ICC of Management Education in India

New session of PGDM/MBA for the 2010-12 batch has begun at number of B-schools. Once again the faculty would appraise the students about whatever has happened in the corporate war games till now & what they expect in future. The faculty & students would once more cross their intellectual swords in the classrooms to suggest various new moves & attitudes to handle business game plan in an efficient manner.

The mother of all questions facing a student would be how to approach the learning at the PGDM/MBA program? I believe the greenhorns in the MBA has onerous responsibility to gather the information/Intelligence about the industry sector in which they wish to pursue their career, appreciate the Corporate profiles of the major players in global & domestic market and develop competencies to be approach a situation in a creative manner.

A student must select a broad sector of industry for intensive learning about its regulatory environment, business processes and the SWOT profile. It would be ideal if you focus on your domain as at the entry level there wouldn’t be much scope of work for a generalist executive.  Gather all important data about the sector of your choice in general.

Follow it up with intensive study of major domestic & global players in the industry sector of your choice. Go to their websites, access the Company reports and rummage through their associations & trade bodies agenda. This would help you understand their strategic importance and nature.

Foremost you must be able to develop your creative abilities to the maximum. In the age of google, a smart executive need not bother about information availability as much as the ability to use that information in a creative manner to put together a new solution.  A smart executive has to be more creative than the counterpart in the new post info revolution era.

Thats what i call ICC of management education in India.

Need for a higher degree of probability of outcome

Despite extensive study & advancements in the field of  marketing management, there are few marketing managers who could underwrite the success of a  Product Launch ?  Corollary could be the business enterprise itself & the prevalence of uncertainty cited as a rule almost. If it is not possible to predict the quality of a tool & clarity in a concept, why go on pontificating about it as the must know aspect in the business studies?

I am in the know of few Marketing Managers who say that they have the ability to underwrite the success of their plans. Wow, the management teachers at hallowed business schools keep shouting about the existence of ‘alternatives’ as against ‘the solutions’. They say the strategic alternative you select is just another alternative that looks most probable & that as a rule there are no the solutions to the problems of business world.

Let me clarify it further. Assuming that you wish to launch a product after estimating its demand and fine tuning your business plans relative to your goals but still no one would say for surety about the degree of success citing of the project as a consequence of environmental uncontrollable factors. Well management science and/or art is not mathematical in its nature. But we require certain concepts, tools & practices that have predictable outcome so that risks could be minimized.

What use is the gun that cannot hit target for surety?   Let us list marketing management tools that offer security of known outcome and those managers who could eliminate the variability altogether.