The Panchdhatu Amalgam

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL

A 1988 alumnus of IIM (A) draws up a blue-print for her ideal B-school

When, for 15 years, you have lived your professional life using and building on what you learnt at your B-School, it becomes hard to answer the question: What is it that your alma-mater did not teach you?

And certainly, the realisation that while there are many things we learnt later, many of those can only be learnt the hard way on the job, makes you want to say "nothing... it was perfect."

But if indeed, we were to say that, then we would be attempting to defy the laws of evolution for every being, every organisation and every institution has room to improve, to adapt to changes and to learn from the past.

And so, I would address this issue more as: If I were to be part of running a B-School today, what would I see as the issues and what would I want to do differently?

The answer: To build bridges "� five of them "� in the form of an amalgam. It is sort of a "panchdhatu" (five elements) of bridges.

The Gold: Bridging the gap between theory and practice

In every discipline, whether finance, marketing, systems or HR, the ability to apply theory to practice is crucial.

The case study methodology is designed to build this capability, and it works. But often, it tends to stop at the strategic level.

What a newly minted management graduate needs is to be able to apply the theory to immediate, down to earth, practical issues and tasks that he faces on day one. To inculcate this ability, possibly the following would help:

1. Allocating as much as 50 per cent of the teaching time to guest lectures delivered by practitioners, with a focus on relating a specific aspect of the theory to actual events and situations in the organisation.

2. Allocating the time of the faculty thus released to consulting assignments done free of cost if necessary. This is simply to encourage cross-learning between industry and academia, hopefully creating a win-win situation.

3. Making two years of work experience mandatory for admission. What this would do is even as the students are learning the theory in the classroom, they are relating it to their practical experiences on the job. And thus their learning is rooted in reality.

Of course, this thought is not new, and is widely practiced internationally. What organisations and recruiters need to do is to respond to this by giving full credit to those years.

Otherwise, there will always be, in the eyes of the students, an arbitrage opportunity to rise faster in an organisation by joining it "earlier".

The Silver : Bridging the gap between thinking and doing

At most institutes, as indeed, in most organisations, we tend to value high-quality thinking way above high quality "doing".

To my mind, this mindset is perhaps responsible for more failures in the corporate world than any other single factor.

A great strategy is completely useless unless executed well and a mediocre strategy can end up delivering superlative results if executed to perfection.

This is a value system that, unfortunately, is not inculcated early in our professional lives. Perhaps the following would help:

1. A longer summer internship: Perhaps three or four months of internship will really help students understand how things are done and not just how things are planned.

2. Informal sessions with alumni: This means going back four or five years, where people can share their experiences on the ground, particularly in respect of the importance of "doing", giving it the status and stature of "thinking".

The Copper: Bridging the gap between functional and organisational skills

While at B-school, most of us have an insatiable appetite to acquire functional skills "� how many marketing courses taken, how many finance courses, how many systems courses and so on.

Somehow, organisational behaviour or OB courses are treated like "fillers" and people who take them are disdainfully treated as people who are taking "the soft options".

This is one area that, I believe, is not a case of "what they don't teach at B-school", but "what we refuse to learn at B-school".

My belief is that understanding how organisations work, teams work, interpersonal relationships work and individuals work, is as important to being an effective manager as is the acquisition of so-called "hard-core functional skills".

We all learn later that we ignored this at great cost to both ourselves and our organisations.

The Brass: Bridging the gap between short-term and long-term thinking

Most of what we learn in the classroom tends to be focused on ideal long-term solutions for all issues. The reality is that in real life, there is no long-term if the short-term is not taken care of.

And as managers, we all need to learn how to effectively manage the short-term while simultaneously building for the long-term.

This learning is perhaps the most difficult of all skills to acquire and takes years of experience. And perhaps, at the maximum cost to the organisation.

Exposure to highly experienced professionals, who talk candidly about this subject, would help students to at least start appreciating that in any given situation, one needs a minimum of two responses "� the short-term response and the long-term response.

And the trick lies in ensuring that one does not work against the other.

The Iron: Bridging the gap between the simple and the complex

B-school education is meant to teach us many complex things. But what helps to make an effective manager is often some of the simplest things.

For instance, typing speed (believe it or not), learning to use the different tools available in standard office desktop packages (Excel and Powerpoint reign in almost every organisation), filing and cataloging, standardising and templatising.

I am not even sure if these words exist in the English language but most of us intuitively know what it means. These are just some tools that help us manage our time better and sometimes, that can make all the difference.

A short "after hours" course on time management tools would make a valuable addition to the curriculum.

In the end, I would only say that so much is possible, so much is "doable" and so many bridges can be built.

Each will add to the strength of the "panchdhatu" (five elements) and every time we stop to think, we will discover that so much has been done. And yet so much more can be done.

(The writer is Senior General Manager Head - Product and Technology Group, ICICI Bank)