The Hindu Business Line : M. N. Vora: A champion case teacher at IIM-A

Professor M. N. Vora of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, who passed away in June at the age of 73, was easily the senior most professor of marketing at any IIM. Yet, he was the least likely person to talk of such a distinction. Like Ravi Mathai, who became director at IIM-A, he too started teaching at the other place in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and chose pretty quickly to move out to the rival campus on the opposite side of the country.

Professor Vora, or Vora saab as many of us remember him, was very much a local man from Gujarat, but he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father was a small-town shopkeeper, like a million other fellow countrymen. The son determined to put himself through a college education by his own efforts, which included tutoring other students and working in the market in his spare time.

Vora passed the B.Com examination with a top rank in the State. He later went to Wharton for an MBA degree and after a brief stint at IIM-Calcutta, moved over to Ahmedabad to teach us, the first intake of students. I also had the privilege of meeting him when he went as a mature student to do his doctorate at Harvard Business School in the early 1970s, and then taught the MBA marketing courses, as a visiting professor, alongside him for many years afterwards.

Professor Vora was not very impressive to look at, being of a rather short and stocky build. By no means an orator, he had a unique, deliberate and considered way of speaking that had no obvious local accent but had, at least in the early days, an overlay of American speech patterns on his essentially Indian diction. His energy and capacity to work seemed limitless. When he stood in front of the class, case and a sheaf of papers in hand, he was a lion. He was nothing if not dogged in his perseverance. He could tease out the sense and the interesting points to be made in any case and had great tenacity and attention to detail. No exhibit was overlooked, no assumption went unchallenged. A particularly loquacious but often silly contribution from a student would draw a shy, amused smile from him. And if you knew what was good for you just stopped in your tracks. He was about to tear your argument to shreds by gently showing you, with no recourse to strong language, how you had misunderstood the case facts, concepts or, often, both.

Market research

In his first year as a teacher at IIM-A, he taught market research as a full-term field project course. He set us the task of finding out, from all sources (traders, consumers, businessmen) all we could to help a businessman decide whether and how he should set up a multi-storey supermarket, as we thought of it then. If executed, it would have been the first ever mall in the country. The year was 1965, decades before organised retailing came into its own in the country.

Years later, as a visiting professor , I had asked students to study the workings of a typical hole-in-the-wall shop, a milk booth or a grocer, just to appreciate at first hand the dynamics of the Indian bazaar. Then someone told me that Vora had already got one of his student groups to study and report on how a paanwallah’s shop was managed and what its ways of stock-keeping, merchandising and economics were. He had discovered that there were nearly 150 individual items hand led by this little shop.

Vora knew, practised and taught a kind of observation research long before it became widely known. He had a special fascination for the small businessman and did most of his consulting assignments helping them market their products well. He had an earthy and natural feel for the common man and no pretensions of being highly westernised in his ways despite the many years in the US.

Preparing the questionnaire

From Vora saab I learnt in particular the fine art of asking questions in a questionnaire. He showed us how one arrived at the definition of the research problem first — starting from the management decision to be made, look c losely at information already available and find the net gap to be filled — and from where. Every question was then value engineered, so to speak, long before we even knew the term. Was the information really necessary? What specific action could we take if we knew the answer? Was there any other way we could get at the same information? Each wasted word was chiselled away, until the research was sharply focused well before one went out into the marketplace or household with the questionnaire in hand. On top of everything else, he taught us something few top professionals themselves did in practice, namely, do a full set of dummy tables before the data was in — showing which question fed into which table and how each was linked to the objective of the research. If there was a question that had been slipped in ‘just in case’, out it went. Principle of parsimony at its best!

Later classes have remarked upon Vora saab’s great skill as a case teacher. We were indeed privileged to see it in its formative years. We from the first batch of students went into an under-prepared campus for an unheard of c ourse, taught by freshly minted teachers, both American and Indian, who looked as if they had just stepped off the airplane. One of our special benefits was a small class (only 48 at the time of graduation) and a team of handpicked young teachers who had all had the full length Harvard teachers’ programme for nine months. This was their first exposure to and preparation for the arduous and completely new way of teaching through the case method. And the older generation, led by Vora, came to capture the essence of this for the next three-and-a-half decades. Few would have realised then what a contrast it was from the conventional undergraduate learning. It was so different from the lecture that all of us had become so used to. Lectures from the raised platform had till then symbolised someone handing down wisdom from on-high as the only way of transferring knowledge from the expert-cum-guru to the uninitiated learner, sitting at his feet. The expert case teacher genuinely gave you the feeling of taking you along on a voyage of exploration and discovering things along the way as if for the first time. This added a zest and freshness to the learning.

It seems, sadly, that the later decades saw the Institute slowly give up the way of teaching through the medium of the well-written comprehensive document about a company’s situation which was the hallmark of the Harvard method. A decision-oriented course such as marketing which offered many possibilities for every choice lent itself admirably to the method — but students did not like the apparent vagueness and amorphous nature of the technique and wanted more and more doses of so-called theory, which is so little relevant in the manager’s life anyway. Professor Vora was the last of those who could write and teach cases the way they were meant to be. He taught one to think, and think critically. If there was no single right answer and no perfect information, so be it — one just got on with the work, which is so true of real life itself.