The Evolution of the MBA

THE MBA degree, the gateway credential throughout corporate India and the rest of the world, has increasingly come into question in recent years. As the fees to get into these management institutes have skyrocketed and new technologies have disrupted the way businesses are conducted, many students have begun to increasingly ask if a business school degree is really worth it. And from the perspective of companies, are business school graduates really the problem-solvers they are cracked up to be?

“The traditional business school education as we know is not working, just like the traditional executive education [meant for professionals looking to up-skill themselves] is not working,” says Santanu Paul, the CEO and managing director of TalentSprint, an edtech platform that works with several higher education institutes, including B-schools. “The same questions are being asked. Do MBA graduates have the tools? Do they have the knowledge, the understanding of what the current world entails?”

These questions are being asked because of the advent of the so-called digital age, where new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) are disrupting the way businesses are conducted, and new fields such as fintech are emerging, and new possibilities are emerging from the huge tranches of data that are being generated. The disconnect between industry and academia that can plague B-school education can, with the advent of these new technologies, threaten to create such a big gap as to rob MBAs of the sheen they once carried.

Unsurprisingly, an evolution is underway in business school education. New classes on business and data analytics, AI, ML, fintech, blockchains and management science are being added in traditional MBA programmes, new certificate courses for management professionals and recent graduates are being introduced, and sometimes, whole new MBA degrees in these fields are being created.

“We are not teaching them technical skills like how to code or a [programming] language,” says Sonya Hooja, the cofounder and director of Imarticus Learning, another edtech platform that collaborates with B-schools. “But more so, on the application. How do you use data applications on a day-to-day basis? How do you set up different divisions of data analytics, so on and so forth.”

The idea of a degree in business administration began somewhere at the turn of the last century. The Harvard Business School was among the first off the block, establishing the first two-year MBA programme in 1908, just around the time the US was losing its frontier image and beginning to industrialise. This model won rapid acceptance, and as companies began to look for a scientific approach to management, MBA programmes began to spring up across the world. The growth of new businesses around oil, machines and the jet age, and the evolving nature of banking and finance over the years, put further emphasis on the role of the manager.

According to those who run B-schools, we stand at the cusp of a new age now—that of the digital age—and while this transformation is exerting new pressure on B-schools and the education they impart, a new type of manager is now beginning to emerge. And this new manager, with expertise in subjects like data analytics and AI, is going to emerge as an even more crucial figure in the world of business.

Pointing out how e-commerce and digital companies now lead the way, and how new technologies are disrupting many sectors, from conventional brick-and-mortar companies to the banking and financial services industry, Professor Uday Salunkhe, group director of the Welingkar Institute of Management, Development and Research (WeSchool) says that it is now imperative that every management professional today has an understanding of how contemporary technologies and platforms work and are able to visualise digital processes and products for the future. “If this is the state of the industry, it is necessary to equip the students with knowledge about these emerging and future technologies to ensure that they can deliver value once they join the corporate ecosystem,” he says. The institute now offers a variety of management programmes that have introduced many of these subjects, from those around business analytics and advanced business analytics to technology in finance banking and financial services, and more.

“Technology is increasingly becoming a significant component of the MBA curriculum simply because of the rapid changes in technology and its use, and innovations that impact almost every sector and function. The pandemic has only emphasised that further,” says a spokesperson from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), which has in recent years begun to offer many new electives and courses in tech-aided areas, such as AI and marketing, AI and HR (human resources), along with a 16-month blended programme geared to skill professionals and entrepreneurs to understand subjects like data mining and big data analysis.

Tarun Anand, the founder and chairman of the Universal Business School in Mumbai, states that with businesses being forced to undergo a digital transformation, new management professionals will increasingly be faced with newer concerns. “Analytics and digital technologies are deeply embedded in the way the world does business. This is creating a newer set of jobs whereby the left brain-oriented tasks will be completely taken up by machines, and graduates of the future will either need to know how to use technology or how to build it,” he says. The Universal Business School has a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)-based MBA programme.

One of the hottest new subjects within MBAs is now data analytics. If data is the new oil, as the cliché goes, the suits that control this new oil are our new power wielders. “Skills, such as the use of statistical software for data collection, data curation, data mining, and data visualisation tools, form the first level of technical expertise that is expected from a management analyst. The next step in this process is to gain mastery over predictive analytics tools and develop models to derive meaningful insights,” says Professor Jitamitra Desai, the chairperson of Decision Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), which has launched a full-time two-year MBA programme in business analytics. “As the cliché goes, “data is the new oil”, and unlike oil, data is being created in abundance by every consumer and every industry; it is an inexhaustible trove of information and applying business analytics will, in turn, provide useful recommendations to make this world a more conducive, inclusive and productive place to live and work in.”

At these programmes in data analytics, the faculty does not necessarily teach students how to code, those who run B-schools say, but gives students the wherewithal to look at data, to train them in analysing and applying data to real businesses. “With the vast amount of structured and unstructured data, it is necessary that a manager is trained to leverage this data using analytics tools,” says Professor Pradeep Pendse, in-charge director for University Programmes and chief technology officer at WeSchool. “What is more important is the manager/MBA’s ability to identify suitable business hypotheses which can be evaluated using the available data. This requires a deep understanding of business, the ability to observe customer and product behaviour on the ground and find possible hypotheses which can then be validated or evaluated using the available data.”
According to Paul, there has historically been a dividing line between engineering and management, the so-called B-school and E-school. But that line is now rapidly eroding. “The big revolution in B-school education that occurred was that you learnt by case studies. That you didn’t get into details of implementation, especially with technology and engineering and just focused on the business aspects of the problem. That traditional line is blurring. Coding is no longer just coding. Coding has evolved to become business programming,” Paul says.

“What is managing, really? Most of the time, it is about managing people. Managing people has been the dream of every manager. That is why the management track has been so attractive. But today, every company you are getting into as a leader or a manager is largely technology-driven or automation-driven. So, there is now more technology and fewer people. If you extrapolate to the extreme, eventually there will be only technology and no people,” he says.

THERE IS ALSO another growing field of the so-called ESG (environmental, social and governance) courses within the traditional MBA programme. With the growing public conversation around issues such as climate change and diversity making their way into the business world, B-schools are now updating their curriculum to introduce new classes in subjects like climate finance, impact investing and social entrepreneurship. IIM Ahmedabad, which has introduced subjects like carbon trading and environmental impact assessment, recently launched the Arun Duggal ESG Centre for Research and Innovation. “Our recently launched Centre has been instituted with the core objective of helping Indian enterprises and organisations integrate ESG into their core business and investment decisions. This is an area that needs a lot of research and we intend to undertake cutting-edge research to help the industry put society and environment at the centre of their long-term business strategies,” a spokesperson for the research centre says. The Universal Business School, which claims to be India’s first green B-school, has subjects like green finance, green marketing, green operations & supply chain & green HR. While WeSchool, apart from teaching a course on green issues, also has one on ethics and governance, which began, Salunkhe says, after recognising the need to nurture managers who were sensitised to responsible and ethical business post the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2018, Paul (who serves on the boards of a few fintech companies) recalls how one of the major concerns among fintech organisations and banks was about the availability of fintech talent. “By talent, I mean, not just young professionals, but also working professionals like bankers and technologists with interests in finance and technology. And that talent was missing as well as the system of producing that talent,” he says. TalentSprint—which at that point was offering an AI and ML programme for executives with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH)—then began to pitch the idea of a fintech programme for working professionals to some of the IIMs.

Executive education programmes, most of which tend to be of relatively short duration and are targeted at working professionals looking to upskill themselves, tend to be one of the highest revenue generators for B-schools globally. When Paul pitched the idea around, IIM Calcutta (IIMC) jumped on it. “Turns out that IIMC was independently concluding that the finance programme in executive education had begun to plateau. There was an increasing awareness that the future of finance and banking was going to be tech,” he says. “You can’t come to expensive education, spend a bunch of money and learn more finance. You have to learn technology.”
Since then, TalentSprint has collaborated with IIMC to offer a number of more programmes, and recently also announced another with the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Other half-a-dozen courses with these two institutes are in the pipeline. These collaborations with edtech platforms to offer executive programmes to upskill the current managerial workforce in the technology of tomorrow is another facet of the evolving nature of B-schools today. A majority of these collaborations are short-term courses targeted at working professionals.

BUT IN SOME cases, edtech platforms are also participating within traditional MBA programmes, designing and delivering a small portion of these new tech-driven courses within MBA programmes, and in the process helping some B-schools upgrade themselves with the needs of industry today. With B-school partnerships, Imarticus Learning, for instance, has mostly tied up to help deliver executive programmes, especially around the fields of financial services and capital marketing, but at least in one tie-up, also helps deliver a portion of the curriculum within a traditional MBA programme. Talking about their collaborations in executive programmes, Hooja says, “So, large parts of the curriculum are changing because of the evolving landscape of financial services and different technologies. Apart from traditional finance, which B-schools do an amazing job of teaching, we come and bring in a lot more of new-age skillsets since we are closer to the industry.”

As Paul points out, it isn’t just that B-schools are moving closer to technology, even engineering institutes are moving closer towards businesses. “Engineering used to be on one side saying hard skills are everything and businesses are secondary. And the B-schools were saying engineering can be done by geeks in the backroom while we do all the glamorous stuff without them. Now, both sides are trying to move to the middle,” he says, pointing to a range of engineering institutes, such as the IITs, offering executive education now. “IITs are realising that the technology they are working on has to enter the business world to make an impact. So, they need to come to the middle to talk to businesses in a more friendly and collaborative way. And business schools are realising that their skillsets of the teaching of technology are so abysmal that they have to come to the middle to learn something from the tech players,” he says.

But what does that mean for engineering students who continue to remain the largest group of students entering B-schools, and who leave engineering behind presumably because, to some extent, they do not want to remain involved with technology? They leave engineering schools only to find a substantial chunk of engineering and technology in B-schools now. Paul laughs as he discusses this conundrum. “If the idea is to get into management because you don’t want technology anymore in your life, then that time is over,” he says.

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