The value add of the IIMs

Let us then begin our walk down this path with a question that I have been grappling with for a few days – about what defines the value of an IIM. Are they really are as good as they are made out to be?

There are many reasons why I have thought about this question. The first is the selection process that is followed to select B school students in India – where your managerial aptitude is judged on your performance in a 2 hour ritualistic ceremony called the CAT. A B – school is as good as it’s selection process; and while there is no doubting the impartiality of the IIM selection process, is it good enough?

My biggest crib with the selection process is that preparing for the test takes precedence over almost everything else in an aspirant’s life. The focus of any MBA aspirant is not to improve one’s technical, analytical, management or social skills – but to master hundreds of problem types and shortcuts in order to crack the world’s most demanding aptitude test.

One may argue that the CAT does test the skills that are desirable in managers – decision-making skills (X: do I answer 1 mark or 2 mark questions), dealing with uncertainties, perseverance (Y: I’ve been studying for this since my engineering days!), the ability to take risks and so on. But by focusing so intently on the CAT, we encourage people to stop adding value to their real lives and instead, to focus solely on cracking the test.

Another reason this question keeps popping up is that none of the IIMs are recognized to be in the league of any of the top 50 B – schools in the world. This makes one question if the quality of learning in an IIM is world class or not.

So where does the much vaunted value of an IIM diploma lie? We could try to answer this by asking what students want out of an IIM. On top of the wish list of most would be money – a dream fuelled by media reports of astronomical dollar – denominated salaries bagged by a few students. Some would be drawn by the prospect of learning, others by the brand – a very powerful one in India.

I, however, think that the best learning you take out of an IIM is confidence – confidence in your capabilities, borne out of having triumphed in a contest of 2,00,000 people. And no learning can be more valuable than that! Paradoxically, it is in the CAT madness the true value of an IIM lies!

In my next article, we will touch upon my pet themes of hyperbole and calvin – stay tuned, folks!

Walking down the lane

Another blog on the wall! Everything has a purpose (apparently) and so does this blog: The purpose of this blog is to make itself purposeful!

Random mumblings apart, I do not intend this blog to be a chronicle of my life; we have enough information to deal with without having to be bothered with gory details of the state of my love life or dilbertian situations at work! Rather, this is the first in a series of articles that I will be writing to chronicle not my life – but rather, my take on life! To clarify on that point – the difference is that while the former would have been focused on the inanities of my life (granular details that I would think are not worth expending effort on, by me as well as the discerning reader), the latter would be an abstraction of my experiences; and a commentary of sorts of the world as I see it.

That summarizes the mission of the blog; and the vision of the blog would be to achieve levels of literary erudition that some of my favourite columnists have attained; Subroto Bagchi and Shashi Tharoor, for example.