A school with a difference

Professor S Sundararajan, Dean, Gulf School of Business, shares with Mayank Singh the roadmap of the institute and how it will contribute in fostering better management practices in Oman.

What is the big idea behind starting the Gulf School of Business (GSB) in Oman?
I am convinced that management education should be for managers. The question arises that if medical and law education can be given to students, who have no exposure, why is there this debate whether we should have students who have no previous experience or should we have students who have previous experience and that too as managers. The field of management is very young. Management was never thought about as an intellectual discipline. For centuries people have been doing business without going through a management education.

In 1954 Peter Drucker wrote a book called The Practice of Management, that can be seen as a starting point for intellectualising management. He said that if you wanted to know about management you need to know about costing, finance, marketing, human behaviour etc. There is a difference between selling things to a consumer and an organisation. Management is not one subject or a discipline, it is a synthesis of several disciplines. It takes various parts and makes it into one. It calls for an ability to understand the various facets of life. People who believe that they need to understand business are the people who need to study management.

There is a risk that people who have no knowledge of business may go into a company and develop confidence without facing or understanding the problems of managing. Hence we take a position that it is not good to take people who do not have experience in business. We want to bring in people and fill them with the intellectual inputs and practical aspects of management. Second, leadership is about humility, one does not need to bend backwards, it is also about realising that a single person cannot handle everything and the fact that when I team up with other people, it helps me do things better. Third, management education cannot be a canned stuff, it has to be contextual. Oman, Germany or France will have a context and the education has to be in reference to that social, economic or environmental context. Fourth, you cannot say that we will produce everything in Oman and be self-sufficient, that is absurd. If every country does things what they are good at, then things would be efficient; localisation and globalisation are equally important. So when you put all these things together it is GSB.

Does GSB have an affiliation with a foreign institute or is it a stand-alone entity?
The course is for practicing managers. We did not affiliate ourselves with any other institute as most such institutions are franchising like a KFC or a McDonalds and this may not be relevant to the local context. Second, when you are affiliated to an institution, inevitably the affiliated institution will say that this needs to be done in this way and that it is a canned stuff. We did not want this. We are getting people from all over the world to teach at GSB so this way we get a global faculty.

What kind of courses will GSB be offering to its students and what is the USP of the programme?
Our tagline is – Practicing management… differently. We have three programmes, the first is Programme in Practicing Management, the second is Post Graduate Programme in Practicing Management and the third is Masters in Practicing management. The third one is not on offer right now. It is a 15 month programme and only for post graduates. The first programme is also open to people who do not have an undergraduate degree. We realised that in this country, because of its history there are people in managerial positions who do not have an undergraduate degree. So we said we will start with them. There are a lot of concepts and tested hypothesis in management, but our aim is not to dump all of this onto students in a session. We will make it interactive, let management arise in the classroom.

In France, they have a similar 15- month programme in management and a 12-month full time programme in management, but they do not call it practising management. Here a person in the first programme can take a challenge exam and upgrade to the second course and do a full time programme. An orientation programme prepares them to get into an academic mould. The programme involves one week’s face-to-face interaction (classes) for the first six months. So between two sessions there is a four week gap. Thus, there will be six weeks of academic inputs on 10 different modules or subjects. While they are in the third week we ask the participant, whether there is some challenge being faced by your company or a professional problem being faced by the manager.

We then tell them to work on that particular issue. So practicing management will bring forth a challenge faced by the company, by the end of the third week. A professor from GSB will be the mentor for students. Starting from then they will work on the project for the next six months. They will be using whatever academic input has been given to them in the sessions in doing that project. In the seventh week meeting they will give a presentation defining the problem and they will share the methodology used, the material gathered, the analysis and the conclusions that they reached.

We also tell them to get their mentor from their company. In addition, we get three judges who will be sitting through this presentation for that one week. This is a very powerful brain trust because when you say that we did something in our company like this, someone may raise their hand and say why did you not think of doing it like this! So people throw ideas at you and it is a real problem for you. Ultimately, you want to solve the problem in the best way and that happens in the session, during the presentation and this project is evaluated. We also give them a comprehensive case study on various subjects that they have learnt. And the case study is another component of evaluation. After the first week there is a four-week gap; in that four week gap, we ask them to do work, for example, at the end of the first week we will throw a topic like – Take care of quality, productivity and customers needs. It is a threaded discussion in which participants need to log in and write what they feel about the topic. This can be a very rich learning process.

What are your plans for GSB in future?
GSB is a joint venture between Morison Muscat Knowledge Centre and NTI, eventually this will be an independent entity, which will be self sustaining. Once we do well in Oman, we plan to set up campuses elsewhere. We want to be the pride of the Gulf.

Tell us something about your professional background and what made you choose Muscat as a base for such an endeavour?
I was a professor at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore for 18 years. I was also at XLRI, Jamshedpur for two years and a consultant for 16 years in banking, mining and manufacturing companies. At IIM-B I was the head of executive education and the head of the centre for entrepreneurial learning and a member of the governing board. In 2005 I came to Oman for the first time to do a programme on corporate governance. I saw a huge opportunity to make a difference to the people in education here. Oman has something that is very inviting and so I am here.
 

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