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Ganesh Melatur

What happens when like-minded individuals get together? A discussion. This is what happened when some management professionals got together, presented papers, debated and then moved away to form new clubs with extended horizons.

Some few years ago, we, a small group of like-minded individuals with professional qualifications in business management, combined with basic degrees in engineering or accounting, were talking one day about the wealth of management knowledge that was strewn across the print media and on the Internet. We were interested in keeping abreast of current thinking but wanted to balance this interest with the demands on our time due to our other professional and personal commitments. We got around this dilemma quite uniquely, and in the process, strengthened our small group, and also managed individual, personal growth. Similar time-pressed individuals and groups, today, may do well to ponder over our method, and perhaps build a group-learning-and-teaching business school as we nearly did.

We started out with a management club that had a single agenda of sharing among its four members, topics of interest in management that each of its members had encountered that week in print or on the Internet. The four founding members would meet regularly on Fridays, late evenings, past working hours. Each member would make a management presentation to all the other members, covering in depth an article, or summarise in-depth, a book. These presentations were a must, and were not to exceed 15 minutes. If the presentation had to be necessarily longer, such as one on a book, then it could carry over to the next week or utmost to the week after that. Copies of the presentation and/or the article along with annotations and references would be made available to those interested.

Each member had to be necessarily present, and hence business tours, and personal leave, were arranged so as to ensure a minimum 35 meetings every year. Membership was restricted to the four of us only, and thus could we ensure group harmony and cohesion, along with frequency-matching on interests, idioms and turn of phrases.

While in the initial sessions, each member's presentation was limited to what was available personally in terms of books or magazines, slowly the idea of pooling in resources in order to subscribe to management journals and magazines or books was implemented. And then suddenly we discovered that our horizons were thrown open literally wide.

After each Friday evening session, we discovered we had easily digested a concisely presented summary of some of the best thoughts in recent management literature. This was better than simply subscribing to a service that briefly presented recent management literature (though I doubt if any such service exists even today), because for each article or book carefully studied and presented by oneself, one also received back three others, similarly worked upon, for free. Since subjects and articles were intuitively chosen to the group's liking and also because the thoughts were vigorously presented and animatedly discussed, all within 15 minutes each, a sense of urgency and purpose was imparted to each session.

Apart from providing extensive and exhaustive access to the latest in management theory, these Friday sessions improved our presentation skills, making them succinct and racy. They also introduced richer semantics into our communications, expanded our vocabulary and added substance to our arguments. Group cohesion was also strengthened.

It was only a question of time before these sessions started receiving more attention from others in the organisation. The bosses wanted to be a part of the club too and so did very many of our peers, colleagues and subordinates. We suddenly found all of our personal investments in magazine and journal subscriptions, and in the purchase of books, unobtrusively and matter-of-factly reimbursed, without our even asking for it.

Unfortunately, at this time the founding group suffered a split, because one of the founding members quit the organisation and another was transferred to the Head Office. The two remaining members then opportunistically dissolved the original club, and formed each in turn one such club with basically the same purpose in mind. They retained a majority of the original club's founding principles in both the start-ups, but increased group strength from four to six members and curtailed time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes per presentation. More importantly, they also allowed in passive onlookers, but on a condition that throughout the presentations the onlookers be just that, passive and looking on.

Over time, instead of covering only business management books and articles appearing in the business press, the two new clubs also started including discussions on live case-studies, and this added a lot of pep to the sessions and also to their sense of being grounded in reality. At times, the two clubs were also used by the bosses as a discussion base for various alternative strategies, or to put before its members an important management viewpoint. At other times, only pure bonhomie prevailed. The management club had evolved into an exclusive club. And I believe it has remained that.

But, I wonder, where did the learning school go? We started it as a club and it ended up as one, with learning being edged out by uninformed debate. We should have called it the working business school and kept it for learning only. But maybe that was the only lesson we did not learn in our school.

Picture by Shaju John

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