HUMANIZING MANAGEMENT
A recent Associated Press story claims “It's about to become official: The recession is over”. The last year saw B-school students in the dumps. Students can heave a sigh of relief this year. But what did we learn from the recession? As Mel Ziegler said, “By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful. By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble.”
The mad race for material prosperity and success at any cost was the mantra. All of a sudden a global meltdown became reality. The pundits declared that the greed and speculative nature of managers was the cause for the downturn. The irony is that the very foundations of business management have encouraged greed and speculation. So in a sense, the educational system is to blame.
Create leaders
Management education needs to change. A manager has to be a leader. The supreme quality for leadership is integrity. Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. It is for us to decide what we want to become — mere managers, or leaders with vision.
Management professionals remain managers and fail to become leaders because of the overemphasis on quantitative rather than qualitative aspects of education. Science and economics have become the alpha and beta of management education. Economics has reduced everything that can be measured into units of money. Even the theory of utilitarianism has been reduced to a cost-benefit analysis. Economic rationality is the only rationale that managers of today understand.
Management education today does not incorporate failure tolerance. Business students believe they should manufacture success at any cost. Students are only exposed to the success stories of stalwarts such as Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji. How often are they reminded that there are many others who miserably failed? Leadership comes from learning lessons taught by failure.
Accountable to society
A B-school must be accountable to society at large. A radical change is required in the very fibre of the curriculum. A change that would help us see profits as a consequence of greater goals such as work satisfaction, social equality, economic empowerment and true happiness. For this, incorporation of the humanities in the curriculum will help. The humanities remind us we are but mere human beings, limited by the vagaries of an uncertain future. It teaches us to see in shades of grey. The Spiritual Quotient (SQ), fast gaining popularity in corporate circles, has also been overlooked in management education.
SQ is not about religion. It is the ability to introspect, to open up to myriad influences and ideas and thus become more tolerant. The conscience becomes the driver, intellect takes a back seat. A conscientious manager is one the world is in desperate need of. The finance managers who hailed toxic loans as assets and sold them as securities definitely lacked this conscience.
It is time to realise that business can be compassionate, ethical and moral. It is time to go beyond the analytical.