Sustainable Humour

 It's all about sustainability, if it's not AI talk. So, here are some tips to sustain you through the next chapter of your life-

Bread is not as sustainable as cake. Marie Antoinette was right, you should eat cake if you don't have bread.

Chocolate is for winters, as it does not melt. Try ice apple in summers. 

Jokes about bosses make your stay in the organisation less sustainable- they have informers. Wait until you have left the organisation to crack them. 

War with Pakistan is sustainable - for us. Not for them. We just have more people.

A Ph.D. makes you immune to delayed gratification in all spheres of life. Try it!

Acting is temporary. Reality is permanent. Be real. (sorry, lifted from something equally inane said by cricket commentators- Form is temporary, class is permanent?- whatever that means)

What I Learnt From IIMs

I mean as a teacher/faculty. And what IIMs can do better..

Classes are overcrowded (MBA) - 70 plus in a section, not conducive to learning. Why can't they have smaller classes, larger faculty size? The norm in the US university I was at, was around 40 in a PG class. UG was larger.

More faculty would also help get more original research and accreditations if that is a goal. More cases too, perhaps with contributions from Professors of Practice. 

Not enough Ph.D. candidates. Each faculty could potentially have 3-4, or one new candidate each year. We would help create manpower. Make efforts to get more quality candidates by spreading the word. 

I had an academic associate (in Indore) who helped with grading. A must for every faculty, to give her/him time for value-added work.

Not enough guest faculty from industry. At IMT and some other institutions, we had a better number of industry folks within the courses, coming to guest lecture.

Projects (live in the course directed by faculty) are going down. Seminar courses are rare, except in Ph.D. classes.

Flipped classrooms are almost nil, in most IIMs I was in.. shouldn't top institutes be doing more of innovation?

 

Teaching Ph.D. Students

 One of my favourite things in teaching has been the Ph.D. courses. For one, the class is small, usually not more than 3-4 in an elective offered to the area students- marketing, in my case. Second, you are constantly learning from the discussions, re-looking at the best work published around the world- I mostly did Seminar courses on Digital Marketing, Tourism Marketing or Retailing.

Research ideas come out of such interactions, not just for fulfilling course objectives but beyond them. Conference papers, journal papers can follow, sometimes with the students as co-authors. It lays the foundation for their Ph.D. topics, sometimes. Here are a few students of Ph.D. from IIM Indore these last few years..

Wahid, Alisha in 2020.

Aarushi, Shweta, Sanket, Ankita, and Sumit two years ago.

Priyavrat, Shweta, Sanket and Ankita earlier. This was Tourism Marketing.

Teaching New Courses

Teaching new courses for the first time is an experience. You don't want to do it too often, but you want to try it once in a while.

I mostly taught Marketing Research since I started teaching in Indian Business Schools-and still do. But at times I have taught Business Communication (YES!), Advertising, B to B Marketing, and a Seminar on Thought Leadership. At Indore, I started teaching two or three new courses- Digital Marketing (for several different programs), and for the Ph. D. program, Retailing and Tourism Marketing.

I learnt a lot from these, and that learning continues each time I teach the course. I like to experiment with assignments rather than just use cases- so I have tried Blogging, a Bidding game, and writing of emails as some exercises, besides a website design exercise in my digital marketing course. Live exercises and projects are good for learning, in my experience. Particularly when accompanied by presentations with Q and A. I can literally "see" the learning in many cases.

Courses I Have Taught

Since I started teaching in 1986 as a grad teaching assistant at Clemson, I have taught the following courses in management schools-

Intro. to Computer Applications
Operations Research
MIS
Principles of Management
The above were taught to undergraduates in the U.S.

On return to India in 1991, these have been my staple in MBA level teaching.

Marketing Research
Advertising, and its new avatar, Integrated Management Communications
Marketing Management
Business to Business Marketing
Business Communication-only once at Kirloskar Institute
Services Marketing-I even wrote a book on this subject while at IIM Kozhikode.

Seminar on Thought Leadership- this is a thought-provoking one, hopefully without provoking students who take it.

Digital Marketing, after I discovered I could not stay away any longer.

The following have also been taught to the Ph.D. students-

Seminar on Retailing-plan to modify this to include Tourism.
Marketing Models
Digital Marketing Seminar- under development.

International Friends

Being in the U.S. for a Ph.D. (1986-1989) was good from many different angles. One was that I met people from many different countries- Alberto from Portugal, Godwin Udo from Nigeria, Masoud from Iran, to name a few. Our group of Indian students also had a permanent member from France, Anne Pouliquen, who was studying in the Agriculture Dept. We actually visited each other's homes later on. Her place in Northern France was an interesting one to visit, full of history and charming rural atmosphere. Mount St. Michael was nearby, and Rennes too. She took us around to these places, and we ate some excellent seafood and cheeses at her place and her parents' farmhouse. She in turn visited us in Harihar, and we went along to Hampi and Pondicherry with her. Muthu, our friend in Bangalore, received her at the airport. She also travelled alone to various places in India.
Some pics from Hampi (above and below, first) and Pondicherry.

Masoud and his wife also visited us in Bangalore, and I met him in Malaysia while he was a visiting prof. there.

Why You Could Teach

I am going to try and sum up why I am into teaching, and let you figure out if you should.

I worked in industry after my MBA for two years- advertising and marketing research. Then I got a chance to get a Ph.D. in the U.S., and went for it. I started teaching as part of my scholarship, and found I liked it. After the Ph.D. in 1989, I started full-time teaching, and haven't stopped. Just a few years' break for admin./leadership roles, but I am back into full-time teaching now.

I find it's one of the most fulfilling professions around. Maybe barring a few-very few. Firstly, you are with young people, and that rubs off on you. You see lots of people who are idealistic, like you were (or are), who think they will change the world. Some actually will.

Given the numbers today, you may not remember every student by name, but they always remember you- for good or bad. I still remember most profs. who taught me in my MBA and Ph.D. classes- some more than others, because they gave me an A. Or their classes were different. Though I specialised in marketing, I remember the Org. Behaviour classes the most (in the MBA). In the U.S. the profs.' openness was amazing.

You can innovate, because in the class (and in exams) you are the boss. The only limit is your imagination.

The feedback is instantaneous. A bored look, an appreciative smile, a confused countenance, or whatever.

Plenty of scope for doing your own research too, if you work in a good B school. You can write cases, write data-based papers, attend conferences, organise them, work with bright, quirky people, in short have a lot of fun at work. And of course, read a lot as part of your job.

Creating Doctors

We need hundreds of them. Doctors of Philosophy or Ph.D.s, in management, I mean. We have major weaknesses in our supply chain- read universities and other institutes. Many state universities lack quality guides and/or systems, though they allow flexibility. IIMs are inflexible, though they provide quality. Who will fill the gap?

No idea, as of now. But I am happy to have contributed my mite to solving this in a small way. I just helped one of my students clear his last hurdle towards his doctorate- he cleared his final viva yesterday. We celebrated with lunch at Lemontree in e-city.  We have a Ph.D. program with NLU and plan to start our own. IMT also conducts research methodology workshops for doctoral students (some of whom are teaching as well). Hope this helps a little bit.

Activity filled week at IMT Nagpur

We just finished doing an MDP (management development program for those unaware of the acronym) for the GMR group. Their executives came in for a 3-day program at the campus. We also had a visit fron HDFC for a campus recruitment program for the first leg of a sort of combined training-cum-recruitment process. The offers will be made to successful students after a training program of a few weeks done both by HDFC and our faculty. This is an interesting way to recruit students.

We also just finished a 2 day conference on MSME sector (Micro, Small and Medium is the expansion of the acronym). Some interesting stats on MSMEs and their contribution to the GDP and exports came up. But some of their problems seem to be timeless. Anyway, researchers made a great effort to document many different facets. This was our second conference since June. Three more are slated in the rest of the year.

We are doing an SPSS (Stat Package for Social Sciences) training program from tomorrow for 3 days. This package is useful for statistical analysis, and doctoral students and faculty in particular. You can do stuff such as regression and other analyses using this.

We also have an entrance test for our Ph.D. program offered in partnership with National Law University at Jodhpur on 27th. So the action continues through this week.

A Landmark

My first Ph.D. student submitted his thesis this week to the university I worked with once at Bangalore. It is a landmark of a kind, though it will take a while for him to clear the evaluation and defend his thesis , and get his doctorate. My Ph.D. was obtained in the US, which has a totally different system, more autonomous, with the guide and his university department doing everything in one place. Here, we have a more distributed system for part time Ph.D. students.

Which brings me to my regular lament- or famous grouse, to borrow from the name of a whisky. That we don't have enough good institutions offering a Ph.D. program in India, at least in the area of Management. The system we have does not encourage excellence with a few exceptions, and falls short of most autonomous institutions like those in the US or Europe. IMT now has a new Ph.D. program in collaboration with NLU Jodhpur, an autonomous institution. We hope we will be successful in launching a few good doctorates in management. Academics should also pay well enough to attract talent to teaching and research. We are relatively better than we were a couple of decades ago, but we still have only about 30-40 institutions of excellence in management. We need a hundred more, at least.