What do you think a lecturer's mode of teaching in a POst-Graduate course like MBA?....Last saturday we here in TAPMI had our annual Industry Interface day. It's theme was "Nurturing today's MBAs to meet India's needs tomorrow''. Around 20 CEO's and HR heads of corporates like Titan Industries, Wipro ,Widia India Limited, TVS Electronics, HP, Daimler Chrysler etc have come. They were divided into three panels and each were given around 1.5 hours for a discussion on the topic and come up with suggestions. Though all the three panels were quite good, I liked the problem identification model and the process of the third panel. They came up with the pecualiar problem with the current MBA Curriculum- the Case method of Study. Adopted and popularised by the Harvard Business School, Case method of pedagogy is perhaps the most widley used methodology in most top-notch institutions. But one of the obvious requirements of a MBA course and a manager is to predict the future with a reasonable accuracy and strategise for it. But the case method as rightly pointed out in the discussion is like "Driving the car looking at the rear-view mirror, whereas what's required is to drive looking at the front". Case method fails in this, as it is essentialy an incident of the past(sometimes as old as 25-30 years). When the entire world is changing at a break neck speed, the pedagogy has virtually unchanged for the last 4 -5 decades. Though the cases can act as a model for problem solving, they dont give you the necessary skills for predicting or for thinking forward. They just give you a situation and ask you to respond to it. The inherent and incorrect assumption being that the conditions hadnt changed from the happening of the incident till date. When you need to manage at the speed of light, you end up thinking at the speed of decade old truck.Also, many cases (infact most) are HBS cases, which deal only with american situations, whereas Indian situtation is completely different.
What the panel suggested was a model for Forward looking pedagogy. One suggestion was to have a Scenario building type of pedagogy, wherein you prepare students by making them look front- look into future and take decisions. How to make this happen is a very tricky question-certain issues involved here are (these are my own concerns)