Tips to set the right direction for your MBA

M-B-A, Master of Business Administration has become one of the most sought after courses in the recent years. It is because post-graduation in an MBA from a B-School makes us corporate ready (proved by the increasing acceptance for MBA graduates from a variety of corporate fields) regardless of the undergraduate background we may have to our credit.

Thus, the demand is matched with the increase in number of MBA seats in existing Institutes by the increase in number of institutions offering Diploma courses in Management. With more number of Management course offerings (the place and field of study) the prospective candidates now have a plate full of options to choose from. Yet, with these options come confusion and this multiplies, as the selection of the choice is a life changing one.

Such life changing decisions need to be made smartly, so before proceeding on the selection let us fully understand and set the right expectations that guide our selection process, with a little help from your friend, who has successfully crossed the Rubicon (selecting a right B-School) and reaping the benefits (by securing an apt placement) by making the right decision then (by choosing IBS Hyderabad). I would like to discuss few finer tips that would help shape-up your selection process.

• Diversity- “Making of a multi-faceted personality”

“Management education cannot be taught, it needs to be self-learned and experienced”. To master in this field you should keep your mind open to new experiences and be aware of the differences stemming from a single point. To learn this you should share experiences with a mixed group of people who hail from different age groups, geographies, cultures, languages, academic backgrounds and professions. This experience is an invaluable asset in your life-time as it shapes your decision-making process and Emotional Intelligence to a great extent.

Additionally, having a diverse knowledge helps you grow and progress in your career. Luckily my institute had a planned set of pan-India selection process and a systematic classroom was set up wherein people from different categories (by profession, education, geography, languages, etc) were evenly split among the classes and the classes were shuffled every semester which helped us learn a wide variety of different experiences from different people.

• Faculty-“A ‘NO’ to teaching!”

You may ask “If Management education cannot be taught, why should we speak of the Faculty?” It is because the right learning can happen only under a right faculty. The faculty discussed here are the people who have the right blend of academic background which is enriched with years of corporate and teaching experiences.

A good MBA institute takes effort in selecting the right faculty and learning from them shapes up an individual’s thinking prowess and introduces them to different ways and dimensions in approaching a particular issue. Such remarkable faculties will also present you with a huge number of high-profile industrial contacts. In order to receive the best from them, you should show your thirst for excellence and knowledge as they would frequently encourage you to participate and raise intelligent and sensible questions from time to time.

• Curriculum- “Design for Doers”

When you have the right mix to discuss and a great faculty to direct you to your cause, the next step is to understand that the essence of right learning happens with the right curriculum, as this is going to be the theme on which the great minds are going to work. An MBA is a real-time course and has one of the most dynamic curriculum which need to be updated every year or even every semester. To ensure this, the top end institutes offer a hands-on-experience to theory oriented program in the ratio of 80:20 ratio. This type of curriculum is brought about by the means of Simulation exercises (offline and online), Summer Internship Projects, Tie-ups with Entrepreneurs and Incubation centers, Case methodology, mini-real time business projects, etc.

They also give a major component of evaluation for the above techniques ahead of theory/ written examinations and most Institutes follow an open-book examination. You should understand that in an MBA curriculum it is not about teaching the right solutions but it is about learning and using the right tools to solve an issue by your analytical, logical and emotional abilities in a proactive way, which premier B-School faculties are known to inculcate in their students.

• Infrastructure- “The training ground”

There is no exception that the B-School’s infrastructure should also facilitate a flawless functioning of students, faculty and the management. This encompasses uninterrupted power supply, internet and telecommunications connectivity, clean water and a rich, natural environment. This will help the students in campus to be in tandem with the changes happening in the society and economy in real-time and also help them to go ahead with the curriculum in a smooth pace.

A Wi-Fi campus, video-conferencing facilities for placements and lectures, air-conditioned class rooms and the like have become the order of the day in many institutes. A special mention should be made for the libraries which should be well stocked with the proper books. They should also include quality national & international magazines (viz. HBR, TIME, FORTUNE, etc) and newspapers subscriptions (The Wall street Journal, Washington Post, Mint, etc), with online subscriptions to international business and social research databases (like Wharton Research Data Services, Proquest, EBSCO, etc). These are the qualitative resources that an MBA graduate has to rely heavily upon to evaluate his business case inferences.

The institutes should also have a complete refreshment and rejuvenation infrastructure through of games and sports facilities. These would include the availability of board games as well as infrastructure such as indoor stadiums, swimming pool, auditorium, open air theatre and gym, etc as these enhance the quality of study in the institute.

• Investment-“Nothing comes without a price- better you go higher the price”

Premier institutes offering management education charge considerably higher Tuition Fees/ Education cost, but here I would like you to consider that amount as an investment for your future and not a waste of money. If an institute is able to offer the above said quality atmosphere, then the individual is sure of becoming erudite and thus he would be able the make profits of such investment. It should be considered as “Investment for life” and not as cost for education. I am not trying to justify the fees that these institutes charge you, but they promise to give their heart and soul to kick-start your career. Thus, the fee alone should not hinder your decision making.

• Placement- “A Cakewalk”

“What is the placement scenario?” This question should be the last question that you should ask if you have selected an institute with above expectations as the core of your selection. An MBA institute which offers the right faculty, a diversified and a deserving student mix, dynamic curriculum, supportive infrastructure is itself a brand (viz. IBS group of Institutes, IIMs, etc). Such brands are meant to attract corporate across the globe for placements, because the global and domestic corporates foresee the graduates from such branded institutes as smart and impeccable.

So friends, all in all, do select an institute which

• Puts you with the right mix of people
• Presents to you high quality faculty
• Does have real time curriculum (enriched with cases and real-time business projects)
• Encompasses you with reliable infrastructure
• Charges you the correctly for “Value for Money”
• Connects you to the proper corporates to fetch an apt placement

It might be hard to appreciate the above mentioned items during the course of study however its benefits would be reaped post MBA.  Steve Jobs famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards!”. Thus I am proud to announce that I am able to connect them now and I am thankful to my alma mater- IBS Hyderabad for making me a better professional.

All the best.

Contributed By : L. Gowtham ( Class of 2013, IBS Hyderabad )

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I want you to recall the penultimate interview scene of the film ‘3 Idiots’? Remember how incredibly the protagonist cracks the interview with his fearless attitude & soul-stirring honesty despite his consistently declining grades. Branding it as suspension of disbelief in the name of cinematic liberty might be an obvious old-school standpoint. For others like me and hopefully you, there is a more rational alternative reasoning to it. Mull it over or read further!

Ask any old-hand MBA about the importance of grades. He’ll most likely advise that once you are out in the real world, its not so much as your GPA that counts as your white-collar disposition and business acumen. I am not trying to suggest that you should skip classes or that your degree is vain. In fact, I advise you do the exact opposite. Confused? Let me paraphrase.

A typical MBA curriculum comprises presentations, assignments, quizzes, tests etc. And all these fetch you grades. But there are other more important things like industry clubs, student associations, networking etc. They don’t directly contribute to grades but will surely enhance your people-skills, which are undoubtedly vital post-MBA.

A professor once told me that a B-School education is as much about what happens outside the classroom as inside it. You have to manage the trade-off between these inside and outside activities. Inevitably, your grades will suffer. I know intentionally sacrificing grades is not an easy habit to break. Especially for academic high achievers. But you have to look at the bigger  picture. Temporarily, neglect all old-school opinions of your well-wishers.

I reiterate that not studying is not what I mean by the above statement. On the contrary, study hard. Be thoroughly involved. Vigorously interact with you batch-mates. Bounce off questions to the professors. Challenge pre-conceived theoretical notions. Try to gain a practical understanding of the subjects to avoid the highly unproductive last-minute cramming sessions.

I’ll give you an interesting example. When I was in 10^th grade, I distinctly remember a class-mate who asked a peculiar question to our science teacher. “How can anything be burned without the presence of oxygen?”, he queried. It was a recurrent statement in the science text-book. The entire class including me was flabbergasted by the astounding simplicity of the question. Even the teacher took her own sweet time to gather her senses.

I was unwittingly introduced to the concept of ‘Out of the box’ thinking. This ingenious catchphrase a.k.a Christopher Columbus’s Egg Puzzle is widely used by Management Consultants globally. Its a quiz where you have to link 9 dots using four straight lines without lifting your pen and without retracing the same line. Try it in case you haven’t. Its a dare. I’ve drawn it for you below. (Hint: Think beyond the box)

During the two years in a B-School, you’ll literally be coerced to deploy lateral thinking and think unconventionally from a fresh perspective. I am re-educating you with these worldly-wise philosophies for a damn good reason. Professional and even scholastic success is a function of several factors and your grade is just a single data-point. Unless you score exceptionally high or abysmally low, your CGPA will just be an arbitrary number post-MBA.

And even if you are a Five-Point-Someone (please disregard any correlation with Chetan Bhagat), be honest and own up to the grades during your placement interview. Never forget that your prospective employer wants to hire intellectually curious, well-rounded people who culturally fit within the organization. As a matter of fact, it’s been proved at a multi-national B-School called INSEAD that there is a negative correlation between high grades and high salaries. Need I say more?

Some MBAs argue that B-School students should take their grades seriously because of the cut-throat competition during placements. More particularly for students applying for Investment Banks and Consulting firms.The very same self-proclaimed Executive Coaches fall flat & go astray when you ask them: “Do good grades guarantee success on the job?”

I recall an unintentionally funny incident concerning one of my MBA batchmates. Unlike me, he was quite good with textbooks and grades. However he struggled a lot while getting a job. If I remember correctly, he was finally selected by some company in his (hold your breath…..) “21^st interview” (I suppose they have set a threshold limit now). He got it at a substandard CTC.

My friend’s experience compelled me (and hopefully him) to juxtapose two scenarios: (a) A bookworm topper who slogs for 2 years to get good grades and (b) A well-rounded average-scoring student who gives a crack-shot at the final interview and secures a hefty package. Which one would you chose?

Bill Gates once said “I studied everything but never topped….but today the toppers of the best Universities are my employees.” It implies that a stellar student may be a mediocre employee and vice versa. So learn enough in a B-School to make you ‘savvy’. But not a ‘nerd’. Anyway, as a manager or entrepreneur you can always hire lots of nerds (with good grades) to do specific tasks for you. Just don’t fall into that trap yourself.

I am aware that its very convenient to preach while sitting at home. Genuinely following an eccentric advice is the hard part. It requires both trust and courage on the part of the reader. Just contemplate whether cramming the four P’s of Marketing or flawlessly drawing the BCG Growth-Share Matrix would necessarily benefit you in the corporate world. Unfortunately, things don’t happen in the marketplace the way they do in the textbooks.

Because the real world will often surprise you by throwing new variables at you. Be prepared to tackle the disturbances created on your pre-existing theoretical notions. In order to achieve that, first you would have to overcome the orthodox and outdated Socratic way of critical thinking/learning. Discover and adopt more modern ways of assimilating useful knowledge.

Grades are overrated, bigtime! So don’t give too much importance to them. Moreover an MBA student is graded in two phases: (a) Classroom projects, where you are judged on your assignments, presentations, quizzes & soft-skills and (b) Semester Exams where you have to score in traditionally structured written exams. Its noteworthy that Phase (b) judges you at a single point of time unlike Phase (a), where you are judged over a period of time.

Both the components have an equal weightage for the purpose of student evaluation. I strongly believe that the assessment should rely 80% on the former as the appraisal analysis is spread over some period of time. Following this approach would positively make the grading process more transparent and sensible. Unwittingly, it will also benefit MBA students who religiously follow our current grading system.

Takeaway: Grades, according to me, are synonymous with a pat on the back for your good work. That’s why you crave them. Whether they reflect your actual performance to the corporate world outside of your B-School remains a matter of concern. 5 years into your job and they’ll hardly matter to anyone. Including you. Change that traditional frame-of-mind before entering a B-School. You’ll learn to enjoy and enjoy to learn much more!

Contributed by Pranshu Awasthi ( Class of 2007, IBS GURGAON )