Thursday, August 25, 2005

Not Normal : how to cut the fuel cost

This is not a normal post for this blog . but the way gas prices have impacted our life i am posting this link which provides some eye opening tips for future and current MBA . How to cut the fuel cost

Friday, August 19, 2005

Good managers only from B-schools?

The debate on the relevance of business schools refuses to die down. In the past, various academics -- including Henry Mintzberg of McGill, Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford-GSB and Warren Bennis of University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business -- have trained their guns on B-schools and the value of MBAs. So far, Mintzberg has been the strongest critic. His grouse: "An MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons."

Three US-based professors have jumped into the fray. In a paper titled 'What's Really Wrong With US Business Schools?', Harry DeAngelo and Linda DeAngelo of Marshall School of Business, and Jerold L Zimmerman of Simon School of Business take a potshot at another B-school staple: Annual rankings.

The paper, posted on the Social Science Research Network's website on August 1, has already been downloaded more than 2,000 times, making it one of the most popular papers on the site. "We are managing B-schools in a myopic fashion analogous to corporate managers' fixation on quarterly EPS -- a danger that we as business professors, of course, warn our students to avoid in the business world. The myopia at B-schools is engendered by the pressure to move up in rankings published by the media,"Harry DeAngelo said.

The three professors said that instead of competing on the basis of the long-run value of the education they provide and the research they do, schools are fixated on "looking good"in the next media survey. "The pressure to score highly on measures that are poor proxies for true quality creates strong incentives to adopt dysfunctional policies. For example, it translates into curriculum changes that emphasise appearance over substance, less time spent on rigorous foundational training, research,"DeAngelo said.

The paper has evoked strong reactions in the academic community both in India and abroad. The most common grouse is regarding the methodology of these surveys. David Lampe, spokesperson for Harvard Business School, said: "Not only are the differences in the scores among many schools statistically insignificant, but the different formulae used to derive them -- a different one for each publication -- seem to have little to do with the true quality of the institutions."

Damned if they do and damned if they don't. "If schools submit to ranking, they are accused of pandering to the masses. If they don't, they are running away from comparison,"said Ajit Rangnekar, deputy dean, Indian School of Business (ISB). In the US, Harvard and Wharton stayed out of last year's BusinessWeek rankings. In India, ISB has decided not to participate in any rankings. The IIMs have also decided to stay out.

Harvard's Lampe said: "Regardless of their shortcomings, ranking surveys will not go away because of the continuing popularity of lists of all kinds."Clearly, it looks like this debate is not going to die out any time soon.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

B-schools wake up to the real world

If there's one thing that Donald Trump's hit reality TV show The Apprentice has taught us, it's that your MBA won't always bail you out in a real life business crisis. By all accounts, acquiring an MBA is a gruelling process.

But could it be that students are so busy discussing textbook problems, writing papers and taking exams, that they've forgotten how to handle the real world?

Business schools in the US obviously think so. They're redesigning their business courses to "get real" (in some instances actually using Donald's show in classrooms). And recently, they have started to move towards the arts, and in particular, design. Schools such as Stanford, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have all introduced design courses into their business curricula to teach their students how to think creatively.

This trend is beginning to crawl into India. Although most B-schools still keep strictly to their business curricula, some are offering arts classes, or introducing a creative element -- beyond the classic "lateral thinking" (a la Edward de Bono) -- into the curriculum that allows students to apply what they learn in the classroom.

The Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore, for instance, has a class called "Tracking Creative Boundaries", introduced to it by the India Foundation for the Arts. Artists teach students about the history of art and the lives of artists.

"A professor," explains the executive director of IFA, Anmol Vellani, "once said to me that management education is all wrong. It only teaches technical competence, whereas management is about other things as well -- soft skills, ethics and, above all, creativity."

The value is clear. "Artists are naturally suspicious of accepted idioms," says Vellani. "They're constantly reinventing themselves. Entrepreneurs need to be inventive too... they need to recognise real world constraints, have the imagination to adapt to them, and be creative."

Other schools, in their quest to lend vibrancy to an entrepreneurial culture, are also focusing more closely on 'creativity' in business.

For instance, the Faculty of Management Studies at Delhi University is facilitating an entrepreneurship competition, involving around 500 students from 20 B-schools and 20 undergraduate colleges, where students have to come up with a business plan.

The 'ROI'? Relevance, originality and impact -- before you get any return on investment. FMS students also have the option to take arts electives in separate schools at DU, but are so busy, says a student, that no one has taken a single one.

Gurgaon's Management Development Institute, meanwhile, has a course on theatre technique incorporated into the communications portion of the MBA program. Theatre is widely acknowledged as a laboratory of audience response, invaluable to any business person who must work out how to address and engage a market.

"Classes like this help students to put themselves in real world situations," says Gita Bajaj, an assistant professor of Business Communications at MDI-Gurgaon, "With exercises like public speaking and role playing, we put students on the spot and this forces them to adapt quickly and make practical decisions."

To be sure, Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats remain handy tools available to B-schools trying to make students break their mental moulds and think anew in varied ways. But the difference now is that actual works of art -- both 'high art' and popular -- are beginning to infiltrate the otherwise sheltered environs of B-school campuses.