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| The senior manager, strategic advisory (food and agribusiness), Rabo India Finance, tells two B-school dons, Supriya Atal and Rohini Vijaygopal, where a management education falls short
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| When I joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1996, I used to wonder how the MBA programme would make a difference to the way one responds to different business situations. Back then I had no work experience and was armed with just an engineering degree.
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| Now, after spending about seven years in the corporate world, the fact is that an MBA definitely provides one with the tools, conceptual knowledge and the rigour to address different business situations.
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| What I gained the most is a structured thought process and the ability to minimise the risk of taking wrong decisions.
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| Having said that, there are many challenges that management students encounter. After joining the corporate world, the biggest challenge for any MBA graduate is the application of concepts which have been studied at B-schools.
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| It is perhaps the difference in the application of concepts that explains the dispersion in the career growth trajectories of two individuals passing out from the same B-school.
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| I feel institutes need to take a leap forward in making their students more application-oriented. There are many ways to do this.
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| One is to avoid giving students very structured problems. Structuring the problem correctly is one big challenge one faces after coming out of a management institute.
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| Hence, case studies at B-schools ought to be as cryptic as real world problems. Why should case studies end with a set of three or four standard questions? These questions need to be far more hands-on and ambiguous.
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| Then, corporate interactions through regular unstructured sessions are a must. Business leaders, too, should be called so theycan share their experiences and focus on how they tackled them.
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| Also, MBA colleges must take students with work experience since students who join the MBA programme after working in the industry are in a better position to apply classroom concepts to business situations.
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| Such students also enhance the take-out from case discussions by throwing in real life examples of what they have faced.
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| Finally, leadership and not just managerial skills must be taught in B-schools. Whether leadership skills can be taught in B-schools is debatable but some efforts can be made in this direction.
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How many graduates read biographies of Jack Welch or Sam Walton during the programme? Students must read at least two such books in their stint at a B-school. This can trigger the process of thinking big,
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