The Nuts And Bolts Stuff Is Missing

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL

Alfred Kallingal- Senior consultant, Accenture Consulting and alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad

Alfred Kallingal, senior consultant, Accenture Consulting, is a huge cricket fan, but he's tired of being told that he looks like Rahul Dravid.

Nor does he think he fits into the category that suffers a disconnect between his B-school education (IIM Ahmedabad) and his job.

"I don't really fall into that 'missing the link' category simply because consulting fits in very well with B-school education; frontline operations like sales or marketing get affected the most with this disconnect," he explains.

So what has been his most enduring lesson at B-school? "Structured problem solving," says the 27-year-old Calcutta University topper "" batch of 1997 "" who studied economics at Presidency College.

"The focus has to be on dealing with any kind of a corporate crisis/problem. You have to map hypothesis to data and find solutions."

As far as he is concerned, there are three areas where he stumbled.

First, B-school's problem-solving exercises consisted of "defining the problem, collating data, validating it and then solving the problem on hand".

As a consultant, there are occasions when there are no apparent problems and one has to take a cold call.

"Our business is creating awareness in the client's mind about a problem that may not be evident," he says.

In B-school, on the other hand, the syllabus laid down well-defined concepts and situations, which you can "locate and solve".

In real-time consultancy, one comes across "blank situations which are open-ended, where nothing is defined". In these situations, "we have to use initiative".

Second, is the issue of interpersonal skills. "At the end of the day, management is about managing teams and clients," says Kallingal.

"You are considered efficient if you can get the guys around to work; ditto for client relationships. And inter-personal skills can never be taught in the classroom "" you have to learn on the job. Academic analyses cannot work in real-time."

Third, and probably most important, is the actual execution of management skills which are glossed over in B-schools.

"There is not enough thrust by B-schools on examining the implementation of theory," he feels.

Most of the time, what works is not technical or analytical skills but "simple nuts and bolts stuff".

In India, practicals comprise only 20 to 25 per cent of the syllabus "" ideally it should comprise around 40 per cent.

"I remember when I did projects during my IIM stint, I was far too caught up with theory," Kallingal recalls.

We normally had groups of five who worked on a given project, and I was only to happy to let someone else do most of the work, because that would save me time."

Subsequently, the exercise turns out to be lop-sided with no equal participation.

Coming back to the fundamentals of problem-solving, B-school education became an object lesson for Kallingal's company.

When Anderson Consulting got to be known as Accenture the task before the company was to "build a brand".

"It was a time of crisis for us but we played it by the book and followed the tenets of problem-solving as laid down by the management institutes," he explains.

"For instance, we defined our target audience, conducted intensive interactions with them and planned our advertising strategy accordingly."

Of course, what also helped was the Enron scandal that made its official consultants, the Arthur Anderson "brand", suddenly seem like a caveat emptor in corporate circles.

For Kallingal, clearly, the bottomline is that business works best when you are playing with a straight bat "" textbook-style. Was anyone talking about comparisons with Dravid?

From this week, we start this occasional series where we ask B-school alumni "" from CEOs and self-employed business-people to executives starting out on their careers "" how their management education panned out in the workplace