Mind your Business, B-Schools
THE ECONOMIC TIMES MUMBAI
Monday 26 APRIL, 1999
Strong customer orientation creates long term competitive advantage. Gopal K Gureja wonders why most business schools continue to ignore this aspect of management education.
In an overprotected market in which demand continued to chase supply for many years, the Indian businesses generally registered commendable growth year after year. This happened despite the fact that most of them had scant respect for quality of their products and for the cus- tomers they served. In the post-liberalisation era, ironically, the Indian companies now suffer from similar indifference that they had meted out to their customers for many years. The B-Schools, as suppliers of one of the major resource for corporate India, have also shown scant respect for the quality of their final product -the MBA.
It was the director of Symbiosis Education Society who saw the relevance and potential that value- adding, quality after-sales-service offers for long term product differentiation. He admitted that the subject calls for much better treatment than it was receiving as part of the syllabus for MBA (Marketing) programme. The Symbiosis Centre for Management and HRD (SCMHRD) decided to include ‘Relationship Marketing’ as an elective subject in the final semester of the class of 1998.
An indirect but telling endorsement of this decision came from none other than Phillip Kotler While in India in October last year he talked about the need of a paradigm shift in marketing. He talked about the customers’ mind share rather than the market share. He talked about the need for customer intimacy. “Brands are crucial for success in marketing”, he said, “but the central concept is exchange between the marketer and the customer, and hence the management of relatiouships.”
What SCMHRD did last year was totally in line with what the B-Schools’ cuistomers had sought time and again. A survey carried out way back in 1994 had revealed that 79 per cent of the respondent CEOs had rated customer satisfaction as one of the three most critical strategies. The need for customer-orientation in companies had suddenly gained considerable urgency. A more explicit message to the B-Schools was delivered by a customer-expectations survey carried out in 1997, by XLRI Jamshedpur. Apart from other things, 66 per cent of the CEOs of the campus recruiters said they needed a more ‘customer oriented’ MBA.
Surely, some B-Schools have brought in new courses on their curriculum. But a large number of them have failed to focus attention on the jssue of customer orientation as an important input for the newly emerging managerial talent.
Encouraged by PC Shejwalkar, poineer of management education and Dean, management faculty, University of Pune and after a request from the Academic Council, I suggested what should be included in the marketing management syllabus for a reasonable coverage of the related topics. The response to my suggestions, without exception, was highly positive. However, the revised syllabus’ for MBA programme, part of which comes into effect in June 1999 in about 40 B- Schools, sets at rest any pretensions that these schools are serious about staying up-to-date on their curriculum. It is unbelievable that in the 92-page document, not a single word appears that signifies the concept of customer orientation, quality of customer service, product service support, training of service personnel or organisational structure for after-sales-service. All this, when the Indian businesses are talking about customer care as their top priority initiative.
The business schools are supposed to “provide to the country a steady stream of competent young men and women imbued with the “latest and relevant. knowledge from the field of management theory and practice”. If that is so these schools cannot be ignorant of the fact that in overall global competitiveness, India is positioned embarrassingly low at 45th rank among 53 countries (WEF Competitiveness Report 1998). On customer-orientation parameter the report places India at 46th rank. But the worst is the downslide that has brought India to 46th rank in 1998 from 34th rank in 1994.
That the business environment is fast changing is common knowledge. The Indian businesses have voiced their concerns about their unfulfilled needs very clearly. Why can’t the B-schools apply enough pressure, on their own, to bring about the required change? Somewhere, some principles of management are being ignored by the very people who preach them.
New, world-class business schools are being established in India and some of the premier institutions are keen to bring the quality of business education in India at par with the international standards. Yet most B-schools are more concerned about the revenue and the bottom line rather than the quality of the product they are churning out It is high time that these management schools woke up to the reality of the situation and implemented necessary changes to transform talented young men as MBAs who are imbued with customer orientation, leadership qualities and entrepreneurial spirit. It is time that they looked at the customers’ needs. There is a good chance that the bot- tom line will take care of itself.