Professor Mirza Saiyadain on HRM and IWSB

First of all, IWSB is basically focussing on Entrepreneurship and developing leaders. The kind of culture that we’re trying to generate here is very different from the other institutions in terms of the flexibility and freedom provided to the students. The courses are designed in such a way that students have tremendous facility to do the kind of projects that they would like to do and also ensure that the learning comes from doing most of these kind of things. The culture of IWSB is moulded around the concept of freedom to the students and assignments are given so that the students are able to use their own creativity and knowledge. Our curriculum is also slightly different as the students are basically allowed to take any kind of courses and get their diploma in general management rather than specialising in a particular field, which we believe is very important for today’s managers to take decisions which are use for the entire organisation. Being a small institute, the relationship between the faculty and students is very informal and faculty is available all the time to listen to the problems of the students and be able to do research and projects. Students here are able to bring forth their own creative abilities and are able to benefit more from the education as well as feel very satisfied with the kind of education that is delivered.

Generally, students like to specialise in Marketing or Finance, but given the conditions today, I think that Human Resource Management and Organisation Behaviour are becoming very important because the kind of people that the organisations are looking for are those who are good in soft-skills, their leadership ability, communication ability etc. and therefore, if one wants to grow in those kinds of directions, IWSB will be able to provide the necessary environment to be able to realise your dreams of being an HR manager.

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Professor Ishwar Dayal on Management Education Today

Management education, over the years, has changed in certain ways, and not changed in other ways. The basic disciplines continue to remain the same. You can’t run business without Accounting, you can’t run business without Marketing or Finance or Organisation Behaviour. The main change that has come about is in the context of business so that when you are talking of Global Business and Global Environment of whatever activity you indulge in, then it would amount to say, understanding how a different country is differs from your own. Therefore, if you’re expanding business or making contacts in Russia or Germany or France or United States, you need to look at, say United States, not as an Indian, look at United States as a citizen of United States who has been born and brought up there, who has been educated there and has developed a framework of his own. And it is that framework which will establish the kind of contact and relationship, not transferring your own culture and tradition over to another country which has already developed in a different way. So these are the kind of changes that have come about in world business, opening up the markets and so on so forth. Therefore, any management institution will have to be also concerned with developing understanding of how one can go about understanding different cultures in their own context and not in your own country’s context and these are very important and this is different for conducting import and export trade because there you have very limited contact and a very limited context but setting up a manufacturing organisation or setting up a regular business office and so on, you certainly need to understand different things, those countries in a different way than you did before. This is where management education has to develop a framework. The curriculum has to be different. The courses that you devise have to be more focussed on cultural and social aspects than the courses that were taught earlier.

In institutions with which I’m associated, such as Indus World School of Business, we are trying to develop a number of courses which are dealing with issues which new to us in business education. In basic course material, yes there are differences in accounting methods in Europe, in America and in India, but those are minor things which can be understood by reading half a dozen articles and talking to people who are dealing with such things after all these are the same figures, they are only represented in a different way. But they’re easily understood and don’t need a full-fledged course to teach a student how to do that. But these are the things I’ve mentioned where the main difference lies between the earlier package of courses and what is useful and necessary now.

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