The Hindu Business Line : A dangerous thing

I WAS recently on a panel selecting students for a post-graduate management degree programme. It promised to be gruelling, the list of hopeful candidates stretched a mile long. But I thought, it's a great opportunity to understand today's breed of young hopefuls.

We panellists had a small huddle, aligning ourselves on what we were looking for in the candidates: some depth of knowledge in what they had studied, a capacity for problem-solving or critical thinking, insights into their attitudes and value systems.

The resumes looked promising. Typically, each promised a smart youngster, with above-average performance at reputed schools and colleges, many with work experience. So, we began each session expecting to find that spark of talent that could be honed into a fine manager.

We were quite disappointed. Time after time, the written persona morphed into quite a different real life person who fell far short of expectations. And the minute we probed the candidate's depth of knowledge in his or her self-professed area of interest, we came up with a blank.

Take for example, the young engineer from IIT, turned software programmer. Ask him about his project for the Calcutta Metro and he came up with "I can't remember, it was long ago." (Three years?!) He looked lost when asked to explain how he complied with the construction standards.

And when we asked him what `Sigma' meant in 6-sigma (in which he claimed to be a white-belt), he repeated, like a call-centre robot, that hoary mantra of 3.4 ppm defects, without being able to explain what a standard deviation was.

Or consider the electrical engineer from another reputed institute. He will be appearing for his final engineering exam very shortly. Fairly simple questions on electrical design had him foxed. It looked like he did a rapid search in his mental database for a pigeonholed, pre-processed answer, and if he couldn't find it, he gave up. There was no effort to see it as a problem, or to use an understanding of electricity and engineering, to attempt a solution.

Another engineer confidently told us that maths was his strong point. Yet when presented with a basic math question that should be a cinch for a 12th standard student, he fumbled and quickly gave up the ghost.

Then there was the commerce graduate who had put down his goal as "making a killing in the stock market." What would be your next steps, he was asked, if given a stock tip right now. "I would ask my uncle for his opinion," he replied. A touching, if ineffectual, aproach to fundamental analysis. "Ever thought about examining the company's annual report?" we asked. He admitted that could be useful, but "our college only told us what it looks like. I don't know how to use one properly." Another commerce graduate listened intently to a question on depreciating an asset using the written-down value and insisted aggressively that it would take 10 years at 10 per cent to write down an asset to exactly zero.

There were more — the post-graduate student in biotechnology who had never heard of the genome project. Or the self-confessed automobile enthusiast who was unable to explain the basics of an internal combustion engine.

This was scary. We weren't asking very difficult questions. No mastermind knowledge of trivia was required. In all cases, we asked them questions from their own resumes, to check if they could live up to their paper image. We did find some bright youngsters who dovetailed an ability for critical thinking with well adjusted personalities, but they were the rare, rare exception. In almost all the other cases, we found ourselves faced with the sinking sensation that the impressive curriculum vitae was paper-thin - scratch ever so softly and the veneer cracks, revealing a hollow: sometimes, stuffed with facts, often with short-term memory problems, and almost always, indicating an incapacity to know when and where to apply this learning.

At the end of the day, I mulled over the questions and the answers again. Had we been too harsh, I asked other colleagues? And as I heard more and more horror stories, I realised that mine was not an isolated experience. During the last week I have been regaled with anecdotes that seem to ring a warning bell about the superficiality of Indian degrees.

Managers need to be problem solvers, not mere repositories of data. Ironically, as the data grows exponentially, so do the modes of accessing these. What is needed, really, is to embed the ability to use the data efficiently and appropriately. It's like having the Internet at your fingertips, and not knowing how to use Google to use it.

Luckily for India, the sheer entrepreneurial nature of the average Indian will ensure that the small-scale sector is alive and well. Unhampered by MBA degrees (or perhaps, any degree!), it will continue to stay vibrant and alive. But between that and the alpha-graduates vacuumed up by the top few corporates, there appears to lie an ocean of mediocrity.

Where, then, is this army of professionals that will herald the Indian entry into the brave, competitive, new world? If there are only a handful of respectable management institutions in India, and if each of them selects around 200 students a year, does that mean that the management gene pool of Indian business is augmented annually by just a thousand or so managers with the ability for critical thinking? Is India's future as a global economic power resting on these slender shoulders?

So, are we really turning out world-class thinkers? Or are we manufacturing a stream of drones, who emerge from cram-schools stuffed to the gills with data, but without any analytical or problem solving abilities? That's good for some of the low-end BPO businesses ... for a few years. What after that? Will we summon the intellectual energy to grow through innovation and value creation? Or will we still be producing the yarn to be milled into valuable apparel in foreign shores, as we did a few hundred years ago?

What saddened me was that these are bright kids, just moulded badly. It's easy to blame their colleges, but the problem lies much, much deeper, starting at the primary and secondary schooling. We need to change our fundamental view of a well-educated person, from one who can regurgitate facts to one who can analyse thoughtfully. It's a tall order, but cannot be put off much longer.

(The writer is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary term for strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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