'Work experience is irrelevant in management education'

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL/ PRASOON JOSHI

Business should be about understanding the consumer. But the approach at most management institutes is usually the other way around "" understanding the business. What they fail to see is that it's impossible to be successful without understanding the consumer "" you can be good at manufacturing, but you won't be able to market well.

Management schools don't teach you to understand human nature. If you look at the works of the best marketing and management gurus, you'll see that they extensively quote writers of philosophy and literature.

That's because these thinkers understand human nature "" and that's critical for a marketer. The approach, therefore, needs to be more balanced: the coursework for B-school students should include subjects like literature and philosophy.

Today, B-schools are churning out graduates much like factories "" assembly-line products with a stereotypical pattern of thinking. The trouble is, no one problem is similar to the previous one.

And, management education has become too much about tools. Most successful marketing people have a strongly-developed gut feel. But management tools go against gut feel and B-schools don't encourage reliance on instinct.

The reliance on management tools is absurd when you are discussing problems. They may be helpful when you need to toss around a problem in your mind. But when you are presenting solutions "" to colleagues or to clients "" what is required is a clear understanding of the problem and not a set of diagrams.

Tools are means, not an end in themselves. Most problems have simple solutions, but simplicity takes the back seat once you start depending on charts, diagrams and sophisticated tools.

In fact, the best part of a management education is, perhaps, the case study. Case studies help you understand failure and where people can go wrong. They help you understand the changing times.

Consumers' lives have changed, they have become more materialistic "" you may notice that human and traditional values are being sacrificed for the values being taught by television serials. It's bad, but as a marketer you cannot afford to ignore it.

Management graduates should be taught to pre-empt these changes in the market. Consider the case for a second TV in a home. A man living in a joint family may resent having to watch what the others like "" he may want to watch a football match while others are hooked on to their daily dose of soap. There's a seed of change there. More importantly, there's an opportunity.

But to see that opportunity, you need to be part-psychologist. You need to understand the psyche of the consumer "" something that requires sensitivity and power of observation. You have to find a way to communicating with the consumer that it's okay to want a TV set of your own "" you're not betraying the joint family.

What's important in this situation is to find a way to make the consumer guilt-free "" not ways to make a better TV or ways to run the company that makes the TV. Once again, it's about understanding the consumer.

I also feel work experience is rather irrelevant when it comes to management education. There's really no thumbrule that says so many years of work experience will make a better management student "" it's good, but it's not essential.

In fact, I believe that the more work experience a person has before goes to a B-school, the more likely he is to see things from a narrow perspective "" defined by his previous career experience. Having said that, let me emphasise the importance of on-the-job training.

Summer internship can be an extremely relevant learning experience. It gives you an opportunity to go back to the institute and discuss your experiences and learnings.

On the other hand, when you join a company, they provide you with training to understand the place. But no company teaches you to understand the consumer.

For a marketing professional, especially, the focus should be on the consumer and not the organisation. That's what your B-school education should teach you.

But most management graduates tend to be inward-looking: our product is the best, our technology is the best. What they fail to understand is that if the consumer doesn't find room for you in his life, your product and technology are worthless.

(Prasoon Joshi graduated from IMT, Ghaziabad, in 1991)