Peter Drucker, the management guru, said that management is about doing things right while leadership is about doing the right things. Our business schools, ironically, have been a little off in teaching either it seems.
I have engaged with more than one top-tier business school in the country to varying capacity. Hopefully, my opinion won’t be dismissed as coming from “the other side.” My experience and opinions are mostly about business education, after all.
Established in 1966, the first ever business school of Bangladesh is the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) which operates under the University of Dhaka. Both public and private universities back then launched their business education programs in the ensuing years to keep up with the growing demand for BBAs and MBAs among young adults and the industry in general.
Despite parents’ initial uncertainties about business education, and their traditional preference towards engineering and medical professions, the popularity of business education has been increasing ever since.
As mentioned, I have worked as a full-time and part-time faculty in quite a few public and private universities since 1993. We knew that public universities were constrained by capacity and, among other issues, session jams. So the emergence of the private sector in higher education came as a sigh of relief, and was graciously welcomed by the business community.
The hard-core corporate executives, including myself, looked forward to meeting a bunch of impressive new interviewees during recruitment. The parents were glad to have more alternatives, and students were excited to find flexible and dynamic course offerings which were more aligned with that of the Western world.
But how many of these expectations have been, and are being met, in reality?
Regretfully, not many. The country’s economic landscape has been changing rapidly. Local corporate houses are catching up to global standards at a faster pace than ever before. But our business schools have failed to keep pace in terms of the curriculum and quality of faculty. IBA has been an exception, but there’s so much more that they can do.
Unlike medical and engineering graduates, when it comes to business graduates, the market wants “ready to run from day one” professionals. They need to be trainable, yes, but we expect them to be somewhat trained already. Business schools can’t be run-of-the-mill theory-cramming centres.
You don’t have to take my word for it, just take a look at how Ivy League business schools are run, or even the IIMs from our neighbouring country.
In terms of merit, we are not behind, as made evident by our graduates who shine abroad as both students and professionals. Why must we lag behind when it comes to the process itself then? What excuse do we have when, technologically, we are just as capable?
Business schools employ so-called “student teachers” to teach courses in business education. I find it unfair for both the student and the teacher. While a medical and engineering valedictorian is capable enough to teach students right away, a business teacher needs to have some experience within the industry.
How does one teach career management if she or he never had a career of her or his own?
The teacher usually has no hands-on experience in or about the corporate world, which creates text-book-oriented and inward-looking faculty members. The archaic model of the teacher sitting in a chair and dictating the same class notes for 10 years in the same monotonous tone cannot be a sustainable practice in business schools, or any school for that matter.
Visiting faculties and top executives are often invited to take one or two courses. If the busy CEO does not have a passion for teaching and merely agrees so as to not upset his good friend in the university, it creates a lack of ownership among teachers and disappointment among students.
To that end, we must do our part to support the busy executives by providing capable teaching assistants to free their time and let them focus on teaching rather than “house-keeping” matters.
The input and output of a business school are its students and efficient graduates. In order to reach break-even point, financially, some universities are forced to take in a minimum number of students every semester. When the focus shifts to quantity from quality, there is nothing worse.
VCs should be prepared to bear some loss in the short term so as to not compromise on intake quality. The alumni can play a role here by arranging grants and donations to minimize the gap. Large business houses can come forward too, as we have seen Mahindra and Tata do with Harvard.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: We have too many business graduates.
We have compromised quality for quantity. Seeing the popularity of IBA BBAs and MBAs, every business school has made their specialized programs into BBAs and MBAs. We don’t see any more Masters in Finance or Masters in Management. Now CAs dictate the corporate world while MBAs simply watch.
MBA and BBA degrees are identical in our business schools. An MBA should be recommended for the professionals who have had minimum work experience. My two cents to the business grads: Get yourself engaged in a job, see a bit of the world, and then join the MBA program.
It is not a degree to enrich your resume, it should be a rigorous program to turn you into a hard nut to crack -- who thinks before he does.
Good business schools are a must to support the economic growth we all aspire to attain in the coming years. Going forward, business schools must look to attract distinguished teachers and researchers from abroad and encourage students to conduct research on Bangladesh and global issues.
Such infrastructural and behavioural changes are imperative, because otherwise, existing issues will hold back students from achieving their true potential. And if they fail, we fail.
Mamun Rashid is a leading banker and a business professor.
