What I didn't learn at B-school...

In a perfect world every product/service would deliver exactly what we expected of it. The Sun would be shining, the birds singing and there would be beer flowing out of taps. Instead, we live in a world where pretty much nothing turns out the way we expect it to. The uncertainty can be pretty irritating at times, but also makes our lives so much more interesting. So, here's a short list of all I expected to learn in B-school but surprisingly didn't!! A disclaimer at this point: Before you read the rest of the post and get the impression that I emerged from B-school the same dodo that I entered, I must clarify that this was indeed not the case. I emerged from school a dodo who had learned a lot of new stuff that will likely (hopefully) come in handy at some point in his life. I just didn't learn about the stuff in this here post...

My biggest grouse, unquestionably, is that I went through the entire course without coming across the words “Peter Drucker” or “Alfred Sloan” once. Which, I believe is truly fantastic!! The aforementioned gentlemen can lay strong claim to being the founding fathers of modern management. And I truly believe that no management course can be complete without some inclusion of the teachings of Drucker and Sloan. Imagine going through your high school without one mention of Newton’s three laws. The omission is pretty much in the same league.

Another complaint, albeit a much smaller one, is that the central theme running through all the education dispensed as part of the contemporary management course is that of “maximizing shareholder value”, as if that’s the Gospel truth. It’s as if an overwrought manager, burdened with the responsibility of balancing the conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders in his firm, clambered atop Mt Sinai and cried out for divine guidance and the good Lord responded, “Thou shalt maximize shareholder value, boy!!”, and there was much rejoicing… The entire argument of maximizing shareholder value is based on the premise that rewards should be commensurate with the financial risk you are exposed to. But how do we know that reserving the biggest rewards for those taking the greatest financial risks is the right way to run a firm? And how do you balance the interests of multiple stakeholders that make up a firm and its ecosystem? Unfortunately, I am as ignorant of the answers to these fundamental questions today as I was before I started the course.

Finally, there’s the small matter of the treatment of ethics and CSR in MBA courses. The prominent role played by some former Ivy League geniuses in perpetrating the greatest financial meltdown of the past million years or so has painted the lot of management practitioners as a bunch of soulless, blood-thirsty and greedy Shylocks constantly devising new and exotic ways of separating honest folk from their hard-earned money. And in the light of what has transpired over the past decade or so, I must admit a manager’s standing is somewhere between that of a vulture and a sewer rat. One would have imagined that after Enron and WorldCom, ethics would have been front and center of any management course and it would be a while another incident of spectacular excesses happened again. But we didn’t have to wait long at all, did we? The current mother of all excesses can be considered a damning indictment of the current B-school model and its singular focus on the financial aspects of business.

I was still in B-school when the financial crisis exploded in spectacular fashion. While the unfolding crisis was analyzed in class, what I found very surprising was that most instructors still treated ethics as a very personal subject and usually steered well clear of engaging students in a debate on business ethics. The focus was so firmly on the “hard” skills and subjects – finance, strategy and the like – that “soft” subjects such as ethics and CSR received alarmingly little airtime. Hardly surprising then, that you have so many in the top management making “errors of judgment”. The crisis is a golden opportunity to realign business courses to the needs of the times, but history is full of opportunities lost. I guess the next crisis will tell us what we did and didn’t learn from this one. And I personally believe we won’t have to wait long to find out. So, until then, ladies and gentlemen, sit back and watch the madness unfold in this theater of the absurd… cheers…