How can we help students learn how to manage? This is the
biggest challenge faced by management educators. Over the last 50 years,
management research has become more sophisticated, and uses more rigorous (even
if somewhat complex and esoteric) methods to enhance the validity of its
findings. But, there is broad consensus that management theories will remain
mid-range, that is applicable in relatively narrow circumstances and that
“general” theories of management will remain largely elusive. So, the “broad”
theories found in text books will remain important and useful, but may not
cover all the contingencies a manager will face.
Further, as ICICI Bank Executive Director K. Ramkumar told
participants of a Workshop on Emerging Pedagogies in Management Education
(WEPME) held at IIM Indore recently, good managers need more than managerial “knowledge”
– they also need skills, perspective, and attitude. As business schools have
embraced research more closely, and as faculty have been evaluated more on
their research output than their teaching (true in all the top business schools
in the US), the knowledge component of management education has tended to get
emphasized more than skills or perspective (business schools do very little on
the attitude front; in fact, it could even be said that they have a negative
influence on attitude, but more on that some other time!).
The History of Management Education
Management education started out in the early 20th
century as more of a vocational training with practitioners sharing war stories
from their experience or tricks they had picked up on the job. Harvard Business
School (HBS) deserves the credit for moving away from these war stories to a
more rigorous approach of learning how to manage in different situations by
pioneering the case method. Patterned on the Socratic approach to learning,
students at HBS are exposed to a mind-boggling 400+ cases during the MBA
programme. If nothing else, by the end of this, they have the confidence to
tackle any situation! Each case represents a real managerial situation faced by
an executive in the past with all the dilemmas faced by the protagonist and the
(limited) data available to her in taking such a decision.
The Limitations of the Case Method
HBS likes to call its case-based education
“participant-centered learning.” There is no doubt that when practised
seriously on both sides (i.e. by instructor and student), the case method can
be a powerful method of imbibing decision-making abilities. But, the case
method has its limitations as well. To be effective, it demands high levels of
prior preparation from participants. It could take 2- 3 hours for a student to
prepare thoroughly for a case discussion. The teacher needs to be skilled
enough to use the case effectively – contrary to the philosophy behind the case
method, many teachers are known to push a single solution preferred by them
rather than be open to a debate around the many possible solutions that are
proposed by the class. Linking case discussions to theory and concepts is
another skill that not all instructors have.
Another major criticism of the case method is that the
typical case study is a neatly packaged set of facts and data, but most
decision makers in real situations will rarely have access to data packaged in
such a “ready-to-process” form. A joke is often told about the HBS MBA graduate
who when given his first task on the job asks where is the case on the
situation so that he can “crack” it. Cases also tend to be static, in that they
represent a decision problem at a particular point in time, and don’t represent
the dynamic changes that are a part of most managerial environments today. Case
writers have found a way to address this – through multi-part cases that track
the evolving decision-situation over time. But few cases are available in this
multi-part form.
The “Raw Case”: An Alternative to well-packaged cases
One interesting solution provided to these last two
criticisms is the “raw case” pioneered by some faculty at Yale University’s
School of Management. Their internal case portal has “cases” on a number of
companies of interest. But each case is not neatly written and bounded.
Instead, it consists of links to articles, videos and other internet resources
related to the company chosen, and these are updated regularly. As a result,
the student (and the teacher!) have to wade through a lot of unstructured
information, much like in the real world. Of course, this makes the preparation
challenge even worse than before, but that’s the cost of simulating the real
world better.
The Power of Simulation and Games
Since the advent of computers, simulation and computer games
have opened up new possibilities for management education. Multi-player games
that simulate market-based competitive situations have been around for at least
a couple of decades. But these games were expensive, and needed powerful
servers to be effective. In recent years, the power of the high bandwidth
internet with audio and video streaming has changed the landscape for such
simulation and games. So has the power of computing itself.
To understand more about this landscape, we organized WEPME
2014 at IIM Indore (IIMI) recently. We invited 13 leading vendors of
simulation-based learning tools to present their solutions to the faculty of
IIMI, academic associates, doctoral students, and faculty from other
institutions. Here are my key takeaways from the workshop in the context of the
management education challenges I raised above.
Several products (Global Strategy game, Capsim, Brandpro,
Markstrat, EnParadigm) simulate multi-player competitive situations with
multiple rounds of engagement. The exact details vary across the games, but
players can decide on investments in manufacturing, R&D, and marketing;
introduce new products, and change prices; choose which markets to focus on,
etc., all within well-defined resource constraints. At the end of each round,
each team can see how it has performed vis-à-vis other teams, “learn” from this
experience, and then apply this learning in the next round while at the same
time making assumptions about what others will do. This certainly provides a
good framework to learn about business decision-making in a dynamic and
competitive context and is a good counter to the lack of dynamism and
competitor response in most case discussion exercises.
Once concern I have about these games is that they make
execution seem very easy, pretty much at the touch of a key. Changing a
strategy or re-orienting a company is a very hard task from an organizational
perspective, but I fear that thee games tend to gloss over that. Henry
Mintzberg has criticized MBAs for being Master of Business Analytics rather
than Master of Business Administration, and these decision-oriented games could
be criticised for reinforcing that analytical streak. Dharam Pal of SanRisk
Solutions (that sells Capsim products in India) shared with the audience that
his product replicated at least one dimension of real-life execution: team
dynamics. From his experience, the quality of a team’s performance in Capsim
depends on the cohesion of the team; even if one member is obstinate or refuses
to cooperate with the others, the team is often unable to respond effectively
to the feedback from prior rounds!
(To be concluded in my next post. All views expressed here
are my personal views.)
No comments:
Post a Comment