The Hindu Business Line : Redefining the MBA

MBA programmes should go beyond cosmetic initiatives such as courses on ‘business ethics' to focus on facilitating the transformational role expected of tomorrow's business leaders.

— K Murali Kumar

B-schools mustequip their students to meet the new expectations of leadership.

Arun Pereira

(The first of a two-part article that looks at the changing face of management education and the agenda that the B-schools of tomorrow need to pursue to meet the changing expectations of MBA graduates.)

The passing of C. K. Prahalad earlier this year 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 key issues that 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 the corporate expectations of MBA graduates. Are the 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 the outmoded, established ones?

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.

Integrity & broader 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.

At last count, the US Department of Justice was investigating 150 companies on corruption charges.

Without doubt, the traditional view that business leaders are solely accountable to shareholders is passé. 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 MBA programmes to 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.

Teaching, beyond the sage on 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 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 modern 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.

(To be continued)

(The writer is a Clinical Associate Professor of Management Education and Head, Initiative for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the Indian School of Business. This article was published in ISB Insight, the journal of the ISB.)

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