Young Achievers: Abhinav Menon
Abhinav Menon (17), a class XII student of the Dubai International Academy (DIA, estb. 2005), bagged a silver medal in the 21st International Philosophy Olympiad staged in Odense, Denmark from May 16-19. The Olympiad attracted 90 high school students from 40 countries who wrote essays on philosophical themes during a time window of four hours. Abhinav’s essay on the need for national constitutions to protect minority rights was awarded one of three silver medals. “I discovered the website of the Olympiad while browsing online. Therefore I reached out to the coincidentally named Abhinav Philosopher, an affiliate organisation of the Abhinav Vidyalay and Junior College, Mumbai,’’ says Abhinav. Founded in 1993, the International Philosophy Olympiad (IPO) is an international science olympiad supported by Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) and run by a group of teachers from several countries working under the aegis of FISP (Federation of International Societies of Philosophy). Kedar Soni, an astronomy postgraduate of Manchester University, UK, promoted Abhinav Philosopher in 2007 and is the Indian coordinator for IPO. Soni is also the founder-director of Abhinav Vidyalay, a state board affiliated K-12 school, where he teaches several subjects including computer science, physics, robotics, astronomy and philosophy to class IX-XII students. “Most of the preparation for the Olympiad was done online under Prof. Soni’s guidance,” acknowledges Abhinav gratefully. An only child of Suresh Menon, a banker and his wife Lata, who works with a Holland-based food company, Abhinav was born and raised in Dubai. “DIA has a liberal outlook and encourages co-curricular and extra-curricular education enthusiastically. Therefore I’ve had plenty of opportunities to take on testing challenges,” says Abhinav, who has plans to study a combination of subjects including mathematics, philosophy, economics, ethics and political studies, at a top-ranked US university. In the longer run, Abhinav intends to return to India and participate in politics. “Contrary to popular perception, politics is a noble profession. At university I intend to develop the skills to persuade people to work in the national interest. It’s easy to be cynical about politics but we need to work for the greater good of the greatest number,” says this philosopher student. Wind in your sails! Sunayana Nair (Mumbai)
B-school profs need industry experience
Vasudev Murthy is visiting faculty at IIM-B and managing partner, Focal Concepts, Bangalore It’s the time of the year when an estimated 500,000 college and university graduates and/or early and mid-career business managers are getting ready to enter India’s 4,500 B-schools. They have been pumped up by parents, teachers and the media that an MBA (Master of business administration) certificate is a passport to a swift climb up the executive ladder or business success. The country’s top-ranked 13 Central government-funded Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), numbered among the world’s top 25 B-schools, churn out more than 11,000 MBA postgrads every year. In addition with the other 4,000 plus B-schools graduating over 40,000 MBAs annually, questions are increasingly being asked about the effectiveness of B-schools and the quality of the students they certify as industry-ready. This is a positive and healthy development. Although over the years, many IIM and other B-school alumni have moved up corporate ladders and become captains of industry, doubts being raised about the industry-readiness of MBAs are centred not so much around the quality of students, as faculty. Unlike other disciplines, business management is an applied subject. Theory has its place but principles of practice are more important. Moreover, while the average age of B-school entrants abroad is the late 20s — in America’s top 10 B-schools including Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Wharton etc, it’s 27 — the average age of MBA entrants in India is much lower because most tend to enter B-schools immediately after completing undergraduate education. It’s nobody’s case that the latter are intellectually inferior. However, they generally lack experience and maturity, which limits their effectiveness when they enter workplaces as ‘managers’. This phenomenon is also perhaps a reflection of societal traditions which ordain the time of youth as best suited for education. Meanwhile, with the popularity of business management education having captured the imagination of India’s 250-300 million middle class, B-schools with inadequate infrastructure and dubious parentage have mushroomed (3,600 plus according to the India Education Review) across the country. With droves of poorly counselled and inexperienced students driven by peer pressure and inadequate research entering the rarefied atmosphere of the corporate world, India Inc is experiencing the hollowing-out effect of too many half-baked managers seeped in theory, seeking short-cuts to the top without spending time in actual hands-on value creation. Therefore in the interests of factor productivity and global competitiveness of Indian industry, it’s necessary to address the fundamental question of management education. If management is an applied art, how can full-time management faculty be made more effective? Management education worldwide thrives on the case study method — which takes an actual business situation and examines it from various theoretical angles. What brings it to life, however, are two main ingredients: • Professors who have lived the story or something equivalent. In other words, faculty with actual business experience who have experienced risk and uncertainty. • Students with work experience who can relate to real-life examples. While some faculty are well regarded in…