Business Schools and Business Strategy

I am sorry, this is not about teaching business strategy in Business Schools. Instead on another important question. Should a B School  require a business strategy? I think yes, one must have a business model; where to and how to make money and how to spend it. What are the priorities and what are the larger or long term instututional objectives? What kind of an institution do we want to build and for whom? These questions are often explicitly addressed and there is an articulated strategic plan to realise the corprorate aspirations for many businesses. What about a a business school? How do we compare and judge alternate strategic choices if we do not have a clear direction?

There are many, however who may feel upset that I am looking at business school as a business. The hypocracy is that we can teach business, but teaching business must not be called a business though it is always one. Mostly academics are the first to reject theory as impractical even in their own organizations. Imagine discussing about vertical integration and rapid skimming for a business school and lifestyle segmentation of our customers who are our students. The perpetrator of such ideas may not be liked very much. Should a B school be profitable and how do we do this, what if it is in public sector?

These thoughts were prompted by IIM Indore's decision to go for backward intergration and start an under graduate programmes. Once I worked in a campus where the management claimed that one can study from 'Playschool to PhD' with out leaving the campus. Would IIM Indore pursue this aspiartion? they already have Doctoral and Masters.Now they are going upstream in supplychain to undergraduation. Would they continue up to have a school also, so that they can straddle the entire supplychain? Or should it be diversification to law, botany, mathematics, medicine etc. Will they remain a nicher or will they try to be the cost leader or volume leader. 

I also wonder what hundreds of undersgraduate students and their parents will do to the IIM system. Imagine PTA, progress reports, parents crying on the inaugural day, Imagine the professor struggling to adopt to students in their early teens. It would be certainly an intresting experiment? But certainly I would love to read a case study on what strategic directions are served by this move. 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the mystery of Patanjali?

Recently I attended a marketing conference. Most of the 'who is who' of marketing academics in India were there, and every meeting formal or informal finally lead to Patanjali. There were many scholastic opinions shared. Some emphasized the celebrity endorsement effect of Baba Ramdev, the most visible, iconic brand ambassador. Some argued that the emerging trend of patriotic fervor, some touched upon the emerging Hindu nationalism and Patanjali riding on the same trend that brought BJP to power . Some pointed out the health and fitness concern and back to nature and natural being good and related the same to a global trend. The political academic saw a hidden agenda and concerted right wing attempt and Government support and subsidy behind the success of Patanjali. There were those who eloquently spoke on their go-to -market strategy and umbrella branding. May be they are all right, but beyond all these , Patnajali is providing a compelling value-for-money proposi...
Read more

90 percent vegetarian

A few years back, I went on a road trip with a colleague of mine on the east cost of US. We being in this noble profession could not afford the restaurants and hence thought of relying on the ubiquitous and benevolent Uncle Mac-the patron saint of broke tourists any where in the world. My friend being a vegetarian had a problem to contend with. He does not like burgers , will not take fried chicken. We tried the super market, but the frozen delicacies need a micro wave oven and our rooms did not always have one. So he subsisted on fruits though he had a value based objection to GM foods. After a day of bananas, apples and pomegranates, I took to him a packet of bread and marmalade. He was quite hungry, still he carefully read the contents listed on the pack. Being in US, most packets list a lot of ingredients.Turning to me with a frustrated look, he said, the bread is omega enriched which most likely must have come from fish and marmalade contain gelatin which is of animal origin...
Read more

The challenge of being a case teacher in business school.

Teaching a case study nowadays do not provide adequate return on investment. For a new field case (one that is on real companies written based on field research) , it takes 10 to 12 hours of preparation and a few hours on learning about industry context. A lot of physical and cognitive effort is needed to extract and organise the analysis, and a lot of emotional labour is involved in remaining calm and not getting upset and frustrated.  After every thing, look at the exprience . There are students who have not read the case, so they sit wondering what is happening. There are the smart alecks who ask profound metaphysical questions like see an example "In business why should margins be proportionate to price";  There are those who are desperate for class participation who want to have airtime at any cost and contribute a point which might have been relevant 45 minutes back. There are those who have an existential dilemma about a typographical error in the case and refuse to pr...
Read more