meek-investor

The online MBA. Yawn. Can’t be done. No value. Wait a minute. How would you like it if you could say you are a MBA from the Jack Welch Management Institute ? Sitting up ? What if it was 20% of the cost of a regular MBA. And what if you don’t have to leave your job for 2 years to do this. Interested ? Read on. Jack Welch is taking a 12% stake in a company called Chancellor University System LLC, whose leading investor is Michael Clifford an evangelist for online education. His lending of his name to the MBA program will immediately catapult it to star status. But will it work ? There is no doubt that technology has the capability to transform education. Firstly the pros. It is cheaper and you don’t have to give up your job. You can do it from anywhere in the world. The monster that is the US visa officer can be kissed goodbye. Many more people can do it. The limitation of the classroom size largely goes away. But there are serious doubts, of course. Can the academic rigour be maintained...

There’s a US TV reality show called “Are you smarter than a 5th grader ?” In this game, adult contestants make a fool of themselves trying to answer questions from 1st to 5th grade in schools. They mostly fail and prove publicly that they are not smarter than a 5th grader. I am concluding my current posts on education, with a non business post on something that’s intrigued me. Two questions come to mind. First an obvious one and the second, perhaps a not so obvious one. Firstly the obvious one - Why does an adult willingly subject himself to shame by being proved on TV to be less smarter than a 5th grader ? But the question that is more intriguing for me is – Why are 5th graders being taught stuff that honest adult Americans don’t know and  have no use for in real life . I am amazed at the sort of stuff taught in schools. I think the educational system has completely missed the revolution in our lives that the internet has caused and is still sticking with an outdated concept of ed...

The day I walked into my business school , all those years ago, I heard this term - "What ails XXX ?- substitute name of business school for XXX. Many years on, I still hear this rhetorical question. From many business schools. Its nice that they do ask this question, but often they stop at that and simply gaze at their own navel. Imagine an organisation, where you have virtually irrelevant performance targets, no serious performance evaluation, you are unlikely to be sacked, where you bristle against authority and do your own thing, where compensation levels are low, but have little relationship to performance and where demand often exceeds supply, so you don't have to worry about capacity utilisation. That closely approximates a business school - I am being deliberately harsh to make a point. Business schools rarely practice what they preach. That's probably why they hate to take anybody from the industry inside. Business schools must be run like a corporate - with all i...

A society can often be judged by the professions it eulogises. What are the professions that are aspirational ? What do people want to be ? Its a sad fact of our times that in no nation would the teacher figure at the top of the list. Very few people really want to be teachers anymore. If the best minds are not working at the schools, colleges and universities, how is a knowledge society like ours going to be sustained. This is true of business education as well, With all respect to my academic friends, the best minds in the business world are not at the business schools. Why ? The obvious answer is that there is little money in academic life. It is a well known fact that an outstanding professor with a lifetime of experience would earn less than a green horn passing out of business school on his first day at the job. So why would anybody, other than those laudable souls who do it out of passion, ever aspire to an academic career. But its not only money. Business schools often do not p...

Management is one of the most applied of all sciences. Its not a theoretical science. You would therefore expect that in this field there is the closest of cooperation between academicians and practitioners. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The two mutually loath each other although outwardly its all bonhomie Managers think academicians are outdated, theoretical and of no use in the "real" world. They think what is taught at business schools is of little relevance to corporate life , even though they may have been from a business school themselves. Academicians see practitioners as non cooperative, contributing little to the profession and certainly irrelevant to the academic world, except for allowing professors to write cases. They see them as something of an intellectual vacuum. Interaction between the two is therefore largely restricted. Top notch professors sit on company Boards and do consulting, but the vast majority of academicians have retreated into their ac...

How obsolete are we ? If I were to judge myself, pretty obsolete. This week I am posting on Education, as the theme. Starting with an outrageous statement - the manager is obsolete the minute he steps out of business school (or whatever school) and then it is a long road to utter obsolescence until he retires. Management science is a pretty dynamic science. The body of knowledge is expanding at a terrific pace and we rarely keep up with it. Company training programmes are meant to missed, citing "extremely busy" as an excuse. How many times have we gone back to university to relearn or do a refresher programme - none , unless your company has sponsored you for one of the Advanced Management Programs (note to my company - are you listening ? Harvard would be nice !) Take for example the field of finance and accounting. A few years ago, in my company, we played a game - Who wants to be a Millionaire (or Kaun Banega Crorepati to my Indian friends) on basic IFRS principles. We pl...