Hack:
SMART ( School of Managerial Attitudes & Real-time Training)

By virender vyas - Student at S.P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai

April 16, 2011 at 8:08am

Moonshots

Enlarge the frame of management education

Summary

Management education today is a ground for exploring new jargons, learning quantitative tools and the abridged history of failures and success. When students land up in the real corporate world and face a unique challenge they try to fit in the problem into their limited knowledge of Jargon, tools and all the history they have known so far – what is lacking is an attitude to think creatively about challenges and come up with new frameworks & models that explain and solve the problem.

A new kind of management schools are need of hour which, essentially works as a group of pseudo-firms incubated in campus and whatever you learn is real-time. Each student is employee of the pseudo-network of firms and change roles to get flavour of what goes into management. After some basic knowledge of what I’ll call Jargon, tools and history, these schools should emphasise on learning management through practices.

What roles you played in the pseudo-firms and what kind of decisions you took should define your score. It will be a win-win situation for students and the corporations they will be joining. Corporations will be able to judge the person on his real creative capabilities and management acumen and students will get a real simulation of what they are stepping into and what is about to break on them .

Problem

"Robert joined XYZ inc.( a firm specialising in cloud computing solutions) 3 months back, as Biz Dev manager. He was made responsible for looking business in APAC region and for expanding the business opportunities in the region. Just after he joined, he got to know a trend that was going on in the market. Inspite of the SME market increasing, which was a promising segment for XYZ , the revenues were sadly coming down. There was an increased demand from another segment namely the educational institutions and student labs in colleges who were not on the radar of XYZ inc. there was an opportunity of solution re-engineering for the new segment, on the other hand there was a threat of losing customers which XYZ thought will drive its business.

It was his first shot into this new world and and his "CEO-dream" was at stake.

Robert sat in his cabin thinking about all he had learnt. Scribbling his thoughts on a notepad. There were choices to be made. The problems surrounding Robert were

1) Where to start ? What are the right questions to ask ?

2) What all he learnt is relevant to this situation ?

3) "will it be good to take risk " or play safe with a quasi-resolution?

The problem we intend to discuss here is in-efficiency of newly appointed B-school grads to apply their learnings in situation and lack of attitude of enterpreneurship.

Solution

- SMART ( School of Managerial Attitudes and Real-time Training) is founded on two pillars

a) Managerial Attitudes

b) Real-Time Training

For realising the two objectives of developing Managerial Attitudes and Real-Time Training we need SMART schools which clearly define platforms like Pseudo-firms .

Pseudo-firms form a competitive market place consisting of different firms which ims goverened by students assuming different roles. The roles assumed are highly in sync with students future aspirations. To give a time sense ( aligning the real time of markets to pseudo-market created here simulators can be used ).

Creating imperfection in pseudo-markets can give the various level of challenges to students.

Integrating the performance measurement in markets to students grades can provide risk enviornment for students.

Practical Impact

- Providing experiential learning platform for students.

- Providing better evaluation of prospective employees to corporates.

First Steps

1) Creating the structure of pseudo-market , suitable role for students in a pseudo-market .

2) Creating the challenges which lead to exercise certain attitudes like Risk-Taking capabilities/Risk-Avoidance.

3) Linking Curriculum with the pseudo-market environment.

4) Performance measurement.

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