Management Education Flaws

It is tragic that education today churns out graduates unmindful of the requirements of the industry that will employ them. In boom times, most organisations grab whatever employee they can and then invest heavily in training, for want of an alternative. We have heard of the training campuses of large companies. I was involved in training for new recruits at Lehman Brothers when they set up their back office in Mumbai. 

Also, an investment banker was in discussion with me once to set up a mini-university within his company. The objective: crash the time it takes a new recruit to be productive, from nine months to 45 days. 

No depth

The problem with our management education is fundamental. Most MBA courses, for example, are marketed on the basis of a stated number of credit courses. Some are compulsory while others are elective. Each credit course on paper is well laid out with quizzes, presentations, assignments, reading and end-term examination. The process of evaluation is expected to assign marks for class participation as well.

So, topics like elements of finance and derivatives may each have one course. Naturally, a more complex subject like derivatives takes a beating, having to be covered in a short time-span. Before a faculty can warm up to the subject and establish rapport with the students, the course is over and finished. There is neither an effort nor a desire to grill the students in the fundamentals and ingrain some depth of knowledge such that when he enters employment, he is ready to contribute.

In my interactions with students undergoing super-specialisation in different aspects of finance such as wealth management or investment banking, it was appalling to see them struggling with basics. What is their specialisation and what is super about them is anybody’s guess. In most of these institutes, we still have the concept of a teacher coming and lecturing, students taking down copious notes and later regurgitating the same in an end-term exam, passing with marks upwards of 90% but with little assimilation of knowledge. The institutes have learnt to avoid investments in libraries and the tech-savvy students, heavily reliant on Googling, have adjusted very well, rarely making visits there. They all want handouts, for reading multiple books is an activity for which they have no time. 

Education is viewed as a very profitable business, where your cash flow is upfront before the product is delivered, and admission is driven not by quality of education but by placement and remuneration record. Higher the placement record, better the average pay offered, greater the intake of students. The institutions are structured to cater to this formula. They use marketing skills and personal relationships with HR managers and somehow push placement for the students. Many even dump a certain syllabus on the students, make them learn a few jargons and unleash them in the market to wreak havoc. Most students in finance would have no clue on any practical aspect of what they learn. 

They don’t get to see a Reuters or Bloomberg screen, rarely visit active markets during the course — all this despite the internet and other trappings of modernity being available. In fact, most teachers themselves must be surviving without actually visiting the live markets.

No exposure

What is taught is determined by the academicians who rule these institutions and not on the basis of what the recruiter would like to have. While some do invite practising professionals to come as visiting faculty, that exposure is minimal. Rare are those institutions who invite practitioners on a professional basis to conduct a full-credit course with complete practical orientation. 

The general approach ingrained in the average MBA course seems to be that the students need to have a broad overview of the various subjects and not necessarily in-depth knowledge in any sub-topic. This has reduced it to a farce, with the students throwing sophisticated phrases with little understanding of concepts. You scratch them at the surface and they start to falter. I have seen this at different levels in different situations. 

Students in finance complete the course without a clue on how products are structured or traded, why the arbitrage taught in a classroom rarely works in practice, how bid-offer spreads and liquidity can kill all that theory mugged up in a classroom. The pity is that most don’t care, so long as there is a job at the end of the course. 

Low-paid teachers

Emmanuele Darman describes this in his book My Life as a Quant: “During my last few years at Goldman Sachs, I interviewed undergraduates applying for jobs in investment banking, and I was often surprised at how little of their coursework some of them recalled, how little a sense they had of the essence of their field. I met juniors majoring in statistics who couldn’t define standard deviation and students who had taken several courses in electromagnetic theory but couldn’t remember Maxwell’s equation. What I had learned, I had learned well. Theirs’ sometimes seemed a wasted education.”

 

Rarely is teaching a choice of pursuing a passion. While there are some faculty members who have opted for it despite the low remuneration, in most cases, it is by default. I have never been able to reconcile the expectations from low-paid faculty members who turn out students offered starting salaries higher than their remuneration. Rarely do you find practising managers giving up their lucrative careers to teach.

Industry’s role

Institutions trying to attract visiting faculty from practising managers also face many problems. They owe their loyalty to the organisation they work for, cancel lectures at the last minute, and rarely coordinate the topics or deliver to the agreed syllabus. To make matters worse, these visiting managers rarely read and hence fail to stitch the theory to the practice. 

 

While the brochures speak elegantly about the faculty, pedagogy with lectures, case studies, class discussion, etc, it is seen that faculty often don’t change the case studies for more than 4-5 years. Even today, most institutions would harp on the Barings case study, while there are multiple cases of later years available to emphasise on the learning. Latest market practices are often not taught. For instance, a class on fixed income markets would rarely refer to the FIMMDA or its handbook of market practices, CCIL and the clearing and settlement practices, RBI’s electronic anonymous screen-based trading system and how to interpret the market from the prices quoted there, etc. It is possible that in most cases the faculty themselves are not aware of these. 

It is necessary to deal with this on a holistic basis. Initiative must come from industry to set up state-of-the-art management training institutes. Each one can be set up by a cluster of contributing or participating companies. Each of these institutes must have a cluster of real businesses, producing products and services used by the participating companies setting up the institution. Students studying for an MBA would spend 3-4 years with a well-structured mixture of theory and practice. The companies must be run by the students themselves with assistance from faculty who must be practising managers. 

Graduates must be assured of jobs from the participating companies with an option to choose jobs outside the participating companies. By the time they graduate, they would have managed different aspects of a running company and be ready to put their theory to practice, having dabbled in it. 

This is possible only if organisations such as FICCI, CII and Assocham take the lead and set up great centres of learning across the country. The faculty should be paid on the same scales as senior management staff in industry. Naturally, the cost of such education would be high and must be borne by the students, through scholarships if necessary. Needless to say, for their work in running the company, they will be paid a remuneration which can partially defray the cost of their education. 

If we fail to address the need to revamp our education system and think innovatively, managing double-digit growth rates may be an uphill task.

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B-schools and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is becoming a popular career choice these days among aspirants and in an endeavour to cater to this growing demand, many institutions are making ‘entrepreneurship education’ a part of their curriculum. ET HighFlier discusses the unique ways business schools are adopting to support students who have a penchant towards creating something new.

MENTORING ENTREPRENEURS:

Karam Lakshman, program manager - iAccelerator, IIMAhmedabad believes that entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation required to encourage entrepreneurial success and lay down the conditions and solutions to the challenges that one might foresee in a venture. “Business is the backbone of a country’s economy and entrepreneurship is a tremendous force that has a huge impact on facilitating growth, recovery and societal progress. It results in innovation, employment generation and social empowerment. In India, entrepreneurship education is gradually picking up. That said, it needs to scale up further to make everyone involved – promoter, investor, parents, employees, etc - more aware about the different aspects,” he expresses.

“The time is right for the educated managers to stop looking for jobs and start providing them to others. Forming the right team is one of the challenges that an entrepreneur faces and if a person is starting early while he/she is in college, they will find the right kind of people amongst their friends, who they can work with easily,” he asserts.

“Students work on their own business plan as part of a project. The students get an opportunity to do projects with the incubates. This helps them achieve a handson experience of working with a start-up .” Lakshman adds.

Lakshman further says, “We will soon be competing with the best in the world if you compare statistics on number of start-ups, funding, etc. Entrepreneurs who don’t know how to go about it, here’s a pearl of wisdom: An entrepreneurial journey is like travelling through a thin fog when there is no wind. Start walking and it will keep getting clearer ahead. If you try and wait to get a complete picture from the start itself , you will keep waiting. Just take the first step and keep walking.”

GROOMING ENTREPRENEURS:

According to Dr Harsh Mishra, associate professor, strategic management , Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon, there is a need for B-schools to have entrepreneurship focused courses and programs. “Before even experiencing the status quo as an employee, formal education in entrepreneurship makes a case for early intervention by exposing students to successful stories, the underlying rationale or theory as well as the science and mechanism for tapping and developing their entrepreneurial instincts,” says Mishra.

Many organisations offers fullcredit courses in entrepreneurship and are also establishing a business incubator that could provide the opportunity to several new entrepreneurs to germinate their ideas into a business enterprise. According to Mishra, courses and programs on entrepreneurship are often interdisciplinary and an MBA program with entrepreneurial focus encourages students to crystallise, test, self-critique and gain confidence in their own ideas to move forward.

Many experts feel that B-schools must encourage entrepreneurship, but a student before opting for such courses, must analyse his/her own personal entrepreneurial capacity. Before starting up a venture, one must evaluate their entrepreneurial idea to meet the existing market need or a new emerging market demand, become aware of the legalities involved and various support systems in the eco-system for entrepreneurship and must not be obsessed with the desired financial outcome.

NURTURING ENTREPRENEURS:

Prof S Sadagopan, director, IIITBangalore feels that knowledge and wealth creation are equally important . He is of the belief that Bschools must encourage entrepreneurship , period. “We promote both, a formal as well as an informal program. Within 10 years of existence, we have incubated four successful companies. Currently, we are incubating five companies. The proof of the pudding is in eating; more than 20 of our alumni are pursuing new ventures currently,” he shares. Talking about the future of this rising trend of entrepreneurship education, Sadagopan says, “It is clear. Indian techies will increasingly look at e-option ! The eco-system is taking shape. My advice to entrepreneurs is to get into the ‘network’ and benefit from the huge advantage.”

Starting one’s own venture is never an easy task but a formal training could teach a person the nuances of the journey. That is why entrepreneurship education is gaining such momentum in recent times.

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Does an Entrepreneur Need an MBA?

A lot of (wannabe) entrepreneurs ask or indeed wonder if they should enroll in a business school and get “business expertise” that would be useful to them as entrepreneurs.

Acknowledging this, an increasing number of universities and colleges are offering courses in entrepreneurship as part of their business education. Around the world, business plan competitions are held by academic institutions at regular intervals. The wide publicity given to entrepreneurship in recent times has resulted in entrepreneurs gaining respect and being acknowledged as critical participants in a country’s economy, wealth and job creation.

But does taking a course or two in entrepreneurship while pursuing a business degree make one a better entrepreneur? I don’t think so. While they’re useful in understanding multiple aspects of entrepreneurship, these courses don’t make you a better entrepreneur. Are these courses useless then? Not really.

A small percentage of any population becomes entrepreneurs while the vast majority becomes employees. There’s nothing good or bad or right or wrong about this – it is just the way it is and indeed should be as both entrepreneurs and managers-employees perform complementary activities in the growth of an economy.

A significant number of professional investors are MBAs while an overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs are not! MBAs are trained to assess and attempt to mitigate risk and determine value of an investment in the future, a tricky thing to do in the best of times.

Additionally, there’s the seeming opportunity cost for an MBA – fancy salaries and lifestyles that effectively preclude any entrepreneurial thoughts. On the other hand, an entrepreneur needs to take several leaps of faith at various points (which unfortunately cannot be modeled), needs to be a good judge of people and situations (experience is a great teacher here) and be able to persevere, motivate and excite his team and partners to deliver (no MBA program teaches this). Taking decisions with incomplete information and with imperfect people isn’t what the classroom teaches. Only experience, introspection and a mentor teach you these lessons. Analytical skills alone won’t suffice, there needs to be synthesis as well - an ability to see the forest, the lay of the land and accordingly marshal resources to make a road.

In countries like India, most students doing their MBA have little or no work experience. Their ability therefore to spot opportunities, appreciate scenarios, develop and leverage relationships is limited compared to those with experience. It also doesn’t help that academic institutions in India are insulated from industry, entrepreneurs and the entrepreneur ecosystem.

Yet why are investors almost always biased in favor of entrepreneurs with degrees from well known business schools? The reason is that, all other things being equal, the degree is a filter – demonstrates that the holder has passed other stringent selection criteria. It is obviously not perfect. On the other hand, many professional investors and many senior executives in the corporate sector are usually business school an alumnus so having the MBA degree assures a network that can be leveraged by the entrepreneur.

Now here’s an exercise worth doing. Business school education in the US is about 100 years old and about 45 years old in India. During this time, how many wealth creators (not companies lifestyle or income-substitution businesses like consultancies), across all sectors of the economy, were founded by MBA entrepreneurs in either country? What about economies like Israel, Taiwan, China, Korea, Germany, UK, and Japan? My guess is that this number would be a very tiny fraction. What’s yours?

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India's B-schools: Growth in Quantity, Not Quality

NEW DELHI -- This is the tenth consecutive year that I have been actively involved in ranking India's business schools. As part of the study, I have visited over 350 campuses so far; still I could not keep pace with their rapid proliferation. It started with the liberalization of India's economy in 1991, when there were about 50 B-schools in the country. Between 1991 and 2000, the number rose to about 700. Between 2001 and 2009, the number galloped to about 2,000. This proliferation is perhaps the major highlight of our B-school story.

Quantitatively, it is an impressive growth story. However, the quality of education delivered in most of them is the disturbing aspect of this positive narrative.

Since our ranking methodology is based primarily on objective data, I have had access to important facts and figures pertaining to the faculty, infrastructure, industry interface and pedagogy followed in many of our B-schools. Last year, I also was nominated to the management and technology committee of the National Board of Accreditation, which is the government's higher educational accreditation body. This gave me the opportunity to have access to the official records of many business schools that otherwise don't participate in our survey.

And here is the depressing conclusion: Not more than 30 B-schools in the country – about 1.5% of the total -- have systems and processes in place to deliver quality education. The vast majority are inefficient teaching colleges and function primarily as placement agencies.

If there has been proliferation of dubious B-schools, one important contributing factor has been the "license Raj" of the government's regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education or AICTE.

Under the council's rules, a newly-established business school can't admit more than 60 students in the first year and for subsequent incremental expansion, it needs a number of different permits. This rule, it seems, has been inspired by the philosophy of keeping capacity down to avert monopolies and to protect the small-scale entrepreneur.

With this constraint on student intake, institutes find it difficult to run a quality program without any aid. Yet government-aided autonomous B-schools like the Indian Institutes of Management, which don't have to seek AICTE approval for expansion, have been too complacent. Though they have expanded capacity somewhat in the past two years, they failed to do so for the better part of four decades.

Many shoddy B-schools quickly moved in to fill the space that the growing economy created. Some of them blatantly violated the law, luring students with misleading advertisements and admitting them without any approvals. Many of them routinely siphon off major parts of the financial surplus they generate to unrelated activities instead of cultivating faculty or using it for improvement of the institute's systems.

If competent B-schools were allowed to increase student intake, they would have substantially crowded out the substandard ones. But to get AICTE approval, a school must meet the AICTE's requirements such as a minimum number of permanent faculty, a minimum campus size, a minimum built-up area etc. Many AICTE-approved schools have adhered to these minimum requirements but have not gone beyond. AICTE approval has become a licence for them to become complacent and, of course, to make money.

One of the main objectives of the annual ranking that we do is to bring B-schools out of their shell of complacency and to promote healthy competition among them so that, in the process, the quality of education improves. We have been partially successful in our objective. Since ours is a transparent methodology, every year B-school directors who participate in the survey get to know their weak areas and work to improve their rank.

In year 2000, we found that more than 70% of B-schools that we surveyed didn't have a single faculty member who had authored a case or a research paper or a book. In this year's survey, 81% of the institutes had at least one faculty member who had authored a research paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

We can also see an improvement in faculty strength, interaction with industry, infrastructure and international linkages in some of them. About a decade ago, only about 20 B-schools had their own journals. Now, over 270 have one. On the flip side, not more than 10 of them are of an international standard. Beyond the top 25 B-schools, faculty publication in peer-reviewed international journals is almost non-existent.

Entrepreneurship development continues to remain a neglected area. Of the 2,000 B-schools that we now have, not even 10 have an effective incubation centre to cultivate enterprise.

But the most important concern when we conducted the first survey was the shortage of competent faculty. Today, sadly, it remains the biggest problem.

[Premchand Palety is chief executive of the Centre for Forecasting & Research (C fore) in New Delhi. He has more than 15 years experience in market research, opinion research, election surveys and performance appraisal studies at a national level. For about a decade he has been writing on management education. In 2002, he authored a book on the best business schools in India, published by Penguin. He is a member of the Management and Technology Committee of the National Board of Accreditation.]

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Poor facilities at B-schools

B-SCHOOL means business school. Most of the students take admission in these B-schools to understand the business responsibility and to face the challenges of economy. Now-a-days B-schools have become the most profitable source of business for the big entrepreneurs. They charge lakhs of rupees from a single student and in return they provide them with improper infrastructure, such as-

• No proper industry interaction.
• Lack of qualified teachers.
• No placement.
• No summer training.
• No sports facilities.
• No proper learning environment.
• No proper computer labs with Internet community.

Along with all these disqualities some B-schools also offer poor canteen and food supplies to the students. Students of these B-schools feel that they are wasting their valuable time along with their parents' hard earn money.

How could the government give affiliation to such colleges. A strong smell of corruption comes, when it comes to affiliation and approval of the colleges.

Why don’t the government take necessary steps to check the facilities being provided to the students in such colleges.

But these B-scholls are run by big entrepreneurs, who aim at earning huge profits on the cost of students' career. These entrepreneurs are not at all approachable. They impose their own laws on the students.

The Indian government these days is talking about consumer rights, but what about the students' rights. If the students are not getting proper facilities from colleges even after paying abundant of fees. Is there any clause under jurisdiction, where students can file his complaints, so that they can save their carrier from being spoiled?

The colleges are not able to provide proper facilities to the students, then also the universities are giving more affiliations to the new courses in such colleges.

We the B-School students are suffering from such a cause. It’s a humble request to all the universities that please change your curriculum of giving affiliation and avoid corruption in education department. The affiliation of such colleges should be discarded.

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MBA important degree in recession

LUCKNOW: Education Times in association with the Institute of Public Enterprise (IPE) and Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME) organised 'The Magic of MBA' seminar at CMS Gomtinagar on Sunday, February 1. The event provided a platform to the students to have an interface with known faces in the industry and gain a deeper insight into the world of MBA as well as the opportunities before MBA aspirants in the current economic scenario.

The panel of experts who spoke at the seminar included NF Aibara, COO, Idea, UP East, Najaf Rizvi, Branch Head, HSBC, Lucknow, Jayant Krishna, principal consultant, TCS, Nishant Priyadarshi, director, TIME, Lucknow and SK Mathur, professor, IPE. The talk of each expert was followed by a Q & A session, allowing the students to interact and seek advice from professionals who have made it big and know what really works in the corporate world. The focus of the presentation of all the experts was the career dilemmas faced by the MBAs when the global economy is facing recession. NF Rizvi said that, companies were always seeking skilled, competent managers who could handle challenges and give effective business solutions for the benefit of the company. "Therefore irrespective of recession, MBA is an important qualification because you pursue it to acquire benefits throughout your life and not just in the current year," he said.

Jayant Krishna averred, "These are challenging times, but there are tremendous opportunities before MBAs, especially in sectors that haven't been effected by the economic slowdown, like telecom and healthcare." Encouraging the MBA aspirants, NF Aibara said, "This phase just poses short term hardships before you. You all have a long career in front of you and you must keep going ahead with a positive attitude." The event rounded up with expert comments from SK Mathur and Nishant Priyadarshi, who emphasised on the need for having sound management executives for the development of the nation.

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invest time in B-schools during Slowdown

MUMBAI: More and more graduates seem to think that it could be the best time to pursue a B-school degree that could be handy in a tight job market. Applications for various full and part-time management courses rose by more than 20% this year at most business schools. Also, there was a renewed interest for more than 60% of the part-time programmes and nearly 70% of executive programmes.

According to Sujata Khanna, founder of Career Launcher, said, “The reason for a surge in applicants is the factor of economic slowdown as one perceives the job market will be tight for the next two years and hence, people want to invest the time in education.”

Something similar happened in 2001 after the dotcom bust, when the number of applications had touched a peak in B-schools. “A year after Y2K, we saw a 40-45% increase in students, who wanted to prepare for various B-schools entrance examinations,” said Ms Khanna.

Jamanalal Bajaj Institute, a leading business school in Mumbai, has recorded a 25% jump in applicants for the MH-CET entrance test scheduled in February. The institute takes 120 students for the post-graduate degree.

Students feel that it makes sense to be armed with an MBA or a post-graduate degree in such times, so that when the market rebounds they would be better placed than others, said an official with the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management.

Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), which conducts the NMAT entrance test for its full-time MBA courses sometime December-end, has received approximately 46,000 applications for its 360 seats. It’s a 21% rise over last year. “If you’re an admissions officer, it’s a great news, because it means you're going to have a lot of decision-making power and have a richer pool of applicants,” said VK Sreedhar, registrar of NMISMS.

Another leading business school in Mumbai, Wellingkar Institute of Management, has also seen a rise of 12% in online applications this year as against last year for its 3-year part-time masters degree. Similarly, applications for Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), which is going to be held on December 21, has shown a significant rise.

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Bollywood biggies to teach at IIM-A

Ahmedabad : Even if it's not exactly boom time at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), it'll soon be dhoom' time! Bollywood biggies are going to descend on campus soon and don the hat of professors.

The first-ever course on Bollywood at the institute will roll out on December 23. Confirmations from Sanjay Gadhvi, maker of Dhoom 2' and more recently, Kidnap', and Apoorva Lakhia, director of Shootout at Lokhandwala', have been received and Aamir Khan and Madhur Bhandarkar have also shown keen interest.

The course has met with overwhelming response with 86 students registering for it. This will make it a class even bigger than that of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam!

"I'm happy with the interest students have shown in the course. The reason for launching it was to study the Indian film business as an industry. Plenty of research has been done on relatively new industries like transportation, telecom and retail. I took this opportunity to explore film industry," says Tejas Desai, faculty in-charge of the course titled Introduction to Contemporary Film Industry'.

The course will give students an insight into economics of the industry at various stages of filmmaking production, financing, distribution, marketing and much more, he elaborates. Prof Desai has prepared a case study on Madhur Bhandarkar's Corporate'.

"With this course, I'm also hoping a whole new industry will be opened for students as far as placements are concerned. National and international companies, like Sony, UTV and Big Entertainment, can offer our students good opportunities," says Desai.

The course has been offered as an elective to second-year students of postgraduate programme in their last term at the institute. At present, the schedule is being chalked out and a brief on topics to be taken has been sent to the two directors who have confirmed their involvement.

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B-schools need to shape mindsets, not just placement agencies

The global economic crisis has thrown up many challenges for our higher educational institutions, especially business schools. This meltdown is not only about greed or irresponsible judgement in using other people’s money by those at the helm in some institutions; it is also a manifestation of a deeper crisis in capitalism. B-schools can play a role in addressing this crisis. Besides shaping the mindset of the students, they also need to set a new direction to the research their faculty is involved in.

The subprime mortgage crisis in the US could not have caused such havoc worldwide had the regulators and the rating agencies done a better job. Valid aspersions are being raised on the integrity of these rating agencies that converted the bad debts of some financial institutions into investment-grade products and trapped other financial institutions. Some even attribute it to an unholy nexus between rating agencies, regulators and financial institutions. The disturbing aspect of it is that most of these organizations are run by products of some top B-schools.

Unfortunately, the role models for most B-school students are those graduates who earn the biggest pay packets; and their dream destinations have been companies that pay the most—even those that borrow heavily to do so or whose directors don’t mind getting fat bonuses even as their firms bleed. Wall Street icon Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which was highly leveraged and collapsed in mid-September, was also one of the highest paymasters.

Even media overplayed the placement performance of B-schools by publishing misleading data. This overemphasis on placements in the last few years has had a great impact on shaping the mindset of students. Many faculty members at some top Indian B-schools have told me how they see the quality of students deteriorating every year. From the day they enter campus, their focus is more on getting high-salary jobs than on improving their capabilities. Students are increasingly viewing B-schools as placement agencies rather than learning centres. This creates an environment where making money gets primacy over hard work, ethics and social responsibilities.

After the Enron Inc. crisis, it became the fashion to include ethics as a subject in B-schools though I have my doubts on whether ethics can be taught at all—particularly at this stage of education. In my view, the best way of inculcating ethics in students is to promote an ethical culture in the institutions. Faculty and management should be role models for ethical behaviour.

This is where many of our B-schools falter. Misleading advertisements, backdoor admissions, hiring incompetent faculty, siphoning money from the system and tolerance for unethical practices among faculty and students by management have a corrupting influence on students.

This, in turn, is often reflected in their alacrity in taking short cuts to complete their projects or in making money. Reversing this trend would be a big challenge for our educational institutions.

The present economic crisis is not only about the failure of some financial institutions, it is also symptomatic of the breakdown of the capitalist system. Like the command economy of the erstwhile Communist countries, it too has failed to keep up with the needs of our growing population and its growing aspirations. It invested much more in fuelling consumption than on investing in creation and application of knowledge in critical areas such as food, fuel and the environment.

Most of the research in the financial sector, too, has facilitated consumption on borrowed money. For example, securitization, the process by which loans of one institution are sold to other institutions as pools of debt, has in a way resulted in irresponsible lending that has significantly contributed to the present crisis. Even the poor are treated more as a market for different products, including debt, rather than as potential wealth creators. This is precisely where research in our educational institutions should now focus—to increase the productivity of the poor, especially those in rural areas. Before treating them as a market, their productivity should be increased by leveraging innovations in technology.

For this, our educational institutions should first believe that they can play a leadership role in transforming society. As of now, most of them are content with being just teaching outlets and placement agencies.

Premchand Palety is director of Centre for Forecasting and Research (C fore) in New Delhi, from where he keeps a close eye on India’s business schools. Comments are welcome at businesscase@livemint.com

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Teamwork and teamplay

WHAT: THEY DON`T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL
by Subrotah Biswas

I believe, it is a series of events (education, job, personal experiences and so on) that all collaborate to make a personality or a career. My MBA education taught me a couple of memorable things: make the most of a given situation, look at the problem and not the person responsible for it, and true accountability.

Through all those case studies and internships we are taught how to prepare for varied business eventualities. However, in the real world, each situation is unique; every problem/challenge requires a renewed approach. When success is defined by how fast you change with the dynamic socio-economic environment, there are no standard solutions. And the only thing that you carry forward from your education is the attitude, the philosophy and certain examples of what “not” to do.

Let me draw an analogy with my favourite sport soccer. At B-school one gets good coaching — one gets to learn about how to kick the ball, control the ball, field movements and so on. In a profession, one is playing a match and individual skills picked up at B-school are not enough to win it; one needs to coordinate, play his role, create opportunities, take initiatives and rejoice in the celebration of the entire team. I strongly believe that in real professional world there are no individual triumphs. Individual accolades and medals end with the alma mater.

To all those stepping out into their careers post their MBAs, I would strongly advise that they look for linear organic growth at the beginning of the career. Exponential growth, especially in the initial days, results in dilution of certain fundamental strengths. I am reminded of the story of a butterfly coming out of the cocoon. If you do not let it struggle through the entire process and try cutting open the cocoon to help the butterfly out, all you will get is a butterfly with underdeveloped wings that cannot fly. Similarly, one should try and gain operational level experience first.

Additionally, I think, every individual should contribute towards a “learning organisation” — this is a term coined by Peter Senge; and implies that everyone in the organisation has the power to contribute positively and should aim at achieving an overall synergy through harmonic coordination of work profiles.

Subrotah Biswas did his MBA from Pune University

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Four components of a perfect B-school application

Chennai: The four dimensions of a perfect business school applicant are leadership, innovation, teamwork, and maturity, write Omari Bouknight and Scott Shrum in ‘Your MBA Game Plan: Proven Strategies for getting into the top business schools,’ revised edition (www.landmarkonthenet.com).

The authors explain that, since business schools want to be known as institutions that produce leaders in their fields, admission committees look for applicants who display leadership ability in all facets of their lives.

“Candidates who successfully demonstrate leadership in their applications exhibit how they have provided others with direction, shown initiative, and managed difficult situations in their professional, personal, and academic careers.”

The second dimension, innovation, is a combination of traditional intellectual ability and creativity, with the former reflected in the hard statistics such as your GMAT score and grade point average. Example for the latter can be newer solutions to everyday business problems.

The authors, therefore, advise candidates to strive and deliver “application stories that speak to adding something new to their selected career paths, rather than merely becoming middle managers in mindless business conglomerates.”

Teamwork, the third dimension, is about basic social skills and a willingness to share successes and take accountability for failures, say Bouknight and Shrum. “While top business schools are certainly known for being competitive environments, operating in teams has become an integral part of conducting business, and as such is a key aspect of the business school experience.”

Maturity, the fourth dimension, comes as a result of candidates’ work experience, which may be five years, on average.

“Top business schools are in search of candidates who present multilayered experiences inside and outside of the workplace. An important aspect of the business school experience is that students teach one another based on their backgrounds.”

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Business schools ready to respond to change

Signals that the UK and US economies were heading for testing times recently moved from the fringes to centre stage. With established investment banks failing in both countries, some are questioning whether what was first believed to be solely a financial crisis may spread to the wider economy.

Business schools are making sure they are ready to respond and lead in this climate. Research will inform future policy to try and avoid a similar situation reoccurring. Through management education, like the MBA, leaders are taught approaches to cope with both today's issues and future developments that will require new insights and novel solutions. A highquality MBA programme is one that provides an enduring education, through everything a graduate will encounter in their working life.

At times of economic difficulty a number of things happen to employees. Most obviously, some are made redundant and are presented with the opportunity to retake control of their careers. Others decide that its high time to move into a new area of working, enabled by an MBA programme. We also quite often see applicants with a great idea wanting to start their own small or family business - becoming an entrepreneur.

Overall application numbers to the full time Imperial MBA have risen over 40% on last year. The number of applications for the MBA programme from candidates with a finance background has increased this year. Most are still working in senior positions at reputable financial organisations but decided that it's a shrewd time to begin a move out of finance.

A higher calibre of student is applying, suggesting that for those considering a place in a top business school - things are only going to get tougher in the coming years as competition for places increases.

The range of candidates is as diverse and colourful as previous years - something that Imperial has worked hard to establish:

A collaborative culture doesn't just happen by mistake. We bring in the right applicants and encourage certain ways of behaving. We're always looking for people who can work with others and who bring alternative views to any discussion or task. If a CV or application matches our cultural 'wall paper', it's obvious. They are comfortable and capable of leading a group but also have the experience to know when to step back and support others. We don't believe that a pool of piranhas is the best environment in which to learn and innovate.

Graduates tend to move into four broad areas: consultancy, service or manufacturing industries and entrepreneurial ventures. What all seem to share is an understanding of the importance innovation and discovery. The candidates that perform best on the MBA want to find the most challenging questions and embrace change. The reward is simple: a view of the world that will unlock value and generate the ideas, income and collaborations, so vital to a modern company.

It seems that regardless of where applicants are coming from, or where they want to go, one thing is clear. There's never been a better time to invest in your own skills.

(The author is from Imperial College Business School)

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B-schools fall short in teamwork, leadership

The ability to work in a team has often been voted as the most desired competency

There have been many surveys conducted among recruiters, including a few by our organization, to identify the competencies that they value most in a business school graduate.

The ability to work in a team, knowledge of subject and its effective application, analytical skills, leadership skills, creativity, performance focus, communication and presentation skills, customer orientation, ability to withstand work pressure, risk-taking ability, dealing with ambiguity and ability to prioritize are the key competencies expected of a B-school graduate.

Of these, the ability to work in a team has often been voted as the most desired competency. In my opinion, this is also the competency that B-schools, including the top ones, have failed to cultivate enough among their students.

In fact, the gap between what recruiters desire and what they get is the highest when it comes to team building, followed by leadership skills. This is one of the findings of an ambitious, four-year study conducted by Asha Bhandarkar, the Raman Munjal Chair professor of leadership studies at Management Development Institute (MDI) in Gurgaon.

She conducted psychometric tests among 1,000 students of nine top B-schools: The Indian Institutes of Management in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Lucknow, MDI, Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamnalal Bajaj, S.P. Jain and Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. The first test was conducted just after their admission and the second test was done in the same group after about two years, just before they finished school. In addition, at least 300 alumni and about 100 recruiters were interviewed for the study.

The findings are published in her new book, Shaping Business Leaders: What B-schools Don’t Do. Says Bhandarkar: “Most of our B-schools do a bad job in enhancing the teamworking ability among their students. At the entry level, too, students score poorly against this competency.”

One reason for students being bad team players could be the increasingly competitive Indian environment that they are growing up in. Admission to a good institute from nursery school onward is more a process of rejection than selection. Entrance to top B-schools, where at least 300,000 compete for about 1,500 seats, forces students to be very competitive. There is a negative correlation between competition and collaboration. Success for an Indian student often means the other person has to fail, so pulling others down for one’s own ascent is then not considered abnormal.

Meanwhile, the evaluation process in most of our schools, which promote the rat race, further reinforces this mindset. The truth that each person in the team can individually achieve more by working together with other members, that everybody can be a winner is still not assimilated by the majority of students. Says Bhandarkar: “I tell my students what helped you get inside MDI will not help you in your future career. It takes a lot of effort to change the mindset of students who don’t listen to others and don’t believe that they can learn from others.”

For its part, MDI says it has designed various outbound activities to promote team spirit among students. The institute also shows students various management films. Students are first made aware of their mindset (knowing), which they accept and own (owning) and then the change process is initiated (changing).

Developing leadership skills is another area where B-schools do a bad job, suggests the Bhandarkar study. Ideally, a good leader should have a clear vision, make every person in the organization internalize it, motivate and enable everyone to work as a team towards the vision. For this, the leader has to overcome his or her insecurities. But a policy of divide and rule is still followed in many organizations.

In the Bhandarkar study, four aspects of leadership were explored: managing self, influencing others, managing complexity and managing diversity. These aspects are important for business leaders to operate in a global arena. The Bhandarkar study shows that B-school graduates fare poorly in influencing others.

To enhance leadership skills, Bhandarkar is of the view that students need to be provided opportunities to understand their emotive and inner psychic space. Exposure to theatre, outbound programmes, experiential labs and to some extent, gaming, will help them. They should also be given a liberal dose of literature and philosophy. She advocates that B-schools should identify classical works by social thinkers and philosophers, autobiographies and biographies of leaders such as M.K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Charles de Gaulle. They should also select classic films and use the interaction with great minds to broaden the perspective of students. This is important as most students come from technical, commerce as well as economics streams where they don’t get a chance to engage with the arts, philosophy, history, literature and political science.

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Recession hits tier-II B-schools harder

MUMBAI: Recessionary trends seem to have hit Tier II B-schools harder than the top rung management schools this year. While offer letters from top corporates were revoked at some of these campuses, others were not assigned duties promised earlier.

Sources say that corporates cite reasons of downsizing and restructuring for the changes made Says a student from Pune based Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies (SIMS), “Had such developments happened at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), these companies would have been black listed.”

Says Parag Singh (name changed) who is working in the KPO division of Infosys BPO in Bangalore, “We were offered job profiles either in the equity research or the fixed income research department. After we arrived, we were told that there is no such profile and that the only client, i.e. Deutsche Bank was gradually pulling out since the bank had a captive in Mumbai. We were thereafter given an option to move to other departments. Also, at the time of hiring we were told that if we quit within six months, we would have to pay back Rs 50,000 sign on bonus. But now we are being told that this period has been extended to a year.”

When contacted, an Infosys official called it “differences in opinions” and refused to divulge further information. Infosys BPO had visited Pune based Symbiosis Institute of International Business (SIIB), SIMS, Chennai based Great Lakes Institute of Management and Mumbai based Welingkar Institute of Management among others B-schools .

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MBA internship mantras

To a large extent, your final job placement will depend on how well you perform during your MBA internship, the first rung of the corporate ladder.

Selecting the right company to intern with, is as important as making the most of your internship stint.

Some working professionals may even wonder if they really need an internship. The answer: YES! This start-up kit explains how an internship will benefit you.

It also outlines strategies and techniques on how to choose a good company, manage your wardrobe, work with your boss, colleagues and clients, et al.

The idea is to make an impact!

This content is is brought to you by WCH Training Solutions, which offers corporate training in business communication, soft skills, managerial skills and corporate grooming.

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B-schools tailor courses for offbeat jobs

NEW DELHI: India’s rapidly-growing economy is throwing up demand for new skill sets. And educational institutes are introducing niche and unheard of courses to meet industry demand.

From Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ (TISS) PG degree (MA) in social entrepreneurship, J K Business School’s MBA in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Indian Clinical Research Institute’s (ICRI) management course in medical tourism to Amity’s MSc in organic agriculture and Welingkars’ course in judiciary management, scores of institutes and colleges are offering specialised courses in a number of new areas.

Two years back, a buoyant clinical trial and pharma industry saw an introduction of a degree course in clinical trial. Take the case of social entrepreneurship. Sensing a trend, both globally and in India, TISS launched a two-year course that aims at training and developing leaders for wealth generation with social progress in social sectors and non-profit organisations.

Amity’s organic agriculture course, launched two months back, has many takers. Two years back, it launched an MBA in organic management and buoyed by its success it launched an MSc programme two months back. “There is a huge demand for professionals in this field,” says Amity University’s Savita Mehta.

J K Business School, which was launched in 2006, is running a course on CSR since last year. It’s a CII-JK business school initiative where students learn about CSR and work with companies specially SMEs, to sort out their problems. This year, students will work with 25 such companies including Sona Koyo Steering, Jindal Steel, Sahara India, Munjal Showa and JK Technosoft.

“Companies in the SME segment often confuse CSR with merely spending money in social projects and there have been issues with carrying out such efforts even when they want to do it,” says J K Business School director general Reena Ramachandran. “This initiative will help our students in understanding the space as well as support the companies.”

Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai, plans to roll out a diploma programme in judiciary management soon. ICRI recently launched a full-fledged course on medical tourism, besides inpatient services & ward management.

“There is a great demand for such modules as the manpower requirement goes up and the need for specialised roles arise.” says ICRI health service director Major General (Dr) M Srivastava. This could just be a beginning. As emerging new sectors throw up new challenges, India Inc would look for relevant skills to meet them. And there in lies opportunities for educational institutes.

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IIMs trying to create eco-system

A few weeks ago, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad organised a conference where alumni entrepreneurs were invited to share their experiences with the centre and with students interested in becoming entrepreneurs.

Most of us would assume that very few people showed up on either side, since the popular perception of IIMA is that it is the bastion of straight-andnarrow corporate executives, and not the breeding ground for off-the-beaten-track entrepreneurs who march to the beat of their own drummer.

Factually, the audience comprised about 150 alumni entrepreneurs and over 250 eager beaver students who came to learn whatever they could and to ask questions like “Is 5-6 years of work experience in a company a good thing before striking out on your own” and “how do you know when you are ready to take the plunge”.

At the conference the CIIE also released a book written by an entrepreneur alumna, Rashmi Bansal, titled Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, covering the story of 25 alumni entrepreneurs who she divided into Believers (those who always knew what they wanted to do), Opportunists (who were hit by an entrepreneurship opportunity they couldn’t refuse), and Alternate Vision (people who became social entrepreneurs or ran boutique businesses).

Alternative Vision

The list of IIM-A Alumni entrepreneurs is very impressive and includes a heartening number of social entrepreneurs too — naukri.com, Subhiksha, Edelweiss, Mastek, Mphasis, Educomp, Makemytrip.com, India Infoline , IRIS, Gridstone, Orchid Pharmaceuticals , Give Foundation, Basix and Eklavya, to name a few.

Some of them went straight into entrepreneurship on graduating. Others first worked for a few years gathering experience in other companies. Sanjeev Bikchandani worked for a few years with a company before quitting to set up naukri.com and R Subramaniam of Subhiksha spent 15 days with a large multinational bank and decided that dealing with money markets and bonds would not give him the life skills he needed and then moved to Enfield for two years before setting up his own shop. Vijay Mahajan of Basix opted out of placement to pursue his alternate vision, but worked first for another NGO before setting up Pradan. Some were late bloomers and some even were ‘second innings’ entrepreneurs , having retired early form top corporate jobs. Rahul Bhasin did a buyout of the securities firm he was working with and Jerry Rao started Mphasis after an entire career with Citibank.

On an average, over the years, 25-30 % of every batch eventually ends up becoming entrepreneurs. The move was more gradual in the older batches but is accelerating in the batches of the 90s and 2000s. Last year, 11 students in a class of 200 or so did not seek placement and set off on their own entrepreneurship voyage — definitely a sign of the times, with easier funding and the comfort that today’s corporate world will hire them at any time, on par with their classmates.

I asked a sample of these successful entrepreneurs to evaluate IIMA course content and teaching in the context of creating more people like themselves. There is a fair amount of consensus that the concepts or tools of business management being taught are equally relevant whether you are an entrepreneur or in an established corporate set up — because after all, running an organisation, whether your own or someone else’s is more or less the same. Also, in the early stages, entrepreneurs have to take on a variety of managerial roles themselves, since they can’t afford to hire too many experts. That’s why several of them support the view of R Subramaniam (RS) of Subhiksha that a ‘work somewhere first’ route is helpful.

However there is an equally emphatic agreement that the contexts / perspectives in which these tools get applied could be totally different in the world of entrepreneurship and more attention needs to be given to making that point.

The prescriptions on how to do this are varied. RS of Subhiksha feels that the way entrepreneurship is currently being portrayed in most B-Schools is much too romantic; and there is a need for highlighting the classic pain — it takes 10 to 12 years of struggle to build anything of significance. There is a real need to understand and control risk better and know what foolhardy and romantic risk is and what well gauged risk is. His prescription to do this is a ½ unit course “somewhere between OB and strategy” to sensitise would-be entrepreneurs to this.

Sanjeev Bikchandani of Naukri.com feels that B-Schools need more case studies on start ups and entrepreneur driven organisations in order for students to see alternate contexts and alternate views of the world. There must also be more successful and failed entrepreneurs invited to talk to the students to provide different role models of managing businesses. Taking Sanjeev’s thought further, I must say that having worked with both typically corporate CEOs and entrepreneurs, even the way management tools are applied are quite different.

For example, market research to scope business opportunity done for an entrepreneur ends up revealing different things than that for a protocol driven “current market and its rules” obsessed corporate CEO. An entrepreneur once said scathingly to me in reply to my question on how much he had leveraged his balance sheet to grow, “only you B School types think that one must leverage ones own balance sheet to grow. There are several other balance sheets you can leverage to grow” . And in fact he had done just that, all totally kosher and legal! Vaidy of Alchemy Capital says that the brain is meant for thinking, reasoning and memory.

He feels that a lot of what he was taught at IIMA is more connected with reasoning than it is with thinking; and also that the memory bank built in student’s heads of things that went wrong and right with entrepreneurial ventures is still quite lightweight compared to that of corporate behaviour. This again points to more exposure to people and case situations from the world of entrepreneurs. There is near total agreement that courses which “help give courage”, “strengthen resolve” , “are inspirational” , “accelerate the seed of entrepreneurship inside us” are very valuable.

A 20 year old course at IIMA that does this and that most of our entrepreneurs remember fondly is LEM - Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation. For the past six years it has been offered by alumnus visiting faculty Sunil Honda, a pharma-turnededucation entrepreneur. His students say that it instils confidence, makes you interact with small shops in industrial estates who earn more than most corporate executives do, and it begs the question “why can’t we, with more education and privileges of intellectual exposure, do it too”? In fact, in the bidding system that students at IIMA use to get a course of their choice, this one comes near the top of the list.

Venkat, a social entrepreneur and founder of GIVE India says that while LEM inspired him to pursue his dream, he also found that the system of IPs (2 Credit Independent Projects) also helped him progress his future business ideas in depth, while getting him the credits needed to graduate.

The CIIE at IIMA was set up six years ago, with the coming together of seven faculty members from different areas, interested in doing research in entrepreneurship . Its chairperson Prof. Rakesh Basant, explains the IIMA philosophy that research centres be integrated with other areas of activity of the institute. One arm of this integration has been the creation and offering of a wide range of entrepreneurship relevant courses ranging from private equity all the way to social entrepreneurship, supported by custom created case material and designed to include project work on the companies being incubated by the centre, on managing the seed fund, in mentoring start ups, vetting their business plans and so on.

The Centre has also worked with the placement office to enable summer internships with start up companies, for a permanent placement slot just before the main placement activity begins, for start ups who want to come and recruit, and for those who want to be entrepreneurs straight after they graduate, a safety net scheme by which they can participate two years later in the campus placement process.

Clearly the mental, the environmental and the emotional aspects of becoming an entrepreneur are what BSchools ought to address. And even if concept learning stays the same, there is a necessity for context learning through greater exposure to entrepreneurs and start up case situations. Ramâ Bijapurkar is a management consultant and visiting faculty at IIMA.

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Accreditation Of Teachers: Shortage of Faculty

Management education is must have education for many students. The field opens various streams for a bright career. However, good education is only possible with qualitative faculty. Here we talk about accreditation of management teachers.

Non availability of adequate faculty is a major constraint for sustainable growth of quality management education in India. Today there are over 1700 management schools. All of these are in need of faculty. In view of the severity of faculty shortage, B-Schools have not been able to improve the standards – both in faculty, student ratio and senior - junior faculty ratios. Given the demand supply gap, additional faculty needs to be attracted.

In addition to pursuing traditional routes, new support facilities have to be created to overcome faculty shortage. This has also been brought out by NKC Working Group on Management Education in their report submitted to Prime Minister in October 2007.

To meet the demand of management faculty AIMA as a national apex body for professional management in the country has a scheme for Accreditation of Management Teachers (AMT). It aims at identifying capable professionals from any arena not necessarily academics who can effectively impart management education by virtue of their academic achievements and professional experience. It has been well acknowledged that teachers at management institutions should be those who have practiced and practitioners who can teach.

The applicants for AMT certification are screened through the following process: It starts with Screening of Applicants and goes through Psychometric Profiling, Presentation,and lastly an Interview.

Accreditation sessions are conducted at AIMA, New Delhi every third Monday of each month. To facilitate the applicants from western part of the country an accreditation session was held at Pune on 28 June 2008. Another accreditation session for applicants from Kerala is planned in the month of September this year.

Qualification required for this program: Post Graduate Degree or equivalent in a discipline relevant to management education.Post Graduate level regular teaching experience of minimum 3 years. Or Industry / consultancy / training / research experience of minimum 5 years.

The Accreditation Board comprising of highly reputed academician from institutes of excellence, senior practicing HR heads and consultants with proven track record conduct interviews with candidates. The AIMA’s initiative of AMT certification is to create a pool of experienced and knowledgeable management faculty from academia and industry. AMTs can be considered as benchmark of quality management faculty for B-Schools.

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Professionals across streams enroll for MBA

B-schools are also encouraging professionals from diverse profiles to do an MBA.

Bhuvana Ramalingam, senior director of communication, ISB, says: “Anyone can do an MBA. Earlier, engineers made up a chunk of MBAs. Today, it’s people from backgrounds as diverse as journalism and defence. Diversity is important in business education as it enhances discussions in the classroom.”

KJ Somaiya Institute of Management, Mumbai, has changed the selection criteria to incorporate as many disciplines as possible. Unlike last year, when 95 per cent of students came from engineering backgrounds, this year only 60 per cent of students are engineers.

A consideration of 12.5 per cent on past academic records is now applicable to students from all the disciplines under the revised selection criteria, as against last year when only engineering students received this consideration.

The institute has also cut down the consideration on work experience from 7.5 per cent to 5 per cent, and has broadening the eligibility to include aspirants from other disciplines as well.

Satish Deodhar, chairperson, admissions at IIM, Ahmedabad, said: “Another trend in IIM-A is that of Chartered Accountants (CAs) doing MBA. Earlier there were many economic students opting for MBA. But today, they have been outnumbered by engineers and CAs as there is more scope for economic graduates in the field of BPO or hospitality.”

The Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar, (XIMB), has more than 60 per cent of engineers this year.

Many feel that an MBA is a favoured programme for all as offers a complete learning experience. But why switch career for an MBA degree, especially when you are in a good profession, already?

The answer seems to be the competitive advantage the programme confers.

“Management education gives students a jump start. The salaries are attractive after an MBA, for instance the average salary for an MBA from IIM is 10 lakh. There could be other reasons for opting for an MBA like tedious jobs, the urge to break the glass ceiling and to broaden the niche market for one’s own profession,” explains Deodhar.

A section of MBA aspirants feels that the course helps them bridge the gap in their established domain of education.

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Hospital management need of the hour

Mumbai, July 20 With the hospital industry expected to grow at the rate of 30 per cent by industry analysis, need for hospital management professionals is growing by the day. The Institute of Clinical Research India has started a health section which is offering MBA in hospital management and medical tourism. The founding member of the Academy of Hospital Administration, Dr Munindra Srivastava has taken charge of the ICRI Health division. Excerpts from an interview:

Q. What was the need of designing a specific course for hospital management and medical tourism?
Trained manpower will be required soon. These people will be trained in maintenance, human resource management, quality and quantity of care along with promotion and strategizing. The earlier conception that management is “common sense” and can be handled by senior medical professionals is no longer true. It has become a highly specified field.

Q. What value addition will a trained professional make to hospital management?
The course will teach them how an operation theatre is designed, about waste disposal, laws related to hospitals and human resource. We will also train them how to prepare for accreditations and how to maintain standards. Hospital management professionals need to have a degree in science before they are trained in management. This will probably avoid arguments arising among administrators.

Q. Though a lot of hospitals, government and private, are trying for accreditation, there is a debate that the norms should be reconsidered for these two branches.
The accreditation norms were designed by a body of experts from the fields of medicine, law and management. We collected all existing norms and formulated new ones after considering the laws and conditions at the hospital.

Q. There is a lot of dispute related to MCI recognition and the universities. Why is this happening and what can be done?
There is only one reason for this. The state government gives the permission for land and setup while the MCI comes in later. All approvals should come at the same time. The students get cheated sometimes at the time of admissions as they are told that the applications have been sent for MCI recognition.

Q. Where is the hospital industry heading and what are its demands?
The industry is expected to grow at the rate of 30 per cent in the next few years. Also the corporate sector is likely to enter the healthcare field as more and more foreign patients are coming to India for treatment. Patients are demanding professionally managed hospitals, which need specially trained professionals. Stagnation too appears to be a far fetched dream as of now.

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