Course Correction

The pressure to discover your passion and follow your heart is causing  students to increasingly ask whether an MBA is still relevant? Couple this with the excitement of entrepreneurship and it spells ‘struggle’ for the traditional MBA. It isn’t surprising that fresh MBAs seem keener to join entrepreneurs (some with MBAs, but many without one) who generate soaring valuations rather than go for traditional favourites like finance and consulting. The MBA has always been a professional degree preparing aspiring young men and women for successful careers as managers and leaders. However, as the world changes dramatically, so does the definition of these roles. Therefore, MBA courses must evolve so that graduates acquire superior judgement, ability to influence and heightened self-awareness.

Superior judgement: In a highly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambi­guous) world, the traditional struc­tured approaches to strategy, execution and time-to-market have become obsolete. Managers are taught to work with clarity and precision that is next to impossible in the 21st century.

Instead, the need is for comfort with ambiguity. Managers must quickly read situations, recognise patterns, make trade-offs, take bets, put a stake in the ground, accept failure, move on, adapt and keep repeating this cycle. An MBA programme could address this by teaching critical thinking, helping students to connect the dots and embrace diversity—all elements of a liberal education. Also integral for better judgement is learning in context.

Ability to influence: Beyond communication skills, emp­loyers miss the ‘ability to influence’ in recruits. Influencing is a key subset of the foundation of all businesses and professions—building relationships. Getting a customer, partner, client, employee, team member, investor, regulator or policy-maker to change her stand and agree with your opinion is no mean feat. The underlying need is to be trustworthy and authentic. Traditionally bundled together as “soft skills” and left to executive education programmes, influencing, mentoring and building trust are in fact capabilities that are as hard as they get. Research, scholarship and practice in these subjects have now evolved to a point that they must be included in an MBA curriculum.

Heightened self-awareness: Leaders need to understand that to lead others they first need to lead their own self. Most people perform lower than their potential because of a lack of self-awareness. What typically gets in the way is professional arrogance, the need to always be in charge and acute discomfort with negative feedback or change. Today, much organisational energy is expended because people will neither listen nor accept that they are wrong. Not only does this affect their business judgement, it makes them terrible teammates, bosses and leaders. Young MBAs need to understand that the kind of person they want to be and the kind of behaviour they will demonstrate will be bigger factors in their career success than what they do.

Obviously, the above three areas are relevant to MBA students across roles and organisations. They are even more relevant to those setting up their own businesses because they do not have a structured, institutional support. The question then  is: why aren’t they being taught already? Well, there are three answers to that. One, that much of this content is not easy to teach. A course on self-awareness, for instance, would fall into the bucket of ‘experiential learning’ and require expert teaching and facilitation, which is still in short supply. Two, a widespread change in curriculum will take time, as all transitions do. Three, several schools with the vision either to create something different or to stay relevant and stay ahead are already offering a “reimagined MBA”. The rest may want to avoid playing catch-up.

(Pramath Raj Sinha is the founder and managing director of 9.9 Media. He is also the founding dean of ISB and a founder and trustee of Ashoka University.)