Indian MBA programs at one point of time were gateways to corporate success but now-a-days it requires being fine-tuned to address the changed realities of workplace. Today’s workplaces are global, in market concerns they address; organizational structures they follow; and professional competencies they demand. The Indian management education has to respond to these demands through judicious selection of priorities while designing courses to impart knowledge of foreign languages, cross-cultural management, global sourcing of products and services, globalization- international diplomatic relations and global politics. In functional specializations, papers like International HRM, International Marketing, Global Supply Chain Management, etc. should be given its due importance.
While deciding on career choices, students should choose subjects which will give them confidence to start local and go global. The management of B-schools should wake up to the fact that internships with MNCs, engaging professionals from MNCs in classroom guest lectures, giving faculties exposure to work in foreign university environments and attracting foreign students to the program are gradually becoming the competitive advantage for survival of B- schools.
Finally, in the context of the above, a mere replication of the western management education system might not be always effective when we try to make business-ready managers with objectives to “start local and go global.” The goodness of the foreign management education system is in its innovative pedagogy, offering diversified electives catering to niche areas and research orientation. These should be appreciated and implemented.
For ages, Indian children have been brought up through story-telling by their grannies. The methodology of understanding and developing human nature through our great epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata and Holy Scriptures has caught the imagination of the world. On similar lines, addressing Indian realities in story lines of corporate cases discussed in the class with emphasis on changes in macro-environment of business, governmental policies regulating private and public enterprises, heterogeneity in the business-friendliness of governments’ in different states of India, etc. are to be included. Recently, lot of anecdotes of entrepreneurs has come in Indian market in story book formats also. In those books we get insights from the growth of the Indian small businesses and first generation start-ups, their success stories from start to scaling up and live experiences of doing businesses in India. Even the failure stories will be of great learning for aspiring entrepreneurs to learn from others’ experience. Another expression of the story-telling methodology can be producing movies and plays related to complexities of different types of business, portraying challenges of managing human, physical and financial resources, responding to changing market realities, etc. They can be produced as tele-films to communicate the various trouble shooting solutions for Indian business environmental problems. These indigenous developments can create a better teaching-learning scenario for the aspiring managers and entrepreneurs for times to come.
Written by Dr. Sudipto Bhattacharya, who is an Associate Prof.
– IB, Entrepreneurship and Strategy at VITBS