in general.

But honestly, I think there has never been an occasion at work when I've directly applied what I studied at B-school. In fact, if you ask me to recall what I have studied there in economics, marketing management and so on, there would be little that I would be able to share.

As far as the course content is concerned, I probably forgot most of what I learnt as soon as I passed out of B-school and entered the real world.

The most valuable thing that a B-school does to you is to make to you a certain kind of person "" it prepares you for life and to become a certain kind of professional.

It helps you to approach problems in a certain way. Depending on the kind of person you are, it can help you become either analytical or creative, or both; either objective or subjective, or both; and so on.

In my case, it helped me become more analytical, objective and fact-based. Later on in my career, I learnt the value of creativity, and developed both left and right brain thinking.

It doesn't matter what you've studied in marketing management, sales management or finance at B-school. You actually learn all of these at the job itself. So, the content part is, more or less, unimportant; it's the approach that it builds in you that is important.

Certainly, there is a big gap between what you learn at B-school and at work. After I graduated from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, I was a sales manager for many years.

IIM never taught me to how to deal with people who were very different from me "" for instance, how to lead a team of people who are all older than me; or how to deal with dealers, distributors and retailers who, unlike your classmates at B-school, have very different levels of education.

No B-school teaches you how to lead or deal with all these people in such a way that they still like you, respect you and you can add value to their lives and also derive value from their lives. Fresh out of B-school, I was in my 20s.

On the other hand, almost everyone in the team I was to lead was in their 30s, 40s and even 50s. And then there were numerous dealers and distributors in various small towns that I travelled to as a sales manager. What was the best way of dealing with them? I learnt all this on the job, not at B-school.

Then later my job involved brand and marketing management. I have read many books and have been taught by some of the best professors at IIM on how to manage brands; but it's nothing compared to what you learn in real life.

Here you deal with real brands and real problems. You don't have to worry just about your ad campaigns, but also about factory stock outs. If your factory is on strike and workers are not reporting for duty, how do you deal with their problems and still get the work done? Every problem is real, for which you need real solutions.

B-school doesn't build in you many of the qualities that can help in dealing with real business problems. For instance, patience, resilience, the ability to go back at problems again and again, not getting disheartened that things are not getting done overnight.

All this is quite unlike what happens at B-school where you have to present a case study the next day. Things don't work out like that in real life "" at times, it takes months or even years to solve a problem.

Further, at B-school, the stress in on measuring the intelligence quotient (IQ) of a student. But what is far more important is his emotional quotient (EQ). Being a genius at work doesn't help much, because that's not what business needs. It's far more important to learn how to deal with employees, partners and customers. And that is where EQ can help.

No B-school teaches you how to make decisions using your gut. In real life, most times you will find uncertainty and ambiguity over business matters "" you will never have all the facts in front of you and yet you will have to take decisions. The best business people often make decisions based on their gut feeling.

At times, their decisions appear completely illogical and have nothing to do with facts. To make such decisions requires tremendous confidence. That's again something that only life can teach you, not a B-school.

B-schools have changed significantly since I graduated, but there is still much scope for improve ment in the quality of education. During my times, most students joined B-schools straight out of college. That trend has changed to some extent, for the better.

The impetus should be on students joining B-school after two or three years of work experience. In the US, you cannot join B-school unless you have worked for two, three or five years "" partly because it's expensive, and partly because the management institutes insist on it.

When you already have some work experience and then you study for your MBA, you have a much better understanding of what you want out of your education and how it will help you at your work place.

Another trend that has picked up and that can be significantly helpful is that of executive education. Over the years, executives need to go back to B-school. And I'm referring not just to the MBA courses.

If a manager goes to B-school, say, after five or 10 years in a job for a one- or three-month course, in many ways that can be more valuable than a two-year course before you have worked at all. You can build on experience and your education, or both.

One aspect B-schools need to focus on is to bring many more industry professionals back to the institute to teach, to interact with the students or to participate in some way in the educational process.

Of course, this is already happening but not, perhaps, to the optimum level. Unfortunately, during my B-school days, industry interaction was minimal.

Learning about real business problems that industry professionals face every day and the way they manage them can be valuable. The need is to bring the students closer to reality.

Our institutes as well as industry should take it as a two-way process, where industry professionals who have learnt from these institutes as students give back to students their learning from their own real-life experience. In short, B-schools can teach you to think long term; but only real life can teach you to live long term.

(Nitin Gupta is country manager, MasterCard International, South Asia. He graduated from IIM -A in 1982)