Diary Of A Business School Alum: What I Did Not Learn …

A wishlist … of the small but significant things we should have been taught alongside business. How to be happy and make people happy, that it’s no less to know less, celebrating failures and caring for your health and that of the planet.

While I have been fortunate to study business management at IIM Ahmedabad, the acronym MBA (Master of Business Administration) for me, most accurately expands to “Manager by Accident”. Smitten by architect Louis Kahn’s insightful design, the translucent arched corridors and structured brick walls punctuated by imposing arches casting poetic shadows, I was obsessed with the idea of belonging to IIMA by studying “something” they taught. A little pluck and lots of luck later, I found myself with admissions to both—the doctoral Fellows Programme (PhD) and the two-year PGP (MBA).

I opted for the latter. While an MBA from IIMA was a gateway to the “corporate world” for many of my friends who came from the IITs, RECs, SRCCs, and Stephen’s, for me, an architect, it was the heaven I sought in terms of the sheer design sensibility—monumental modernism. That IIMA also was a sought-after institution in terms of career was pure serendipity for me.

Looking back, the IIMA experience was a rewarding one—a rigorous curriculum packed with insightful cases from the best universities globally taught by outstanding faculty. It was a well-rounded programme that gave us the “hard’ skills (quantitative analysis, economics, operations, accounting, marketing, finance, strategy) and a firm footing in the ‘soft’ skills (human resources, organisational behaviour, communications). Prof. AK Jain and Prof Rama Bijapurkars’s question series—“Who is the consumer? What does she want? And what role are you (and your brand) playing in giving her that?”—introduced us to the jobs-to-be-done concept before Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen popularised it in The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book that came out in 1997 and talked about how companies can do everything “right” and yet falter in the market.

There were others like Prof Anil Gupta, Prof Handa and Prof Basant, who inspired entrepreneurship long before the term became fashionable, and the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) was set up in IIMA.

While we were considered the chosen few, blessed with the best India had to offer, I do have a few wishes around what IIMA could have taught us.

We learned interpersonal dynamics and collaboration in theory and practice. This was amongst the most useful playbooks we took from IIMA, but I wish IIMA helped every student understand and celebrate their individual ‘sevens’ and chart a futuristic vision and purpose that would be unique and compelling rather than being part of the ubiquitous rat race.

I figured that defining the problem accurately is only half the job done. While the infamous Written Analysis and Communication (WAC) course, which ran throughout the first year of the programme, drilled the algorithm of situation analysis, problem definition and structuring and solving issues in a variety of contexts, I wish we learned to appreciate the grey and the abstract more. There are many “right” answers, but there was one that was “more right”, and it was the IIMA student’s dharma to find it. The term Conceptual Clarity and Contextual Familiarity was brandished in every alternate sentence—“is ka CCCF batao?”—and hence had to be abbreviated.

In a volatile, uncertain, and incomprehensible world taking decisions without facts was believed to be imperative, but I wish IIMA taught us to be comfortable with not knowing everything and navigating and thriving from that space. The postscript on this is quite cheerful though—last year, as a part of an alumni cohort, I attended a course on business strategy called “Elephants and Cheetahs” by Prof Saral Mukherjee. After every session, the award-winning teacher would make all students recite after him, “I know NOTHING! I know NOTHING”.

The IIMA enjoyed a fantastic industry relationship and a terrific alumni base which meant exceptional placements and networks, but I wish IIMA would have taught us how to rise above transaction analysis to build and nurture personal and professional relationships and turn these networks into communities.

Today we see several schools and organisations putting purpose first and showcasing business as a force to strive towards “good”. One can be dismissive of this “woke capitalism”, but this approach is important in the face of climate change, inequality and scarcity of resources. Twenty-five years ago, the situation was starkly different. The high quality of talent, intense competition and a culture that celebrated individual victories ensured that all of us strived hard to become “go-getters”, but I do wish that my alma mater also imbibed a culture that celebrated diversity, failures and collective success by telling us that there is merit in being “go-givers”.

While we learned the difference between managers and leaders and different styles of leadership, I wish we were also taught that leadership is a service too. If the principles of service design were to be applied to leadership—purpose, behaviours, interactions, role modelling, continuous learning, and improvement loops—those would have made a phenomenal difference to the impact and happiness of the teams I led early on in my career.

While the old world needed quantitative analysts (quants) and poets—the new one needs quants who are poets and vice versa. I wish IIMA went beyond breadth and offered an interwoven approach to the curriculum by combining core business subjects like finance, marketing, supply chain and others with data science, technology, design thinking, psychology, user experience, communication and capstone projects, which could have equipped me with a more holistic perspective of contexts and opportunities.

Saving the most important one for last—“all of us have only two homes—our body and our earth”, I wish we were also taught to understand sustainability. Most business leaders haven’t cared enough about these for the last 70 years which has led to unsustainable growth and a higher burden of disease.

I wish IIMA had taught us to appreciate and care for environment in a way that would help us achieve a balance. Sustainable living and sustainable business should be foundation courses and integral parts of every course so that we are able to work for a better future together and look at the past and with that knowledge, march towards the future like Kahn did in his design that combined humanism and regionalism together to create monumental design with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the “spirit of commonness” and imagination. The IIMA building reflects these and goes beyond man-centered scales and forms to represent assembly of transcendent nature.

While I remain truly indebted to IIMA where I “learned to learn” and got the opportunity to work at Unilever where I “learned to do”, I wish we learned more about people and how we can build on happiness brick by brick.

Pushkaraj Shenai CEO & Wholetime Director, Lakmé Lever

(This appeared in the print as 'What I Did Not Learn …')