The Hindu Business Line : Learning to manage `tomorrow'

Higher management education in India began in the 1960s, with the two institutes of management at Ahmedabad and Calcutta. Few would know however that the committee, which examined the need for them, recommended that India should first focus on beefing up basic education at school level, given the illiteracy level prevailing then. Yet, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was strongly in favour of getting management off to an early start, as a national priority, with the help of the best in the world, and so the IIMs were born.

It was an unusual co-operative effort involving Harvard and MIT, support from the Ford Foundation, as well as the State and Central governments, and the business community.

However, the Administrative Staff College at Hyderabad, launched still earlier along the lines of the Staff College at Henley on Thames, UK, focussed on the preparation of career civil servants to shoulder the enormous managerial tasks involved in running a growing planned economy. The private sector also participated in its programmes, which soon built up a reputation for its facilities and a relaxed ambience.

The IIMs quickly assumed a disproportionately high scarcity value, simply because of the numbers of the best and the brightest applying to get in. By the 1980s the degree was clearly seen as a lifetime asset, available however only to the cream of ambitious youth, a pole to vault you across the forbidding gulf dividing the affluent urban upper class from the merely middle class.

Somewhere along the line, in the process of becoming the crowning achievement of a young person's scholastic career, the schools lost their way. Feeding the appetite for more money and careers by becoming competitive placement factories (admittedly necessary in some sense) took over everything; it overshadowed the main purpose of the institutions, including creation and dissemination of relevant new knowledge through research. Declining real salaries of the faculty and the politicised atmosphere inside many of the B-schools, among other things, have further contributed to the drop in quality of the academics — compared to the counterparts in any other calling. Thus there is a widespread feeling that the schools that teach people how to manage are not in themselves a very good demonstration of the subject.

Meanwhile, the world of the 21st century has moved on. It is unrecognisably different from the one the Nehruvian socialists lived in. The composition of the Sensex itself is an index. It consists today mostly of companies unheard of when the early management graduates were looking for jobs. New industries have emerged that were undreamt of then; the world is digitised and full of instant devices, personalised, miniaturised and mobile. If a manager has to live and work within this world, how well is he (or should he be) prepared to tackle it?

Think of a middle level manager, who is ten years into his career in, say, accounting, production, marketing, or service functions, in any organisation. He would have another 25 years of active life to look forward to and most of what he learnt as a young man is already obsolete. New knowledge and new concepts are emerging which would have been heresy in the late-1980s.

The meaning, of the very existence and purpose of a firm is being questioned — or twisted out of shape. The notion of national barriers is challenged by the Internet. The iPod and the Napster phenomenon have extended customised personal entertainment to new levels and posed issues about the intellectual property rights which could not have been raised before. Data proliferation on the Web is accelerating at an unimaginable rate. Innovative methods of collaborative learning such as bulletin boards, chat rooms, free access to encyclopaedia and the new phenomenon of community-based learning such as blogs are growing.

More methods of acquiring information other than the conventional ways of reading a book, listening to a lecture and taking notes, will doubtless come into use in the near future. How does one keep the manager constantly refreshed and updated to cope with change, of which the examples are only a random selection?

One answer is fairly clear at once. We can no longer merely depend on the answers to specific issues, trotted out by pundits of the past, however erudite and thoughtful they may have been in their heyday. Some concepts and ideas are truly never entirely outdated, of course, such as cost of time, balancing risk and return, consumer perceptions making up reputations and brands, the magic of organisational culture and climate changing the work experience — to mention a few.

Yet, what we need is neither a fresh set of answers to new challenges as they emerge nor a flavour of the month approach to new knowledge. Rather, our crucial need is to develop the capacity to learn from our own experience in a reflective way, based on fundamentals about people, systems and the ecology of business.

A systemic view of the business world is the first prerequisite. It places the manager, his company, the industry, the economy and the international economy in a series of concentric circles, so that action on one must be taken bearing in mind the interaction of the circles or systems.

A second priority is to stop seeing the human being as an independent actor in control over an environment to which he is an outsider. The manager himself, in other words, is part of the problem. The way he shapes, frames and approaches the problem changes what it is — and of course the resolution of any problems or difficulties. In other words, learning is never in the abstract, but contextual.

You make your case material as you go along; you are the author, teacher and student at the same time. This is in keeping with the spirit of what some profound thinkers like Chris Argyris and Revans used to refer to as Action Learning. In learning is the action, and vice versa. The two are not separate and sequential steps. This blows the older mental model of "learn first and try it out later" out of the water.

If we need to twist and bend a few ideas borrowed from an unrelated discipline, we do so by all means and perhaps contribute to new knowledge as we go along. After all, both the nanotechnology and biology at cellular level have some things in common.

In learning of this sort, another piece of mental baggage that we as managers need to jettison is compartmentalised, functional thinking. Organisational actions are seldom only about any one departmental function. Integration used to be the popular word at one time, but let us remember that one needs to integrate only what is already divided; if it is not split up in the first place, then the holism is already built in.

We might well have to approach new moves in professional education in this new perspective, that is to say, not break up issues and problems atomistically into subjects — and then try to bring them all together, but see the totality, and the interconnected complexity of phenomena, in the first place. For example, the attitude to bringing about organisational change or motivating employees would undergo a transformation, if this approach were adopted. We would at least drop the mechanistic, formula approaches, borrowed from bestsellers.

In summary, the new manager education that we need is a good deal different from the management courses that used to be run for practising managers off site for a few days at a time, borrowing essentially the same texts and cases from the material used in the longer degree programmes. Rather, we need to convert the factory and the office, indeed the entire organisation into a laboratory for continuing professional learning. It implies revisiting the notions of what it means to think differently — how to learn and how to think, but not teach mature adults what they ought to think. That is something they will figure out for themselves, if they can practise learning-cum-action in a combination. It is this revolution in thinking — about the very role and place of manager education — that needs the greatest attention of anyone concerned with the grooming of managers of today for the morrow.

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