Management Education: Glorified Nonsense

26th February, 2010
Special acknowledgement for this post: Priyanka Shalini - for giving me the inspiration to write on this one and Prof. Padmashree Radhaswamy inspiring Priyanka to giving a presentation on the same.
Students over the past few years have this dream of becoming a management graduate. In simple words if you ask a student in the final year of graduation,what their future plans are, they would reply that, "I would like to go in for my MBA".
As a result of this we see that huge crowd of prospective students inside the IIM's and others in the same league for the purpose of ruining each others happiness through performances in group discussions and interviews.
Over the past few years a degree in management has come into great demand by corporates. As a result of this we see engineers sacrificing the noble designation of creators and are running after the coveted title we fondly call as "Manangers".
After making it to the 3rd semester @ ISHRD, I have finally figured out one thing.
Some people tend to ask why is a degree in management required?
Let me give you a few examples -

• Management - It is in all business and human organization activity is the act of getting people together and accomplish desired goals and objectives. This is what we learn in business school. Our general orientation towards this concept is very generic, something like "handling people or things"
• Leadership - It is the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the support and aid of others in the accomplishment of a common task. In normal circumstances, we would just wind up on this concept by saying that everyone is a leader - from Mahatma Gandhi to Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
• Cognitive Dissonance - It is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. This is a concept from Individual Behaviour. In normal circumstances we would not give a damn about this concept.

These are just a few examples. There are many more for all of you to find out.

In the end, we have to understand that what we learn in management courses provides us the theoretical aspect of what we are set to encounter in our future (our jobs).

The theories of behaviour, learning and training are useful to make it through to the end of a hard day @ work as a HR professional.

The art of preparing a compensation manual or a performance appraisal system which would help us to prove to the workforce of the organization that a MBA HRM graduate is not just any fart who does not know how to shit.

It's true what Mr. Vikas Sethia said - We have to become HR professionals and not just HR managers.

A professional would be a flexible all rounder. A HR manager may slowly get phased out and might be seen carrying water bottles on the field of play.