Indian Institute of Technology (IITM) Management Musings: Pioneering Professors of Management in Amazing Ambience of Technology

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) has been one of the foremost institutes of technological and scientific education and research in India for the last few decades. IITM was inaugurated on July 31, 1959, and by an Act of Parliament in 1961, IITM was declared as an Institute of National Importance in 1961. The Institute was backed by collaboration with the German Government. The first batch of B Tech graduates, a 5 year course at that time, passed out in 1964. There has been no looking back for the Institute from then on, as it continued to expand and diversify in its course offerings and student intake, establishing schools of excellence, year over year. Most alumni from IITM have occupied and continue to occupy leadership positions in their chosen specialities.  Dr A Lakshmanaswamy was the first Chairman of the Board of Governors while Dr B Sengupto was the first Director of the Institute. Initial Directors brought exemplary guidance to the Institute which successors tried to preserve and grow.

IITM was amongst the best among the IITs for its picturesque campus with vast flora and fauna. It was also very much a part of a growing city. Set adjacent to a vast reserve forest land, the campus even today ranks as a deer-friendly nature park. The campus had its own specialities from the central Gajendra Circle (GC) to the unique Open Air Theatre (OAT).‎ In fact, nothing symbolised the open and free spirit of IITM more than the OAT which has been a host to movies every Saturday (even in examination or vacation seasons) and to several special seasonal events such as Mardi-Gras and Sarang. IITM’s hostels were notable for their simple single room accommodation but exemplary food services. The common rooms of the hostels provided the magazine and newspaper fodder for the avid reader while there was nothing other than a humble canteen for a hangout even up to the 90s.

Course architecture

Initially at the time of its inception, IITM had just five technology streams: Mechanical, ‎Civil, Chemical, Metallurgy and Electrical. Each of the disciplines was endowed with dedicated teaching blocks and impressive workshop infrastructure. IITM was a pioneer in establishing humanities and social sciences (HSS) as an integral part of its engineering curriculum from the very beginning. Over the years, HSS began offering M Tech and Ph D programmes in Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management from the late 1960s. Eventually, even as the technology and scientific disciplines proliferated with more specialisations and sub-specializations, a Department of Management Studies came into being in 2004 to offer specialized MBA equivalent programmes.

Without doubt, there has always been a great and unmistakable technol‎ogical ambience and culture at IITM. Yet, it was somewhat intriguing to see such technology talent moving to the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to join management courses. The other aspect, much discussed of course, has been the flight of talent for advanced courses in technology and management abroad, especially the USA. The emergence of distinct schools of management in the IITs, probably a naïve attempt to fight the two trends (or a practical approach to respond to popular trend) took root first in IIT Bombay and eventually all the IITs including IITM followed suit. Unfortunately, unlike in ‎some IITs there has been no major external sponsorship of the management school in IITM. That makes the growth of the management department at IITM even more impressive.

Pioneering professors

Long before the management school came on, a few professors were pioneering management education as part of the humanities and social sciences department, from the 1960s. As a student of the M Tech programme in Industrial Engineering of 1972-74 batch and the Ph D programme in Industrial Management later on, it was my privilege to witness some of the pioneering professors in management strive to be both differentiated and integrated simultaneously in the amazing, and occasionally overwhelming, technical ambience of IITM. Professors R K Gupta in Business Policy and Strategy, Dr S Ramani in Industrial Engineering, Dr V Anantharaman in Organizational Behaviour, Dr L V L N Sarma in Financial Management, M Durga Prasada Rao in Management Accounting, Dr A  Ravindran in Operations Research (visiting faculty from Purdue University), M G Asthana in General Management, Dr A V Krishna Rao in English, Dr Y Nagendra in Statistics and Dr Dipak Chaudhuri in Reliability and Maintenance Management were the early pioneers. Micro-economics was taught by Professor Ganesan from Vivekananda College with a great quantitative flair while Macro-economics was the forte of Hamsaleelavathi.  V Arumugam from College of Engineering was a passionate advocate of Work Study.

It required conviction and passion on the part of the founding professors and the other lecturers who supported them to develop and institutionalize a stream of management education in IITM from the 1960s, in a period of the Institute when such management education was seen as a needless diversion by the technology deans of the Institute. Also, it is to the credit of the professors that early on they laid the base for Ph D programs in industrial management and industrial engineering, taking a step ahead of the IIMs in that respect. But for their vision and persistence, the school of management would not have seen the light of the day. Nor would the next generation professors like Dr T T Narendran and Dr L S Ganesh (who became the Head of the Department of Management Studies) have been moulded as researchers of the first order. Unlike the IIMs, however, the professors were inward oriented focusing less on industry interactions and consulting assignments, which probably explained the low visibility of the IITM management programmes to the industry.

Unique pedagogy

The IITM management professors had unique pedagogical approaches. Professor Gupta brought to bear day to day simplicity to business policy and strategy, weaving finance and accounting concepts in the study. He was a patient teacher and was always waiting for the class to think on its feet and respond to his little intriguing but earthy questions. Dr Ramani made the complex canvas of industrial engineering a fascinating potpourri of supply chain management and management information systems, peppering the traditional time and motion study. Dr Anantharaman was unparalleled for his keen understanding of human behaviour and scintillating sense of humour. He made the multiple organizational behaviour theories of management gurus come live through his extempore presentations. His group dynamics human laboratory exercises helped many of his students understand the meanings of visible facade and invisible self that govern all of organizational behaviour.

Dr L V L N Sarma exemplified the virtuous approach to management studies. Powered by a keen intellect and a sharp wit, he propagated many techniques and tools of modern financial management, from dividend signalling to portfolio analysis and from discounted cash flow to ratio analysis, long before they became fashionable.  Professor M D P Rao made the dry but critically important discipline of management accounting as simple as the peeling of banana. Between the teasing of master accountant Guptaji and the challenging of the financial strategist LVLN, MDPR’s genial approach provided the much needed comfort to the engineers who tended to be at sea in the accounting and finance oceans! No one who went through IITM management can forget the rigour of statistics as taught by Dr Nagendra. He was such a master in statistics that the ordinary failings of his students looked unforgivable to him. So was Dr Dipak Chaudhuri in his exposition of quantitative rigour for developing reliability and maintenance management paradigms befitting of engineers. S G Asthana was an ever-smiling exponent of principles of general management, taking care to move students along with him.

Dr A V Krishna Rao who headed the English faculty as well as the department for several years taught the linguistic and communication skills with an everlasting smile. Amongst the next generation professors, Dr T T Narendran set out new vistas in systems simulation while Dr L S Ganesh focused on operations research, forecasting, decision sciences and public policy. Dr L S Ganesh was particularly focused on matters of public policy as much as on the emotional wellbeing of the students. Dr R N Anantharaman came on to fill the void left by Dr V Anantharaman with his brand of classic psychology for management. The Industrial Engineering stream continued to get enriched by Dr C Rajendran and others. As with any institutional evolution, old guard yielded place to the new, but one cannot but recollect with nostalgia and respect the contributions made by founding professors of management, humanities and social sciences in an overwhelmingly technological ambience. Credit also must be given to the fact that the technological depth of IITM gave a rare edge to management students – who else other than Professor H N Mahabala could have taught Computer Science and Engineering in such a delectable manner in the overflowing hall of Central Lecture Theatre (CLT)?

Uniquely different

It is to the credit of the management professors at IITM that‎ despite the overwhelming technology ambience they did not succumb to style over substance. While they could have appeased by christening their course as Technology Management to the appreciative nods of the engineering faculty, they chose to name and position management for what it is as a unique and integrative discipline. As compared to the IIMs, however, they gave a strong quantitative bias to the management course, making the graduates hone their analytical skills further. With certain specialized course focused on aspects of inventory management, reliability management, statistical quality control, operations research and management information systems, they laid the foundation for the subsequent evolution of Operations Management discipline. Dr A Ravindran added a masterly touch to the courses at IITM with his inimitable teaching of Operations Research. One of the more complex yet real time oriented branch of mathematics, Operations Research was followed by the students with total absorption when Dr Ravindran taught the subject.

Amidst the quantitative orientation, the perspectives and insights that were generated out of organizational behaviour and financial management were unique and absorbing to the engineers who made up the intake. It is to the credit of the professors, Dr Anantharaman and Dr LVLN that they offered the mind-expanding disciples as serial courses across semesters helping the engineers become better real world managers. It is even more creditable that the professors encouraged full-fledged MS and Ph D‎ programmes in such core non-technical disciplines too, adding to the multi-disciplinary nature of IITM. In fact, MS by research is a programme unique to IITs, representing a bridge option for those students who are research oriented but do not wish to spend several years on a deep research topic. Many students in management found the MS option relevant and satisfying.

Blessed I am

While God decides our intrinsic capabilities and competencies through genetics handed down through parents and grandparents, te‎achers and professors play a significant role in expanding our horizons, deepening our knowledge, honing our competencies and developing our capabilities. In a way, institutions such as the IITs and IIMs and their dedicated professors, and the competitive but egregious student population help us re-discover and re-position ourselves. It is my fortune that as a student of the M Tech Programme, I was spotted, developed and appreciated by my learned founding-professors of Industrial Management and Industrial Engineering. If the M Tech programme in Industrial Engineering made me confident and capable as well as industry ready, the Ph D programme helped me to drive attributes of perfection and diligence to new highs, and more importantly embed in myself the fundamental tenet of robust research - understand the available knowledge, hypothesise alternate constructs and validate through empirical research a new paradigm that adds to the body of knowledge.

My research journey in IITM, which started with the guidance of Professor R K Gupta but was essentially guided and concluded under the supervision of Dr L V L N Sarma was a journey from one pole of knowledge (stimulatingly descriptive of Guptaji) to another (diligently analytical of Dr LVLN). It taught me how to utilize data and information to develop new hypotheses and validate them. It is this (positively!) bipolar quest for knowledge that attracted me to the fascinatingly descriptive Michael's Porter's works on Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage but go on to develop a validated analytical construct to quantitatively and statistically validate certain follow-on as well as original hypotheses of competitive strategy. If my Ph D thesis "Strategy and Structure of the Indian Automobile Industry: A Study of the Four-Wheeler Sector" remains a path-breaking thesis to date that gave a unique quantitative foundation to Porter’s descriptive theories, with several constituent papers having been published in refereed journals, I have to express my gratitude to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and its pioneering professors who shaped my knowledge perspectives, notably Professor R K Gupta and Dr L V L N Sarma.

Tailpiece

When I was in school, I was fascinated by the stories penned by Sri Mopineni Durga Prasad Rao and Sri Lellapalli Venkata Laksmi Narayana Sarma and published in Telugu weeklies regularly. They were full of humorously incisive analyses of family and social relationships, and the quirkiness of human relationships. My joy knew no bounds when the very same famed writers of fiction happened to be my professors at IITM!   

Acknowledgements:

I must gratefully acknowledge the role played by all the educational institutions, and the teachers of each institution, in developing me; these being Sri Sai Baba National Higher Secondary School, Anantapur, P R G C Higher Secondary School, Kakinada, Government College of Engineering, Anantapur affiliated to Sri Venkateswara University at that point of time, and finally the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. 

Posted by Dr CB Rao on February 27, 2015

     

Indian Institutes of Vocational Management (IIVMS): Institutes for Next Generation Management

My first brush with management studies was in 1970 when I took an optional course of production management as part of my final year mechanical engineering course selection. Thereafter, I had the opportunity to complete post-graduate and doctoral programs in industrial engineering and industrial management. Over the last 44 years, it has been my practice to keep in touch with the management disciplines as taught and as practiced. As an engineer who pursued management studies, I was variously intrigued, fascinated and circumspect, time to time, about the glamorous attraction of the management studies that tempted several thousands of engineers to branch off into management. The emergence of premium schools of business such as the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) only fueled the trend. The more established premium schools of engineering, technology and science such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) had to follow suit by establishing their own in-house departments or schools of business.   

Unlike engineering, management studies have remained largely static over the last four decades. While more nuances may have come about, and while other disciplines such as mathematics, statistics, economics, sociology, psychology, and information technology may have enriched management, there have been no new disciplines that have emerged out of management. Even Porter’s theories of competitive strategy and competitive advantage (of the 1980s) made for compelling reading but elusive application. Overall, over the last four decades management studies helped graduates improve their conceptual, analytical and communication skills and leapfrog in their careers, leveraging their institutional moorings. With mushrooming of management studies and the increasing need for companies to secure operational advantage rather than strategic advantage, management studies need to move from the (now threatened) vantage position of prescriptive studies to a (future secure) position that would be more value generating and value sustaining. This blog post discusses a few options, some merely extensional and some truly transformational.

Art, science, skill

For too long, the debate on management focused on whether it is an art or science; the former view because of the strong people element in management and the latter view because of the strong quantitative element inherent in performance. Neither is wholly right or wrong but what is more relevant is that management needs to be like anything else - a profession of skill. There is an oft repeated criticism that the Indian educational system focuses too much on information and theory and too little on knowledge and application. As a result, there is a strident view that the workforce is qualified but not knowledgeable and where it is knowledgeable it is not skilled. One of the concerns on ‘Make in India’ reaching its full potential relates to the skill deficit arising out of the Indian educational system. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s very first exhortation has, therefore, been that India must focus on 3 S’s of skill, scale and speed. On these, a common view could be that individual efforts are required for skill development and management efforts are needed to achieve scale and speed. In a distorted view of this, managers tend to believe that only the employees at the bottom of the organizational pyramid need to be skilled while the higher levels need to be only well versed in managerial processes and focused on others’ outcomes than on their own contributions.

Historically, organizations have looked at skill only from a workman perspective and even categorized workmen as unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled and highly skilled. The fact of the matter is that everyone needs to be skilled; whether one is a material handler, forklift operator or machinist. It is only that different types of skills are required for different roles. As understood from serious incidents of quality, compliance or safety, lack of skill even at the lowest levels can cause serious dislocations or disruptions. Given this perspective, it would be an even greater organizational distortion to conceptualize that skills are required at frontline levels and higher levels need only capabilities of management and leadership,  classified as art or science. Management and leadership must move out of the exotic domains of visioning, strategizing and performance management and concentrate equally on individual contributions that are commensurately and consummately skilled. The synergistic arithmetic of organizations has two components; individual and team based. Managers and leaders are also governed by similar value arithmetic. There are two approaches to achieve this in a phased manner. The first is by redefining management curricula. The second is by making management studies completely vocational, and skill based.

Specialization and customization

A logical way to go is to increase the extent of specialization and customization. Specializations such as production, operations, marketing, finance, human resources etc., have always been there. The next frontiers of specialization must be three dimensional. The first dimension must be on specific industry orientation. There is no point in letting management studies remain generic and prescriptive. The least that can be done is to customize studies to industries, which will retain the basic scientific and technological foundations of one’s professional undergraduate studies. One may envisage at least 50 such industry specializations to start with. The second dimension must be on converting themes into subjects. Fashionable topics such as visioning, integration, diversification, costing, execution, self-realization and self-actualization which are nothing more than sections or chapters currently must be developed into holistic subjects. The third dimension must be on focusing on management for differentiated national cultures. Setting up and running industries or businesses could be significantly different across nations, and customization would help in making management graduates better.

The above is based on the requirement that management studies must not remain as generic studies as they now are. Two years is a long time in one’s educational career, especially as one gets closer to the career doorstep. By remaining generic, management studies not only make students unlearn their hard-learnt technical competencies but also make them managers of others’ competencies rather than contributors of their own intellectual might. Today’s generation has the opportunity to learn from diverse sources from the childhood days and it does not require a management capstone course to acquire soft skills. In fact, soft skills, including conceptual, analytical and communication skills, must be integrated from the basic school curricula stage. Management courses by becoming more specialized and customized will become more relevant to the industry. Possibly, educational institutions could be averse to such specialization as there could be uncertainty in securing high student intake. Specialized and customized management courses, not unnaturally, would require early career planning by the students (and their families who have a say over the career choices of students in the Indian context!).

Indian Institutes of Vocational Management (IIVMs)

Vocational courses are those that are directly deployable onto a work situation by teaching and developing work related skills. Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) with their technician courses are typical providers of vocational studies. Even at a higher level, with reference to scientific and engineering studies, it is commonly understood in all engineering institutions that while class room teaching is essential and inevitable science is best learnt in laboratories and technology is best appreciated in workshops. Not only that, class room education is embedded with problem solving to illustrate and imbibe the theoretical principles. In contrast, management studies, despite the gallant efforts to bring in the case study approach and occasional industry guest lectures, remain theoretical and class room laden. In addition, the inevitability of reducing complex real world issues to manageable assignments leaves the students quite distanced from the complex realities. Added to this, the convenient management principle of holding someone else accountable and responsible for elemental projects makes management studies even more superficial. The earlier recommended approach of specialization and customization in subjects, industries and cultures is the first foundational step to make management vocational.  

To institutionalize vocational management studies, it would be necessary to establish a string of Indian Institutes of Vocational Management (IIVMs). The existing management institutes may be given options to convert themselves into IIVMs or establish adjunct IIVMs. Vocational management studies must have five essential components. The first is that an equal distribution of pedagogy between classroom and workplace must prevail. If it is a one year program, six months must be in class room and six months in a workplace, and in the case of a two year program, one year each in classroom and workplace. The second is that project work is not a surrogate for real time work experience. If there exist 12 courses in the theoretical curriculum, there must be 12 projects, each reflecting the main theme of each of the subjects. The third is that the faculty must comprise an equal number of fulltime academic faculty and visiting workplace managers and leaders. The fourth is that the curriculum should be managed and students’ performance evaluated by an academic board of both in-house faculty and industry experts. The fifth is that the vocational management institutes should run off-campus management programs aggressively on the lines of Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani.  These five principles can transform the way management courses are conceptualized and run as truly application oriented vocational programs. This, of course, requires close collaboration between industries and IIVMs. The exciting opportunity of next generation management - vocational management - is well worth the effort to overcome challenges of collaboration.  

Posted by Dr CB Rao on October 22, 2014

Hard Skills and Soft Skills: Differences Real or Unreal?

A manager’s competency set is expected to comprise both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are those that reflect technical and analytical capabilities while soft skills are those that deal with communication and collaboration capabilities. A well-rounded manager should be adept in both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills, which are technical and professional in nature, are predominantly acquired through education while the soft skills are predominantly personality based, and are improved through experience. Trainers typically tend to view these as two distinct streams of learning and development. Hard skills are rarely imparted in organizations except through on the job training. Each time an equipment or facility is upgraded or product and process specifications are bettered, experience of working with the changes teaches the employees new hard skills. On an exceptional basis, employees also are retooled through customized educational programs in universities.

On the other hand, experience which helps the employees upgrade their hard skills ironically very often leads to hardening of soft skills. Employees tend to become somewhat egoistic and rigid (depending on their cultural evolution) as well as authoritative or withdrawn (depending on whether they are extroverted or introverted respectively). Functions become rigid organizations within organizations, with growing inter-functional distances, making communication and collaboration exceedingly difficult, both at functional and individual levels. Given these cultural characteristics, the concentration of organizations tends to be on developing the soft skills of employees on one hand and changing the cultural dynamics of the organization on the other. Trainers and human resources managers generally concur that such programs usually have limited impact and fail to bring about fundamental and lasting improvements to employee soft skills or organizational cultural dynamics.

Hard versus soft; or hard with soft?

The distinction between hard skills and soft skills is real but the attempt to treat them as two distinct streams of continuing education is unreal. A person’s soft skills determine how open he or she is to improve his or her hard skills. Hard skills are not merely skills of engineering or accountancy that are robotically imparted. Hard skills also require significant person to person interaction to imbibe new skills. A person who is egoistic and rigid is more likely to be closed to asking questions and seeking knowledge than a humble and flexible person who is likely to be all eager and willing to learn new knowledge. More importantly, hard skills are likely to involve a host of technical and professional disciplines which need to work together to deliver the total systemic effectiveness. A manufacturing engineer, for example, would need to understand how his machine tools operate and fail, and how they are maintained. A maintenance engineer must understand why and how design and manufacturing tolerances are achieved. Clearly, interpersonal communication and collaboration, across technical functions, are vital to optimize the hard skill learning processes.

Equally, soft skills do not exist in vacuum. The soft skills of communication, collaboration, and time management, for example, may be required in teamwork for designing products, conducting operations, managing finances or developing markets. However, these goals themselves require hard skills. Without hard skills that lead to design creativity, manufacturing excellence, accounting integrity and market mapping these hard jobs cannot happen successfully. Possession of mere soft skills cannot lead to delivery of technical and functional jobs. Also, in addition, several of the soft skills require a measure of hard skills, be it language skills, computer skills or presentation skills, to be expressive, efficient and effective. It goes without further elaboration that hard skills and soft skills are integral to each other, and even symbiotic to each other. Organizations must find holistic paradigms to impart both the kinds of skills amongst the employees simultaneously.

Laying the foundations

In the Indian educational scenario, technical and professional educational stream is considered distinct from the language and fine arts educational stream. As one may surmise, the latter stream provides the foundations of soft skills. In technical and professional institutions, language courses are limited probably to just one semester and fine arts courses are virtually non-existent. As a result, students could be technically brilliant but tend to be lagging in terms of soft skills. As a converse phenomenon, arts and language courses have very few technical and professional subjects that could enhance the conceptual and analytical capabilities of a student. This differentiation is further accentuated by the fact that from the school going stage itself, the school children and their parents tend to zero in on their preferred careers and accordingly focus on the related subjects, and defocus on what they consider to be unrelated subjects. The foundations of basic education thus tend to be less than holistic, even if they are specialty oriented. Efforts by certain higher technological institutions such as the IITs to have one or two language or business communication and technical writing courses hardly provide complete alleviation.

Even in the job scenario, given that the emphasis of the organizations is on achieving immediate delivery from its employees, most training programs focus on adapting and updating the hard skills rather than on overcoming the deficiencies of soft skills. As a result, by the time someone reaches a managerial position some of the soft skills needed for getting effective delivery from others or effective collaboration with peer managers would be found to be missing, impacting organizational performance. Although organizations mount soft skills programs for middle level and senior level managers, such attempt would often be a case of “too little, and too late”. The problem is also accentuated by the “ego hurt” seniors feel when they are expected to develop the soft skills at a late stage, and the consequent defensive as well as aggressive reactions, making the desired culture of collaborative delivery even more elusive in an organization. Another negative consequence of this distinction is that technical specialists tend to get confined to line functions while non-technical people gravitate towards staff functions, making holistic leadership development to meet the requirements of apex positions even more challenging.

Easy to lose, difficult to acquire

The hard skills and soft skills are inversely correlated with learning and longevity. Hard skills are acquired in a relatively well-structured manner through the educational system but are easy to lose. As employees become accustomed to operate in established technological systems of firms, the gap between emerging technologies and established technologies widens leading to knowledge obsolescence. As the employees move up the hierarchy, ecosystems and management processes distance the employees from their machines, as a result of which they lose the hard skills relatively easily. The author’s observation is that employees tend to be technologically and professionally contemporary in the first one-third of their career span and later on experience a decline in their hard skills. The hard skills are easy to lose for employees who do not make special efforts to update themselves. There is no permanence at all in hard skills, and as certain organizations and certain employees encourage acquisition of soft skills, hard skills become easier to lose.

In contrast, soft skills are more difficult to acquire but once acquired tend to be more difficult to lose. Soft skills are acquired not merely through educational stream but more importantly through life experience itself. The propensity to acquire certain, if not all, soft skills is very much a personality related matter too, and in a sense tends to be a genetically influenced factor too. Depending on the congeniality levels that existed in family, school and college environments, a person could be positioned in terms of propensity to absorb soft skills. Interpersonal skills are experiential and once acquired are difficult to lose. While one does comes across instances of aggressive people mellowing or self-effacing people becoming more emphatic over a lifetime, basic changes in personality disposition are difficult to come by. While language skills may be easy to acquire equally by diverse people, the manner in which communication is conceptualized and delivered by each person would continue to be personality-specific. While people may be trained to adopt a particular style of interpersonal relationship, more often than not, adopted behaviors tend to wilt and natural behaviors are likely to surface under stressful circumstances.

C-suite requirements

The way hard skills and soft skills are taught in educational institutions, the manner in which they are imparted by family and social ecosystems and finally are updated by on-the-job experiences ironically run counter to the need to develop holistic business or corporate leadership. Like several of the managerial templates, the managerial grid which advocates that leaders should have more of strategic skills and less of technical skills, or put in a different way more of soft skills and less of hard skills, at leadership level is deficient. A music conductor, however eminent, he or she is cannot afford to forget how the notes are written. A surgeon, the more eminent he is the more skillful, the more technologically updated and the more behaviorally competent, he must be. The requirements of the corporate C suite are no different, and require holistic technologically and behaviorally competent leaders. The concept that with experience and hierarchical progression, the typical executive can afford to lose the hard skills and needs to be adept only at soft skills is ill placed.

The C-suite leader, the CXO of whatever domain or the CEO himself or herself, needs to keep the technical and professional competencies as strong and as updated they have been at the beginning of the career, and also have the appreciation of what soft skills can do to enhance the leadership. The educational approaches and the experiential strategies which make the hard skills easy to lose and soft skills difficult to acquire need a complete redefinition. If these development models are re-tuned to develop holistic students, holistic executives and holistic managers who are high on both hard skills and soft skills we would have a C-suite bench that is far larger and richer than what India, Inc has at present. The enriched C-suite would be a great leading factor in India’s quest for globalization. There would be a greater all-round entrepreneurial and big business development in the country and a greater emergence of Indian multinational corporations across the globe. It is time that Indian executives, managers and leaders who are strong on either of hard skills and soft skills appreciate the need to become equally strong on the other dimension.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on May 6, 2012

From IIMs to IILs: From Masters in Management to Leaders in Leadership?

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have been the most successful of the Indian efforts to clone and absorb, and even excel over, the Western educational thought. The IIMs are a group of public, autonomous institutes of management education in India. The institute at Calcutta was established first, on November 13, 1961, and was named Indian Institute of Management Calcutta or IIM Calcutta. It was set up in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management, the government of West Bengal, the Ford Foundation and the Indian industry. The institute at Ahmedabad was established in the following month and was named Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Like MIT Sloan in the case of IIM Calcutta, Harvard Business School played an important role in the initial stages of IIM Ahmedabad. The success of these two premier institutes prompted setting up of more Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) from the 1970s. Today, India has thirteen IIMs. The success of the IIMs triggered the mushrooming of standalone management schools and establishment of management divisions within general and technical educational institutions.

The IIMs offer a wide variety of management courses. They were established with the objectives of providing high quality management education and to assist industry through research and consulting services, and have more than fulfilled the vision and objectives. IIMs are considered to be among the most prestigious and elite business schools in India. Like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) which attract the best school leaving talent through nation-wide Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the IIMs attract the best graduate talent through their Common Admission Test (CAT). The IIMs primarily offer postgraduate, doctoral and executive education programs. The two-year Post Graduate Program in Management (PGP), offering the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM), is the flagship program across all IIMs. Some IIMs also offer a one-year Post Graduate Program for experienced executives. Some IIMs offer the Fellow Program in Management (FPM), a doctoral program. The Post Graduate Diploma and Fellowship are considered to be equivalent to MBA and Ph.D., respectively. Many IIMs also offer short-term executive education courses and part-time programs.

Expectations and realities

According to IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA), students admitted to the Post-graduate Program in the past have had scholastic achievements in different disciplines such as arts, commerce, science and professional streams such as medicine, engineering and agriculture. Some of the qualities which characterize past students include high levels of initiative and energy, capacity for hard work, strong task orientation, willingness to learn, and a temperament suitable for teamwork. The PGP classes have had a mix of fresh graduates and persons with work experience. Among the recent PGP students, a significant proportion has had full-time paid work experience of more than six months after their graduation. The influx of experienced graduates into the IIM stream reflects the gap between the expectations developed in fresh students by the IIM education and the experienced maturity levels that most brick and mortar organizations need. The IIMs typically prepare the students to leapfrog over the first executive steps to become managers straightaway. The fundamentals of products, processes and the marketplace are therefore not mastered to the requisite extent by the management graduates. Many times, the intelligence and grasp of the management graduates enables them to overcome the lack of frontline experience. Even so, the gaps between the demands posed by the role intricacy and peer group imbalance in organizations on one hand, and the aspirations fueled by the strategy oriented management education and the initial jumpstart of the career, on the other hand remain high.

Despite this realization and the influx of experienced personnel into IIM studentship, even if the majority is with experience of six years or lower, the challenges of expectation-reality gap and aspiration-delivery gap have not dimmed. The practical circumstances force that, out of the thousands of IIM alumni that join the ranks of industry and business each year, only a few become the most successful entrepreneurs or most effective leaders, managing total enterprises meeting all the benchmarks of true success and effectiveness. In a career, spanning four decades leading to enterprise leadership, so much emphasis is put on just two years of management education at the base of the career, which is subject further to the rollercoaster of organizational dynamics. One way of looking at the elite management education system of India is that the IIMs teach leadership to the unprepared far too early, actually make them managers quite early and let them lose the leadership potential eventually. Given that India’s quest for global economic position requires leadership in multiple domains, clearly time is opportune to define the limits to management education and also explore the next frontier of leadership education.

Early genesis and emerging logic

Despite the adverse image India’s post-independence socialistic polity has, many of the more progressive institutional initiatives of India owe their origin and inspiration to administrative analysis and political wisdom. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were established by the Government of India, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India who believed in scientific and technological self-reliance. The IITs were set up as a group of autonomous engineering and technology-oriented institutes of higher education, declared as “institutions of national importance”. They were created progressively from 1951 to develop a talent base of scientists and engineers, to support the economic and social development of India. Today, India boasts of sixteen IITs. The establishment of the IIMs was also envisioned and initiated by the Indian Government, based on the recommendation of the Planning Commission. India grew rapidly in the 1950s, and in the late 1950s the Commission started facing difficulties in finding suitable managers for the large number of public sector enterprises that were being established in India as a part of its industrial policy. To solve this problem, the Planning Commission in 1959 invited Professor George Robbins of the University of California to help in setting up an All India Institute of Management Studies. Based on his recommendations, the Indian government decided to set up two elite management institutes, Indian Institutes of Management. Calcutta and Ahmedabad.

India today has a civil service cadre of over 20,000, manning the huge all-India governmental and administrative apparatus. These belong primarily to the all-India services and the central services. The all-India services consist of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFoS). The personnel of these services are allotted state cadres and primarily work with the State Governments. They also serve on deputation to the Central Government. The Indian Administrative Service, with its federal nature, forms the backbone of the delivery of basic services and poverty alleviation programs. The seven central services comprise Indian Audit & Accounts Service (IA&AS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS), Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax), Indian Revenue Service (Customs & Central Excise), Indian Railway Personnel Service (IRPS), Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS) and Indian Postal Service (IPoS). The cadre of all these ten services is perhaps insufficient to cater to the needs of the huge 1.3 billion population and their development needs in India.

India has over 3000 central and state ministries and over 650 administrative districts, each of which requires several individual service heads, over 300 major central government owned public sector undertakings (PSUs) and over 5000 state government owned PSUs, and over 100,000 joint stock, public limited and private limited companies, each of which requires multiple corporate officers and enterprise leaders. The leadership pool is supplied by scientists, engineers, professionals, some of them with formal management qualifications; all of them acquired at the starting phase of their careers. Most of the leadership capabilities and competencies are acquired by these officers as they progress through their three to four decade careers. Given that the environmental context, in terms of political, social, demographic, economic, business, and technological trends, changes significantly every five years it is a moot point if the currently available educational structures, including the management capstone education offered and acquired typically in, and by, one’s mid-twenties would be adequate in one’s later half of the career between forty five and sixty five years of age when the leadership impact is expected to be the maximum. There is, typically, a mid-career inflexion point in one’s leadership journey which is completely unattended to in the current educational system.

Breaking the journey

The mid-career point, say the period between forty and forty five years of age (corresponding to fifteen to twenty years of experience) is the inflexion point when typically a mature manager begins to morph into a potential leader. By then, a successful manager would have reached a level of functional mastery and cross-functional capability demonstrated by successful headship of a function, division or a region. What lies ahead is the opportunity to head a business with profit and loss responsibility and later the total corporation. In some cases, the emerging leader would be required to even start up an entirely new business or open up a new region for the corporation. The leadership skills for this transformational journey would be significantly different in terms of developing a business or enterprise vision, formulating a transformation strategy and executing it through a leadership that walks the vision and strategy. The mature manager’s skills of orderly resource management, compliance to established systems and procedures and programmed people management would be necessary but would fall short of the leadership needs. Non-recognition of this inflexion requirement causes managers to continue to act as managers even when they are catapulted to leadership positions.

The answer to this lies in the managers and the companies as well as the civil servants and the governments retooling the mature managerial talent base and transforming it into an emerging leadership talent pool at the above identified mid-career point. The transformation requires the reinforcement of the managerial skills in the new-generation and next-generation contexts and the absorption of what it takes to be a leader in the changing environmental context. For example, the contemporary marketing head must understand the importance of social networking and how it could further change in future and the transformative products and services that are needed to leverage the social networking. Amazon leadership, for example, transformed the industry through electronic book, Kindle and online digital book libraries, leveraging the Internet and telecommunication technologies, and built for itself an industry dominating position. Online music technologies and cloud platforms demonstrate the need for leadership to transform lives through transformed corporations. This transformation requires the mature managers to shed the past partially and take on leadership development fully.

Indian Institutes of Leadership (IILs)

Just as the IITs and IIMs provided a fundamental and lasting breakthrough for India in the scientific, engineering and management education from the 1950s and 1960s, a new network of Indian Institutes of Leadership (IILs) would mark a pioneering transformation in the buildup of leadership development in India. The IILs, like the IITs and IIMs, should be deemed institutes of national importance, and set up as autonomous institutions under the Act of Indian Parliament. The admission to the IILs should be open only to the practicing civil servants or corporate managers in the age group of forty to forty five years, with a corresponding experience of fifteen to twenty years. The admission should be open to mature managers who qualify through a Common Admission Test Customized for Leadership. The admission should also be open to those managers who are sponsored as well as those who reigned from their managerial services, with appropriate years of experience as stipulated. The Government, the industry and the industry associations have a role in supporting the establishment and ramp-up of IILs. It also requires that IIMs confine themselves only to their current educational formats and not open up new leadership course streams for highly experienced candidates. However, IITs and IIMs should be encouraged to establish either on their own or in partnership with the government and the industry discrete IILs.

The curriculum of IILs should obviously be innovative and challenging and also state-of-the-art in terms of adaptation to the dynamic external environment. It should focus on transforming functional managers into business leaders without losing the core technical and professional strengths. Capabilities and competencies to start and grow startups, green field expansions and diversifications, achieve globalization and leverage pioneering technologies should be the unique deliverables of the programs. The curriculum should promote networking between industrial leaders and civil servants as well as between entrepreneurial leaders and professional leaders. The sponsoring corporations should treat the study period of twelve to eighteen months as paid sabbatical period, and seek no direct relationship between the study stream and the company domain; on the other hand, the companies should see the IIL programs as multifaceted leadership development initiatives. The faculty competencies should also be commensurate with the lofty and challenging goals of the IILs; the best of business leaders from India and abroad should constitute the core faculty with fulltime involvement. The IILs would be as transformative in India’s leadership drive as the IITs and IIMs had so far been, and would continue to be in India’s educational drive.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on March 11, 2012