To excel, B-schools will need to redefine the restrictive walls within which they currently operate.
The passing away of CK Prahalad and the appointment of Nitin Nohria as the Dean of Harvard Business School bring to the fore their respective passions: The potential of emerging markets, and accountability in business leadership. Coincidentally, these are two key issues that presently shape the discussion on the changing priorities in management education.
Tomorrow's business schools are expected to be different, from the content of the curriculum to the methods of instruction; from student learning to corporate expectations of MBA graduates. Are existing B-schools ready for the challenge? Or will we see a Schumpeterian form of creative destruction whereby new and more relevant B-schools emerge, crowding out die outmoded, established ones?
Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to be “business as usual” for the B-schools of tomorrow.
To excel, B-schools will need to redefine the restrictive walls within which they currently operate, with regard to cultivating business leaders, teaching priorities, management curricula and student expectations.
Business leadership redefined: Integrity and broadened accountability
Warren Buffet once said that the characteristics that he seeks in a manager are intelligence, hard work, and integrity “If you don’t have the third,” he said, “the first two will kill you.”
Buffet’s words ring true as we witness many a business leader crash to ignominy, seemingly bankrupt of any notion of integrity, be it Ramalinga Raju at Satyam, Jeff Skilling at Enron or the many others who have exchanged their pin striped suits for prison stripes. The parade of dishonest business leaders seems unending, and at last count, the US Department of Justice was investigating 150 companies on corruption charges. There is an uneasy calm in the corporate world, with an undercurrent of questions emerging about the roles and responsibilities of business leaders.
Without doubt, the traditional view that business leaders are solely accountable to shareholders is passe.
Today the expectation is that business leaders are also stewards of society and its interests — particularly given the relevance of businesses as engines of growth and prosperity in the many emerging markets. As such, business leaders can expect to have their decisions scrutinised through a public lens that is coloured with societal and environmental issues.
The B-schools of tomorrow must focus on producing graduates who are equipped to meet the challenges of these re-defined expectations of business leadership. This requires efforts in MBA programmes that go far beyond cosmetic initiatives such as isolated courses on “business ethics” to a more substantive focus on facilitating the transformational role expected of tomorrow’s business leaders: The ability to motivate employees to look beyond themselves and the company, and embrace the well-being of various stakeholders tied to our communities, our society, and the environment. For such transformational leadership to work, various pre-requisites are necessary, starting with Buffet’s view of integrity, followed by an acute understanding of the role of business in society, the nature of business as an economic engine, the power of the free market, as well as its limitations.
An important outcome of leadership with such a broadened scope is that it can enable a collective level of “self-governance” in free markets - important to help pre-empt onerous governmental regulations that are likely to emerge to protect the environment, society, and its interests. Unchecked, such regulations can adversely impact the growth of free markets, which in turn can impede the power of businesses to transform societies. Bottom line, tomorrow’s B-schools must produce a different type of leader, one with a different set of priorities and abilities than seen in the past, if businesses are to continue to be powerful engines of growth in society.
Business teaching redefined: Beyond the sage on the stage: The model of a “sage on the stage” imparting knowledge to students (described by researchers such as Alison King) will likely give way to the teacher as a “guide on the side” in the successful B-schools of tomorrow.
Case discussions and lectures will have to compete with new and powerful learning tools that range from podcasts and simulations to immersion experiences (be it with customers in different cultures, or students partaking in real-world negotiations, or watching stressful team discussions), to new approaches, such as metaphoric learning.
A common pedagogical approach in today’s B-schools is the “case method” and this approach tends to reward decisive thinking during the discussion of the case, as long as it is backed by a sound perspective, relevant analysis, and often, hard numbers. Such an approach may need to be modified, given the broadened expectations of tomorrow’s business leaders. Possibly, teachers will need to accommodate a more nuanced approach to decision making that embraces intuition, creativity, empathy and even collaboration, underscoring the complexity of business decisions, and the need to embrace issues that are broader than the narrow problem at hand.
This is of course, hugely challenging to implement in a classroom; it means more creative methods of teaching and managing classes. It may mean going beyond isolated classroom sessions to include mentoring and coaching outside the classroom. In all this, faculty in research intensive schools, who can bring cutting edge thinking to their teaching will likely trump over schools whose faculty are less involved in research, and as such, are likely to rely on outdated material for their teaching.
In the future, it is likely that the student-teacher relationship developed during business programmes will morph into one of a manager-mentor after the programme, or an executive-coach, or even teacher teaching partner. For example, alumni of B-schools can become powerful teaching resources who can be leveraged to advise, train, and mentor current students. In return, alums can be expected to seek state-of-the-art thinking, and as such, faculty involved in cutting edge research will more likely be sought out by these ex-students.
Given this broad mantle for teachers in B-schools, it would be myopic for administrators to continue using end-term student evaluations as the only measure of teaching effectiveness. Ideally, other measures should be included, such as a measure of the teachers’ impact in the long term, be it at the student level, the corporate level, or the societal level. Thus, for example, continuing feedback from alumni on the impact of a teacher or a class, over the years, can be a useful supplement to student ratings. This can be incorporated in the reward structure for faculty to help incentivise them to take a broad, long term view of their responsibility in shaping future business leaders.
Business curriculum redefined: Integrative and interdisciplinary: The curriculum in B-schools continues to be silo-like, functionally focussed. As such, not surprisingly, the mantra echoing in the halls of B-Schools in the recent past has been “integrative thinking”. Although that is vital, tomorrow’s B-schools will fail in their mission if they are focused on facilitating integrative learning of only the business functions; these functions are obviously critical, they may not be sufficient for successful business leadership.
To help produce the type of transformative leaders discussed above, B-schools will need to provide students access to non-traditional knowledge areas. For example, the training one needs to run a successful financial institution goes beyond knowledge of business functions and likely includes an understanding of public policy, law and politics.
The importance of New Delhi to Dalai Street or Washington to Wall Street is more critical than we think, and the distance between them is shorter than one would imagine, if you are trying to succeed in business.
We can expect tomorrow’s MBA aspirants to seek out B-schools that offer flexible curricula to help them succeed in diverse industries, and to enable them to navigate through the fundamentally different cultures and processes seen in public institutions, private public partnerships, multinational corporations and entrepreneurial ventures. Students will expect variety in curricula that could range from subjects such as the environment, energy, and public policy to healthcare and design. Equally important, there will be a need to integrate these topics within traditional business courses; for example, students working on assignments should not simply measure the impact of a business decision on say, market share, but possibly, analyse its short term and long term impact on say, the environment.
Further, tomorrow’s curricula in B-schools will have to break free of the legacy of western business education and focus on the unique needs of the vast growth markets of tomorrow — that include Prahalad’s insights on the “bottom of the pyramid.” Success in these markets imply overcoming challenges in the context of consumer literacy, communication, and distribution, all of which call for content in curricula that will need to diverge from traditional, western approaches to business education. Thus, for example, tomorrow’s curricula must include a focus on enabling innovations in emerging markets and methods to tackle its associated challenges. These challenges include new financial instruments that cater to developing markets, be it methods to identify credit-worthy customers among unorganised labour or expanded microfinance products such a micro lease, micro insurance, micro pensions, and the like. Also, new methods of marketing research for the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” require creative approaches to survey and measure key issues such as customer needs, preference and choice because of hurdles of customer illiteracy or semi-literacy.
These methods are presently being developed, and can be expected to become a part of mainstream curricula in the successful B-Schools of tomorrow.
Placement redefined: Careers, not simply jobs: Jack Welch, the famed ex-CEO of General Electric once said that MBA schools had become glorified placement agencies, rather than the place where great business leaders are born. Although that remark may have been made tongue-in-cheek, Welch was making an important point about the misplaced attention given by students, the media, and many B-schools to placement statistics of graduating students.The B-schools of tomorrow must convey the relevance of the MBA as the starting point for lifelong learning that goes hand-in-hand with a growing career. In this model, students who forego traditional placement for entrepreneurial activities will be valued as much and maybe, even more, than those choosing traditional placement. Thus, not-for-profit social entrepreneurs, as well as traditional entrepreneurs, who have the potential to make a far-reaching impact on society and the economy, should be celebrated as much as those who get the immediate rewards of a high-paying consulting job.
The often talked about notion of “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” with regard to post-MBA success should become an important priority for the B-schools of tomorrow. To do so, B-schools will have to provide resources to help guide such a “marathoner,” be it in the form of stipends and incubation facilities that reward, say a far-thinking social entrepreneur with a vision, or provide alumni access to mentoring and opportunities for continued education, so that “life-long” learning is not a hollow promise, but a real differentiator between excellent and mediocre B-schools.
Conclusion
Today, management education is at a crossroads. There are unique opportunities emerging from the changes, challenges, and expectations shaped by technology, market needs, the public’s perception of business, and discerning MBA aspirants. The B-schools that excel tomorrow will likely be those that grab these opportunities by modifying existing curricula to address the public’s expanded expectations of business leaders as well as cater to new priorities in emerging markets. Further, these schools will need to make available to their students areas of knowledge outside traditional business functions, and facilitate life-long learning for their alums by providing access to state-of-the-art knowledge from faculty involved in cutting-edge research, and offering incentives to these faculty to be involved in beyond-the-classroom teaching and mentorship. This is a high order; however, the B-schools that pursue such an agenda will likely emerge as true catalysts of change in the personal growth of budding business leaders and through them, in the growth of corporations and communities of tomorrow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author is associate professor of management education and head, Initiative for Excellence in Teaching Learning, at the Indian School of Business. This article was first published in ISB Insight Volume8 (Issue 2).
Reprinted with permission from ISB Hyderabad
