WAKE UP CALL FOR INDIAN BUSINESS SCHOOLS : The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School..extracts from HBR June O9.

Before it happens to India, lets work with the business schools to help them add value to the society…

“Unless America’s business schools make radical changes, society will become convinced that MBAs work to serve only their own selfish interests.” by Joel M. Podolny, HBR June 09

This is just not true about the USA..here are some more extracts..

• “Many people is US believe that management education has contributed to the systemic failure of leadership that led to the current financial crisis.” In India have a look at subiksha, Educomp under the scanner for financial irregularities, Satyam, and many more… ALL MBAs
• “That may be so because, one, a focus on values-based leadership and ethics has not been central
  to management education. And,two, even when B schools teach leadership, they foster the belief that CEOs should focus on the big picture – not the practical details”…How true for Indian MBA. Rather in some schools dolling out degrees and collecting packs of money is key to the big campuses and big ad campaigns and very less value delivered.
• “Business schools can regain society’s trust by emphasizing values as much as they do analytics and
  by encouraging students to adopt a holistic approach to business problems. As professional schools, they
  must stop competing for students only by advertising rankings – a practice that reinforces the idea that
  their only goal is to teach students how to make a lot of money.” Our Indian business schools also need to learn from this.
• The time has also come for business schools to develop codes of conduct for MBAs and to withdraw
  the degrees of those who break the manager’s code.

WAKE UP B SCHOOLS..

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The Challenge...my first large scale social initiative at Rajur, Dist Ahmednagar

At Rajur..150+ Km from Pune, a group of 4000+ tribal and youth waiting for an opportunity of life. As i thought when i went to Rajur for the first time, it was with an idea that we would do a career development program in a beautiful tribal school.But later realised its not about career development at all. Building Careers is just far from our imagination and its about un employable youth. The problem of un-employability is far deeper than what it looks like from outside.

The tribal and the local kids learn in the local Ashram School, highly subsidised, fully residential. After the tenth grade they are supposed to leave a protected Ashram school to fetch higher education for themselves. Now it really a test of their sustainability.. on one side the pressure to earn their living and the other to study. Invariably each one of them lands into a college to do Arts, after few days unable to pay up 50% drop out. and lack of confidence and opportunity leaves them with menial job or no jobs...

Decided to do some thing...something that would make an impact. Went back to Pune, worked on a program and returned with a unique program to develop these young people.

The belief was they had enough potential...they had enough intelligence, what they did not have is confidence.. decided to test my beliefs..

We conducted the culture fair ravens intelligence test on the pilot batch of 140 students and to our surprise we found 24 students above the 75 percentile.

38 between 60 to 75 percentile. and the rest below 60 percentile. Said need to work on them, and then the pilot batch was launched. We said its the SEVEN steps to being employable...

ITS NOT THAT THE SHORTAGE OF OPPORTUNITIES.. ITS THE BIG IRON SCREEN OF THE JOB MARKET THAT DEMANDS SOFT SKILLS MORE THAN THE ACADEMIC AND PROCESS SKILLS TO GET EMPLOYED...We are focusing on this challenge..and hence the design of the program.

Anand Desai

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