B-school profs need industry experience

Vasudev Murthy is visiting faculty at IIM-B and managing partner, Focal Concepts, Bangalore It’s the time of the year when an estimated 500,000 college and university graduates and/or early and mid-career business managers are getting ready to enter India’s 4,500 B-schools. They have been pumped up by parents, teachers and the media that an MBA (Master of business administration) certificate is a passport to a swift climb up the executive ladder or business success. The country’s top-ranked 13 Central government-funded Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), numbered among the world’s top 25 B-schools, churn out more than 11,000 MBA postgrads every year. In addition with the other 4,000 plus B-schools graduating over 40,000 MBAs annually, questions are increasingly being asked about the effectiveness of B-schools and the quality of the students they certify as industry-ready. This is a positive and healthy development. Although over the years, many IIM and other B-school alumni have moved up corporate ladders and become captains of industry, doubts being raised about the industry-readiness of MBAs are centred not so much around the quality of students, as faculty. Unlike other disciplines, business management is an applied subject. Theory has its place but principles of practice are more important. Moreover, while the average age of B-school entrants abroad is the late 20s — in America’s top 10 B-schools including Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Wharton etc, it’s 27 — the average age of MBA entrants in India is much lower because most tend to enter B-schools immediately after completing undergraduate education. It’s nobody’s case that the latter are intellectually inferior. However, they generally lack experience and maturity, which limits their effectiveness when they enter workplaces as ‘managers’. This phenomenon is also perhaps a reflection of societal traditions which ordain the time of youth as best suited for education. Meanwhile, with the popularity of business management education having captured the imagination of India’s 250-300 million middle class, B-schools with inadequate infrastructure and dubious parentage have mushroomed (3,600 plus according to the India Education Review) across the country. With droves of poorly counselled and inexperienced students driven by peer pressure and inadequate research entering the rarefied atmosphere of the corporate world, India Inc is experiencing the hollowing-out effect of too many half-baked managers seeped in theory, seeking short-cuts to the top without spending time in actual hands-on value creation. Therefore in the interests of factor productivity and global competitiveness of Indian industry, it’s necessary to address the fundamental question of management education. If management is an applied art, how can full-time management faculty be made more effective? Management education worldwide thrives on the case study method — which takes an actual business situation and examines it from various theoretical angles. What brings it to life, however, are two main ingredients: • Professors who have lived the story or something equivalent. In other words, faculty with actual business experience who have experienced risk and uncertainty. • Students with work experience who can relate to real-life examples. While some faculty are well regarded in…