Musings: Management Education for the next Decade

When Management education was introduced in India in 1950, it was focussed on solving the management issues of 1950, namely providing management professionals and research that will solve the issues related to factory production, banking professionals, marketing professionals, supply chain and organizational structures that were focused on large behemoth organizations that generated the necessary jobs are were perceived to be the backbone of a fast industrializing nation.

However, almost seventy years later, the nature of the economy has rapidly changed. The lines between formal and informal has blurred and ever increasing number of jobs are being created due to technology or are supported by technology such as ecommerce, cab aggregation, room aggregation etc. More importantly, setting up of large industries do not generate the number of jobs proportionate to the capital deployed. Increasingly, production is getting automated and jobs are getting created in supply chain and in new innovating startups as well as in MSME’s.

Hence, for the country to switch gears from an economic pattern perspective, one would need research and management talent that can manage the new pattern of industry, wherein business is conducted by organizations that are very small, connected to each other dynamically through technology, and is able to co-opt in workers dynamically, thereby providing the much needed jobs and the growth in the economy.

This would imply a paradigm shift in the key areas of management that are (a) finance, (b) marketing, (c) organizational behaviour, (d) operations research & production and ( e) Systems.

Finance will have to grapple with issues such as how to do credit rating of dynamically formed firms with short history, no collateral and small size.

Marketing would need to understand how the internet, mobile and the new generation of digital native consumers are to be reached and the issues of marketing, both B2C and B2B, in this new, fast evolving construct.

Organizational behaviour would need to grapple with challenges in managing a loose trans-border confederation of small firms, unlike the earlier issues of managing large behemoths.

Operations Research would need to figure out how technology enabled supply chain and production will work in a world which is not only having technological leaps such as 3D printing for local production and driverless vehicles as well as drones for delivery but also is largely cross-border in nature with increasing Trade Facilitation making it easier to conceptualize optimized trans border supply chains.

Finally, Systems would need to understand the systems requirement which had become the backbone of any firm and industry, and without which, no industry can realistically operate with any reasonable scale. With that comes a whole host of issues in terms of cyber security, decisions on using cloud or building cloud, adherence to local laws on IT, getting appropriately skilled manpower etc.

To be able to produce managers who can provide leadership to the industries in this fast evolving economic construct, it is critically urgent necessity to quickly change the curriculums that are being used in the management schools, if India has to power forward in its economic ambitions. However, to develop such curriculum, intense research is urgently required in the above areas, in the Indian context, and be able to come out with a curriculum that accurately gauges that new pattern of economy, understands the economic linkages to rural India and factors in the rapid urbanization of India. Through this process, a robust curriculum needs to emerge, which helps creates entrepreneurs and managers who can then create the desperately needed jobs in India.

Institutions such as Department of Management Studies (DMS) at IIT Delhi, are better placed to provide leadership in evolving this new curriculum and in provide the research inputs as it has better access to the technologies that are evolving across the spectrum – from electronics to computer science, to mechanical and chemical and so on, and everything in-between, where the real innovation is happening. Therefore, in partnership with the engineering departments, institutions such as DMS can co-create the new pattern of management education that is able to create professionals who can provide the leadership for a new kind of economy that is emerging from Extreme Automation.