I always used to wonder what sort of losers read the self help books that come out by the dozen every week and are well advertised by the ‘best seller’ columns of newspapers. I am not talking about DIY help books on cookery, gardening, yoga etc. I am talking about the books with names like ‘You can win’, ‘Formulae for success’, ‘Creative thinking’ etc. I mean, don’t people realize that the only winner in question here is the author, who, after being a successful corporate executive and drawing hefty salaries, is adding to his big pile of money through the royalty. The problem does not arise if we read autobiographies or biographies – they are akin to what history is for the civil administration. The problem arises when the retiring luminaries do not write a simple autobiography, but a self help book. To make the common sense truisms presented in their writing marketable, they often write them down in a very abstruse language, and invent new terms. Arguably, their only intention could be just to make their writing lucid and easy to understand – for example, Khushwant Singh’s ‘Operation Colombo’ cut short a lot of writing that would have otherwise been resorted to. However, the management education world makes these plot elements bigger than they were intended to be – these in-book guiding arrows are brought into real life and thrust down people’s throat. I am sure De Bono had thought to tell people to force themselves to think factually, critically, emotionally, positively, creatively and holistically at will – the ‘six hats’ being simply a metaphor to help people visualize adopting a thinking strategy consciously as similar to putting on a different coloured hat at will. Yet, the hats have continued to live beyond the thinking, and have acquired a life of their own. It has become expected of a business student to speak in terms of hats – Hey man, your work is getting monotonous! Time to put on the green hat!!
Not only in these self help books, but in many other management education scenarios we find terms living beyond their utility and hence usurping the space rightfully reserved for a single thing – common sense. Is it that essentially we all realize that management is inherently an un-teachable (new word!) concept, and hence, to justify the two years we spend doing an MBA, we hide behind big words, and reinvent the wheel innumerable times. The management literature is replete with such examples – the whole of organization management, systems thinking, marketing management and all such branches of management in which one finds ‘big words’ are essentially consisting of two things – disguised common sense, or personal opinions being taken as gospel truth. Well, if you do not know how to do a thing to the t, and still, the thing needs to be done – obviously you will go at the work, and learn along as you do the work. Common sense? No, some joker has ‘propounded’ this as a theory of ‘Action Learning’, by masking this very truth behind neat words. If you drive your car and control the wheel, compensating every time the road turns you will reach your destination, and if you simply step on the gas and leave the wheel, you might end up upended in one of the innumerable possible ways. Common sense? No, some leading light has put it as the ‘Law of equifinality of the system in case of negative feedbacks’ in the Systems theory. WTF?? I mean, this ends up being taught in B-schools? Are the people who take some very tough tests and interviews to get in, many after leaving well paying jobs, supposed to be treated to this? Well, this is the ground reality. There are courses on ‘Creative Thinking’ – where people have to cram up the ‘six hats’ and regurgitate in the examination. How creatively are they being made to think? All the flights of fantasy, taken by senile (no doubt great, but definitely senile at the time of writing) managers, are duly taught to people – to emulate their success. Now, do you really think an organization of, say, 100000 employees can be directed like a clockwork to perfection? I do not subscribe to that view. In the end, a good working organization simply is a chance phenomenon, which then survives and outlives competition – much like the first living cells which formed, by sheer coincidence, out of the primordial soup, and then survived well enough to ensure I write this blog today and you read it. Yet, there are innumerable books written by countless CEO’s and MD’s who happened to oversee great working organizations when they retired, all talking about their ‘formulae for success’. I read it once – when in doubt, look intelligent. Is it a manifestation of this dictum? I bet some nosey journalist had gone to, say Jack Welch, and asked him how the hell did he make GE into the behemoth that it is. Trying to look intelligent (I, a mere MBA student, might be committing blasphemy here by commenting on Jack Welch’s intelligence, but then, fair chance he won’t be reading it), Jack might have given an answer, partly coated in high sounding words and lofty ideas. The journalist might have written it all down and put it on the paper the next day, and the academics would have been discussing it the day after – behold, a new theory in management studies was born. Then Jack, and other top level businessmen, seeing what suckers we were for such ‘theories’, and being the shrewd businessmen they are, started giving out more of them, for substantial royalty, of course. I am not speculating here. We have, at our B-School, symposia, where top business leaders are invited, by constant pestering, and an audience of weary students is collected on the pain of hefty fines (remember, it is a Saturday, and no one likes to spend the week end delivering or listening to boring lectures.) Well, they come, deliver something on topics as enigmatic as ‘India poised, but is it? And oh, will InfoTech play a role, or will we melt down before that, and creative ideas to solve this whole thing’. Of course, that is not a real topic, but I have forgotten the real ones, but this one gives a near estimate of what is discussed there. Then some of our classmates ask ‘insightful and intelligent’ questions, to which they gives equally ‘creative’ answers. These answers are duly noted by the faculty and students alike (though I would like to assure you that I am not guilty of this crime), and then, it enters the popular discourse, and ends up being written in term papers, examination scripts and thus legitimized as ‘theory’. I have often asked my very enlightened and intelligent classmates if the things we are studying here are even remotely useful in the field – they give really interesting answers. Some are candid – man, this is BS, and we know it, but still, whatever it takes to get the MBA degree. Some are a bit rebellious, like me, and do not study such things, and concoct their own theories in the examination – if you need BS, it does not matter who the bull was. Interestingly, some do not think it is all BS, and tell me that we need to take our understanding to a higher plane to comprehend it. All I can say, either they are delusional, or they are our future business leaders.
In the end, I repeat the same old question – are we doing the right thing by wasting our time learning made up stuff? Is it a time to call a spade a spade and cut out all this useless stuff from management curriculum? I have no personal grudge against them – after all, writing for ends on systems theory is much easier than trying to solve a capital budgeting numerical, because you cannot go wrong. But, in the end, we end up wasting our time, in the prime of youth, when we would have been better occupied doing actual work. Think again.
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