American political scientist Edward C Benfield from Harvard, ‘ Long term perspective is the single most accurate predictor of upward mobility.’
Importance of leadership:
This statement entails that one of the fundamental principles of quality education is to develop a long term orientation/perspective in managers, particularly those who are aspiring for leadership roles. It is much easier to educate one for outcomes of today and tomorrow, as these expectations are more visible and measurable.
These leading outcomes are relatively easier to achieve, by using linear and analytical thinking. However, to achieve the long term objectives, which are lagging in nature, leadership of a different mettle is required. In order to be savvy at achieving such outcomes, deductive thinking, critical thinking, scenario planning and even design thinking are essential.
What is quality education?
Quality education can have different meanings for different people, organizations, and educational institutions. Malcolm Forbes, the publishing magnate captured it succinctly, when he said that the purpose of ‘ Education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.’ This statement alludes to the imperative of quality education to lead to opening of minds of students/managers/aspiring leaders, in order to enable them to be receptive to 360 degree signals.
These signals would be reinforcing current actions/decisions, along with indicating the winds of change that are blowing in the periphery of the system. Today’s peripheral challenges will be tomorrow’s core.
While referring to the quality of management education in India, the expectations of its stakeholder system – including students, parents, regulators, corporates, government, faculty- need to be factored and integrated. However, with the growth of private business schools in India, the quality of education provided been experienced as widely varying between the top 100 institutions and the rest. These variances have been observed on critical indicators, including physical infrastructure, student-faculty ratio, number of teachers with PhDs , research output etc. The most often cited causes for such cases point out to delay the upgradation and contemporarisation of curriculum, unavailability of academically as well as professionally qualified faculty and mentors, weak industry-academia-government interface, lack of funding, limited opportunities for experiential learning, imbalance between teaching and research, poor faculty development and many more.
Indian B schools will have to benchmark themselves against the globally renowned schools by working on academic curricula, oriented to shifting corporate needs, innovative and learning-centric pedagogical approaches, meaningful and remunerative placements, robust infrastructure and faculty development.
Some of them have already moved in that direction by prioritizing enhanced industry-government linkages, attention to leadership development, setting up of innovation labs/maker spaces/incubators/ accelerator programs for boosting the entrepreneurial spirit of the young MBAs besides forging international alliances.
All these are aligned to the compelling and urgent need for the institutions of excellence to exercise greater autonomy to run their show, raise the level of ranking in the country and overseas, earn prestigious global accreditations, besides a continuous benchmarking culture. Increasingly, these attributes are forming the key parameters of quality in higher education.
Quality education should be also be able to facilitate the learners/students/current leaders to be courageous and visionary, in terms of their perspectives. The American statesman-author-explorer Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Keep your eyes on the stars and feet on the ground.’ The stars represent the ideal, higher order purpose, sustainability and fairness while the ground metaphorically represents the need for leaders/educationists to win today’s challenges. Remaining only at the starry level could end up becoming a fantasy, without an orientation into reality.
Renewal and reinventing oneself should be embedded as a feature of the quality education architecture. We have seen many individuals, organizations-even some countries- take a tumble, whose renewal was not holistic and 360 degree in approach. What is the point of achieving greatness over time and one day; lose all of it because the leadership/leader took a decision that was on the horns of a dilemma- between delivering higher results v/s being right and ethical.
India needs a skilled workforce, agile thinkers that are also capable citizens and future leaders to contribute to our economic growth and social development. B schools today have the collective responsibility to equip them with requisite knowledge and skills but develop them to have sufficient maturity and self-control to be good parents, neighbors, and members of the communities in which they live. The young students entering B schools today are the future leaders, thinkers, innovators, artists and humanitarians that will make important contributions not only to this country, but also to the world at large.
English author, Lady Rumer Godden, has captured it very well and said, ‘An Indian axiom says that everyone is a house with four rooms- physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.’ Wholesomeness should hence be an integral goal of quality education.
Ronda Rousey, a mixed martial artist, captures the challenge of nurturing leaders of tomorrow, saying, ‘you are not training to be the best in the world. You are training to be the best in the world on your worst day.’ The message is that doing your very best, every day, is a must. One is not in contention for earning the privilege to lead for tomorrow, if we do not show up every day, like the rising sun, being able and willing to give our best
source”cnbc”
