Monday, May 10, 2010

Rethinking the MBA

Rethinking the MBA 

From June 2010, Nitin Nohria, alumnus of IIT Bombay, will
take over the responsibilities to lead Harvard Business
School, the world's most respected management education
institute. We are all wondering, where will Nitin and his
team lead Harvard? 

We get some idea of Harvard's strategic directions, from
the recent landmark research by Harvard Professors, which
 is summarized in the HBS publication, "Rethinking the MBA".
This research coincides with the year of completion of 100
 years of Management education by Harvard. For a quick
review listen to David Garvin at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBxtrbj_yXU.
The research and book "Rethinking the MBA" is also
co-authored by Srikant Datar, IIM Ahmedabad alumnus.

The research is based on data collected for the period
2000 to 2008 from 36 top management schools in the
world, detailed interviews with Deans, faculty, recruiters,
employers and other stakeholders. Six detailed case
studies were prepared.

What is required in an MBA course are three major
components - (1) Knowing - Knowledge of the various
management subjects. (2) Doing - Having the knowledge,
how to actually do things in practical situations (3) Being -
Being aware of the actual purpose of what managers do,
the responsibilities and roles of managers towards
shareholders, society at large, employees etc.

Most existing MBA programs already take care of the
"Knowing" component. Students 'know' a lot more than
even what the actual job demands. But present day MBAs
do not meet the requirements of "Doing" and "Being".
In the present context, the research identified following
unmet requirements by existing MBA programs:
(1) Global Perspective (2) Leadership Development
(3) Integration (4) Organizational Realities (Power, Politics etc.)
(5) Creative, Innovative thinking (6) Oral and written Communication
(7) Risk, Regulation & Restraint

Leading management Schools have already initiated
changes to incorporate these unmet requirements in their
MBA programs. There are however many challenges. How
to provide "doing" component? Generally to learn "doing",
the student must be in a real life environment, in small
groups, under close supervision of an experienced
professional. The same requirements have been already
successfully implemented by Medical schools and they
have evolved a model which can be easily copied by
Business Schools. Harvard Medical School has about
600 students but the faculty to teach these students
exceeds 10,000 (mainly because faculty includes
several physicians from the attached medical hospitals.)
How will Business Schools build this large, practicing
manager's teams to become part of faculty?

A part of the solution to meet this requirement is the
successful, well placed community of Alumni of these
business schools. Harvard is planning to mobilize the
alumni to add the "doing" component to their MBA program. 

Will IIT and IIM alumni do the same for their almamaters?  

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Aa Ab Laut Chalen to BIMTECH, Greater Noida

Aa Ab Laut Chalen (AALC) group has taken up first project at BIMTECH (Birla Instititue of Management Technology) in Greater Noida, which is about 60 km from New Delhi and part of National Capital Region.

BIMTECH is one of the premier private Business Schools in North India. The institute has excellent residential campus with more than 700 students studying various post graduate Management diploma courses. For details please visit  http://www.bimtech.ac.in/

It all started with an invitation to teach ERP for the PGDM students. This involved understanding full course curriculum because ERP touches upon almost all subject areas taught in PGDM courses. What we concluded was that various 'Technologies of Management' need to be taught to students in the modern age of internet and information technology. The modern day Management courses need to complement with learning of several technologies of Management such as 'Collaboration Technologies', 'ERP', "CRM", 'Business Intelligence' and so on. The managers need not know how to build these solutions but must know how to use these technologies for improving management efficiency. They need to know how to design and test applications and develop organizations which will adopt these technologies effectively.

The AALC team has now designed a complete cloud based platform to enable access to these applications as well as store training resources and enable delivery of teaching of these courses with trainers who are physically located in remote parts of the world.

Some details about this project are available at https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AecGSz8Wq7OcZGRkaHM2M2ZfMTEwMnh6czRwdmhi&hl=en

Details about each course and the AALC volunteers will be published in the following posts. Please post your comments and how would like to participate.