Professor Ishwar Dayal on Management Education Today

Management education, over the years, has changed in certain ways, and not changed in other ways. The basic disciplines continue to remain the same. You can’t run business without Accounting, you can’t run business without Marketing or Finance or Organisation Behaviour. The main change that has come about is in the context of business so that when you are talking of Global Business and Global Environment of whatever activity you indulge in, then it would amount to say, understanding how a different country is differs from your own. Therefore, if you’re expanding business or making contacts in Russia or Germany or France or United States, you need to look at, say United States, not as an Indian, look at United States as a citizen of United States who has been born and brought up there, who has been educated there and has developed a framework of his own. And it is that framework which will establish the kind of contact and relationship, not transferring your own culture and tradition over to another country which has already developed in a different way. So these are the kind of changes that have come about in world business, opening up the markets and so on so forth. Therefore, any management institution will have to be also concerned with developing understanding of how one can go about understanding different cultures in their own context and not in your own country’s context and these are very important and this is different for conducting import and export trade because there you have very limited contact and a very limited context but setting up a manufacturing organisation or setting up a regular business office and so on, you certainly need to understand different things, those countries in a different way than you did before. This is where management education has to develop a framework. The curriculum has to be different. The courses that you devise have to be more focussed on cultural and social aspects than the courses that were taught earlier.

In institutions with which I’m associated, such as Indus World School of Business, we are trying to develop a number of courses which are dealing with issues which new to us in business education. In basic course material, yes there are differences in accounting methods in Europe, in America and in India, but those are minor things which can be understood by reading half a dozen articles and talking to people who are dealing with such things after all these are the same figures, they are only represented in a different way. But they’re easily understood and don’t need a full-fledged course to teach a student how to do that. But these are the things I’ve mentioned where the main difference lies between the earlier package of courses and what is useful and necessary now.

-Transcribed from Video