The road to the corner office
Mugging up management lessons does
not a manager make. Master the concepts out there in the real world.
If your idea of management education
is learning by rote from books, the corner office will never be yours. To win
your spurs as a manager, try applying difficult management concepts in the real
world even before you earn the degree.
Management education, in its actual
sense, remains incomplete till the students put into practice those concepts.
Mathematics, History and Economics can be learned from books. But not
Marketing, Business Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Consumer Behaviour and so on.
Management students have only one
road to take: either learning by doing or experiential learning. A manager who
has only textbook knowledge falters when asked to make crucial decisions.
Management is defined as organising,
planning, controlling and directing an organisation’s resources to achieve its
objectives. To be a successful manager, gain experience in all these functions.
Marketing students know the basic
concept called 4Ps — product, price, placement and promotion — or the marketing
mix. Marketers employ this set of controllable tools to achieve goals.
Every product has its own 4Ps,
differentiating it from another. Many students just mug them up for
examinations, without knowing their value. Knowledge that cannot be put into
practice is no knowledge at all. Ideally, students should have a chance to do
marketing in the real world. Since it is almost impossible, other methods,
called experiential learning, have to be adopted.
At present, many options allow to
create an artificial business environment. Business simulation is one. Here, in
a computer-simulated situation, students have a chance to employ the tools and
learn by themselves how their decisions can lead to success or failure in
business. However, business follows no mathematical rules, and so, business
simulation has only a limited scope. Nevertheless, students get a chance to put
into practice what they have learned and can understand how their decisions
affect outcome.
The most widely used experiential
learning method is the case method, proposed by Harvard Business School as far
back as the 1950s. A business case is a verbal representation of a real-life
business situation that puts the student in the role of a participant. The
basic difference between textbook learning and case method is that textbooks
represent reality in a logical and coherent manner, whereas real business
situations are fluid and involve a lot of uncertainties.
A case will involve a significant
business issue or issues and have enough information on which to base
conclusions and no stated conclusions. The teacher assumes the role of a
facilitator and guides the students to arrive at a conclusion by using the
theories that they have learned from books. Here, more than the result, the way
in which one arrives at the decision is the critical element. The idea is not
to teach the subject but to put what they have learned from books in real-life
situations. Let us assume that a company wants to launch a product. It may be
new or a variation of an existing product. The critical decision to make is how
to price it. Several theories are there on pricing. However, the decision
depends mainly on the nature of the product and the competitive environment. If
the product is priced high, there is a possibility that demand will be low or
it will invite intense competition. If priced low, the company may end up in
the red. So, the pricing method to adopt is not straightforward. Business
simulation or case method can expose the student to the intricacies of pricing.
Apart from the above techniques,
many B-schools are trying to use the Internet by connecting the teacher with
the students by forming groups, allowing free interaction. Software is
available for conducting case method through the Net.
These learning methods are, by no
means, exhaustive. Newer and newer methods are being looked into by various
management education institutions. Experiential learning is not a substitute
for real-life learning.
Abdul Karim Musaliar, Executive Director, TKM
Institute of Management,
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