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Creaming off competition

Anjali Prayag

MBA. That perceived passport to successdom, with an unswerving demand for over two decades.

The counters dispensing this stamp are umpteen. India has over 750 schools offering this coveted programme. Every year, approximately 50,000 students graduate from B-schools across the country. But what is their standing in the career bazaar? How do Indi an corporates view management graduates from institutes other than the IIMs?

It's a well-known practice in management schools to treat students as products who are groomed to be sold in the corporate market. But a common gripe among HR circles is that these products are not packaged well enough by management institutes other than , perhaps, the IIMs.

Agrees Harish Bijoor, Chief Operating Officer, Zip Telecom Ltd., ``This accusation is certainly true. It happens all the time across a gamut of institutions that peddle management education in our country.''

But he's quick to point out that a mix of both approaches, that is, looking at the student as a customer and the corporate world as one too, is the essential direction that management education needs to take in the present and the near-term future. As he reasons it out, ``This is due to the fact that the student as customer is a perspective that can be useful at times. Particularly so as the student is the product that is seeking to be moulded.''

Corporate organisations are ever-changing entities. The environment of business is always on the morph mode. ``In such circumstances,'' says Bijoor, ``to peg the existing corporate and its needs as a static-point requirement would be a point of error to make.'' In his view, ``A mix of both approaches is essential because at the end of the day, you have to create and mould the `true-blue manager' who is able to adapt to circumstances new and ever-changing in the corporate flux ahead.'' But where non-IIMs are concerned, he, like Kaushik Gupta, Vice-President (Personnel), Madura Garments, agrees that these too have are a crop of talented young people. According to Gupta, the top 10 guys from any school are just about the same. Their aspirations are the sa me, they study as much as others, they try much harder and the commitment to perform is that much higher.

A major difference lies in a common view that non-IIM management grads have the confidence without the brashness of an IIM grad. ``It's the commitment that is the differentiating factor between success and failure,'' points out Gupta. Bijoor hastens to a dd, ``All generalisations are not necessarily true. There are a host of second-rung institutes as well, that are pretty savvy in what they create and what they offer to the corporate world.''

But what do headhunters who are in the thick of the matter have to say? Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO and Managing Director, Headhunters, Bangalore, an IIM-C alumnus, feels there's not much difference among graduates of the top 30 institutes. ``It's also true t hat many good boys don't get into the IIM.'' He further says that many of them would have got in but for the luck factor.

Even the curriculum in all these schools is unchanged for years. As Lakshmikanth sees it, companies as a rule head for the IIM campuses for recruitments because these institutes have done the filtering process and are already nourishing the best talent i n the country in their portals. ``It saves companies the trouble of finding the cream of talent in the country as the IIM has already done that.''

But all of them rue that apart from the top 20 or so, the other schools are not serious about preparing the candidate

for the realities of corporate life. The drill that management students must go through is understood only by the top schools.

What separates the grain from the chaff is the environment of learning and the exposure to situations that are closer to reality in the corporate world. While the industry agrees that the IIM graduate is certainly a whole tad better than the rest, it is all because of the size of the well they swim in. ``The bigger the well, better the perspective,'' says Bijoor.

But there's a third dimension to the issue. According to H.P. Miranda, Assistant General Manager, Human Resource Management, BPL Ltd., even in the IIMs there are the second and third level students. At recruitment time, old-economy companies are given Da y Two preference which puts ``tremendous pressure on us because we have to make do with the residual talent.'' The top talent gets taken up by consultancy firms anyway. ``Why should we settle for the second and third-best when we have equally good talent among the toppers from other institutes?'' he asks.

This year, at IIM, Bangalore, only 45 of the 180 applications from students were in favour of FMCG companies while IT, banking and consultancy firms attracted the rest.

But come March and all companies, old economy and new, are in the IIM recruiting mode. Says one HR manager who wished to remain unidentified, ``There's tremendous pressure by the company board of directors to recruit at least two to three IIM grads, does n't matter which one and what grade the candidate has achieved.'' He says his personal preference would be a top ranker from a second-rung institute rather than a poor second or third-grader from IIM.

A Bangalore-based HR manager says top rung institutes have outpriced themselves. ``The topper from a management school from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad or Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, are as good as the 20th rank from IIM. Actually anything beyond the 30th rank from IIM is a waste of money.''

But what goes against an MBA from a non-premier institute? ``The one big black hole is the lack of the system for preparing for the unexpected and the new,'' reveals Bijoor. According to him, management education in the country is today hooked on to the case study method in a big way. ``We need to ask if this actually prepares the mind in the manner it is meant to be prepared to grapple with the realities of the future.''

``The IIM output is certainly superior on one count, and that is the ability to think, ideate and conceptualise with a very macro set of parameters,'' opines Bijoor.

The general opinion among HR practitioners is that the non-IIM grads come with a disadvantage in the form of an inferiority complex. They accept defeat more easily and are more submissive. According to the HR fraternity, the single biggest plus point tha t the premier schools bring with them is excellent communication skills. The second and third-rung institute alumni lose out on this front. ``This, of course, is again a generalisation and like all generalisations has the risk of overdoing it,'' says the HR manager.

``The gap between an IIM graduate and a non-IIM may be in the sphere of competence, but definitely not in intelligence,'' says the HR manager. The former's survival skills are much better honed which is where the other schools slip up -- of course with t heir exceptions to the rule.

Lakshmikanth too has `encountered' IIM grads, who after three years are still at the Rs 3-4-lakh package. ``Some of them get burnt out very fast,'' he says. The truth of the matter is that the pressure cauldron situation does not exist in schools other t han the top ranking ones. And so the urge to perform does not exist.

Though toppers are self-driven with that crucial hallmark of self-discipline, the academic precincts still have a role in imbuing these qualities among the rest. One common reproach that the HR fraternity has against also-ran B-schools is that most of th em do not update the curriculum. On the contrary, the IIMs are the hubs of knowledge possessing state-of-the-art technology.

Many colleges offering MBAs are run on commercial lines and sustain on capitation fees. Unfortunately, the managements of these institutes want to make these self-sustaining propositions. ``The focus is not education but on making money. That's why compa nies have stopped recruiting from some of these schools,'' says a HR manager. The bitter truth is that these schools thrive on the aspirations of the people to possess an MBA. ``And they very well know how to stoke these aspirations,'' he adds.

But tucked underneath their graduation caps must be some advantages which the IIM yield cannot give?

``MBAs from a B-rung institute make up for it all by the fact that they do not hesitate to dirty their feet. They do not necessarily bask in the glory of his conceptual mind-set and are ready to learn things the hard way,'' according to Bijoor. They also come in with less rigid learning and are therefore more easily adapted to specific working conditions that prevail in all types of industries.

Gupta and Miranda agree. In their experience, IIM graduates are wary of sales jobs. Only product or brand management jobs excite them. ``And most of them aspire to be CEOs from Day One,'' contends the HR manager. Miranda prefers the second-rung institute s because their products ``are more practical and are open to discussion.''

Customarily, companies are forced to take graduates from both types of institutes. But when you have a mix of both, there's a strong underlying conflict. ``The emoluments have to be the same for both categories which may create a discord. Second, their w orking styles differ, which again leads to dissonance in the organisation,'' Miranda explains. He stresses that it is imperative for companies to follow a strict logic while recruiting and not yield to vagaries of the market.

As Prof. J. Philip, Director, Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship, Bangalore, puts it, ``You cannot have only HLLs in the country. You need smaller companies to run the economy too.'' The professor has been the Founder-Director, XLRI, Jam shedpur and Director, IIM, Bangalore.

But what management education in the country should emphasise on is creativity and the facility to help people think outside the box. Bijoor spotlights on the issue, ``Management education must work to shatter the somnolence of paradigms and working with in them.''