5 October 2018, Kathmandu
I remember being merely an engineer a decade ago. However, my job description also included management of the manpower involved in the technical working process as well. Being simply an engineer with no grounding in management, I felt lost in the mumbo jumbo of technicalities.
Then one day, out of the blue arose an opportunity to fulfill my childhood dreams of being a manager by doing an MBA. I could not do a full day MBA because of my job commitments. Therefore, I opted for an Executive MBA which meant I had to study at least three hours in the morning and still do my daytime work.
I hustled for at least four years between job and education before I got out of college with a shining “degree of pride”, an EMBA degree. Due the insights I got from the management courses, I could immediately implement knowledge every day while I was also learning each day. This was the most fruitful part of that journey.
I soon realized that while I was using all those principles every day, I did not really know the core principles of management and how it worked. Nevertheless, I kept on learning and applying those principles in my daily lives.
Gradually, I began to understand the inner workings of International management very intricately. This was because at that time I was directly associated with communicating and reporting on daily and monthly basis to a very big and fast growing international car company. We were trying to build a part of that company from scratch here in Nepal. It made the learning even sweeter because I could learn everything from the point of origin.
I could Google the parent company sites, take out required information to do my work, learn new information and apply it again. I found out that this application really expanded my mind in the field of management.
In 2018, I decided I want to give back the theoretical knowledge and the practical know how to the new generation of management students. Therefore, I joined a few business schools as part-time faculty.
My initial shocks after interacting with management students came when I observed that most of them were clueless about how things get done in the real world . The very small number of students, say one percent of the total, who knew what lay ahead for them in the real world belonged to a street smart environment. When I interacted with these few students, I had a flash back of my own past. Like me, this small numbers of students were getting exposed to various practical management areas in their free time.
This group of one percent students gave me a positive vibe that they can be successful in future. This was because they learnt the principles and immediately related the information to the type of management areas they were involved in and they applied the theory.
The remaining student appeared dumb and clueless. Therefore, with every topic I dealt in I gave the students practical examples of the type of world they were going to enter when they graduate. As a result, the classes became a lively discussion grounds about the ways to implementing theory in the real world.
My job as a part-time faculty has given me some profound experiences and insights. I strongly believe the management education system needs to be revisited in Nepal with utmost seriousness and on priority basis for the betterment of all the present and future generations of Nepal.
The changes required to be made in the learning style and the pedagogy of management education is certainly debatable. Here I would like to propose a system of techniques propagated by many management gurus such as Henry Mintzberg.
(a) Context based learning – Shifting from teaching research based knowledge to problem based knowledge for developing the sense-making capabilities of the students, particularly of the context and the impact the context is having and is likely to have in the future.
(b) Closer blend in-class learning with work – Moving away from class-based learning and the ubiquitous case-study based approach to more individualized work-based learning, coaching and mentoring.
(c) Promote Practical Intelligence – Practical intelligence means the ability to investigate and analyze the issue at hand. It is about understanding the wider context that the issue and any solution will be situated in. It can be blended with evidence-based knowledge and understanding.
Practical intelligence highlights the importance of an active problem-solving approach and the crucial skills of imagination and creativity.
Developing practical intelligence needs to be at the heart of the new management education. This means greater use of visiting part-time faculty from the business world. It will help in addressing the development of reality seeking and evidence-based practice coupled with imagination, ingenuity, resourcefulness, insight, enterprise and inspiration.
(c) Developing mind-set capabilities for the workplace- This means moving beyond the traditional technical and functional capabilities developed in business schools and moving into moral, ethical and values-based education and philosophy where the students critically think about their own mind-set and actions and learns to adapt these to become more globally and socially responsible.
Needless to say, as stated earlier as well, the above three points can be debated. But such a debate may help in arriving at conclusions about the type of changes we would like to make in our business schools and the style of learning for our students.
The earlier we start the debate about the pedagogy and appropriate learning styles in our management schools, the better it would be. Time is running out. It will not be a surprise if our students are unemployed following our colleges and university management system.
Such students might then start questioning the very relevance of the present management education for the future generations, which in turn may lead to the extinction of the business education as a whole. The truth is that a large number of students have already started raising this question.
(Nischaya Subedi is a Consultant Strategic Manager based in Kathmandu.)
