Need to rethink MBA education

Post written by Anshul Gupta. Follow me on twitter.

Up gradation of knowledge and pedagogy in a B-school is a must for making students up to the mark to fight with emerging challenges. I am not going to discuss any of those shortcoming of that, because we know a lot about it already. But there are few things which can be done to make it better; things which many B-schools have already started doing:

Use of focus groups: recognizing a group of (6 to 10) students from the second year batch, often multiple groups to get their sense of what they are finding. What they liked and what they didn’t like about the business education.

Trilogy: three things that every professional education should provide:

· Knowing or knowledge

· Doing or skills

· Being or sense of purpose/identity

For many years, ever since the classic report by Carnegie & Ford in 1959, business education has been focused on knowing. They have been highly analytical. They taught economics, they taught statistics, finance and accounting…But much less emphasis on being or sense of purpose…what’s the role and responsibility of a business person in business today.

Applied work: One of the problems with B-school students is that they know a lot, but don’t know exactly how to put it in practice! They are a little weak in understanding business realities like: power, politics, hidden agendas and coalitions; the realities of implementations. A more applied work, like better interaction/frequent interaction with the current realities…

Understanding the 3Rs: Risk, restraints and regulations. The limits of the models we learn in a B-school. The understanding that world is not what we think it is.

[Some of my views (listed above) are the learnings drawn from my summer internship experience…:-) ]

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•