MBA story

With the CAT round the corner..i felt that this article may be of some use to any aspirant of the 'Master of Business Administration degree'

By Debashis Chatterjee, 14/10/2010
Surviving an MBA: The untold story

IIM-K director takes you into a world of no baths, no breakfasts, no time


The IIMs produce roughly 5 per cent of the MBA population in the country. We select our students through the Combined Admissions Test (CAT) examination. For every 100 students who take the CAT exam, only one makes it to one of the IIMs. The CAT-scanned boys and girls represent a selection of excellence that is unparalleled in the world.

The popularity of the MBA program comes from a very stiff entry barrier and multiple exit options in the form of job opportunities. This is unlike university courses where the entry barrier is not that high and job options are much less.

It is only natural, then, that recruiters in industry pay a lot of attention to our students and consider them fit for lucrative jobs. Where else would recruiters find such tried and tested students with a very high degree of general intelligence?

Having started on a note of optimism, I wish to share with you the untold story of what actually happens once you get into the MBA programme. The views expressed here do not pertain to IIMs in particular, but to most good MBA schools in general.


Getting admission to the MBA program is only part of the story. Being selected is just one function of your test-taking ability. It may not have much to do with your managerial ability. Your success in the jobs you get will depend not just on your quantitative and verbal skills that had helped you successfully crack the CAT.

The challenges on the job will demand a lot more: social skills, ethical behaviour, capacity for on-the job-learning, emotional maturity and leadership. Here, I attempt to highlight some of these: The learning curve: From the day one of joining the program, you have to move steeply up the learning curve. Your accelerated learning has to accommodate reading upto 200 pages of printed matter a day.

The readings will include case studies, books and newspapers for general awareness. You will be dissecting a human enterprise with the help of theories of demand, constraints, emotions and behaviour. You will be tested for your ability of not just learning by rote, but also learning from the experience of practising mangers and some wise professors.

Time & self-management: You have to complete at least 36 courses of 30 contact hours each in two years. Time passes by like a rocket and if you are not self-organised, you may feel like an astronaut who has just missed the spacecraft! Everything here may seem to be at an accelerated pace than your "previous life". Some B-schools insist on a minimum percentage of class attendance. So, chronic bunking downgrades you in more ways than one.

Every day you may have to make critical multiple choice decisions about time management. One student describes this as follows: (a) have bath and breakfast both (becoming rarity in campus), (b) bath but no breakfast, (c) breakfast but no bath, and (d) neither (becoming an alarmingly regular option).

The mess food: The food in the mess, like in most students' mess, is likely to obey the law of marginal utility that you study in economics: the more you have, the less you want to have. A student light-heartedly describes mess food as an advance warning: "You may have a stomach-churning unforgettable experience of drinking a liquid preparation that the mess cook calls soup!"

There are some students who overeat as a defence against anxiety they are unable to handle. This gorging is more evident before exams--you eat as an advanced compensation before you are eaten up by your exams! In all earnestness, you may have to plan the right diet for you to be in match condition for the challenging MBA curriculum.

Each year, some students are asked to repeat or abandon the programme because they are not able to cope. You certainly do not want to be one of them. Gender parity: Most high-profile MBA program have adverse gender ratios that are generally skewed in favour of male students (about 90%).

Women constitute roughly 10% of the batch size. At IIM-Kozhikode this year, we have some good news for those who believe that women make good managers: about one-third of the incoming MBA batch of 300 will be women. This is very different from the usual. It means that you have to be man enough to be very well-behaved and courteous before an intelligent female classmate.

All the women that you would see here have come on their own merit and deserve to be respected for who they are. Besides, most women come with the requisite social and managerial skills that make them equal to or more than men in the eyes of the top recruiters of the world.

Think of Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, or Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO of ICICI Bank--you will get the picture.

Multi-dimensional character: If you are a potential Nobel laureate and a social entrepreneur like Muhammud Yunus, you will not be a complete misfit in the MBA course. We have had people who have owned their own football clubs and scripted promos for Bollywood after passing out from IIMs.

Yunus of Grameen Bank, for instance, talks about the multi-dimensional man who does not want to do business for profit alone. He says we can put poverty in the museum. Imagine! So, what is this multi-dimensional human? Yunus thinks people are motivated by a variety of impulses--not simply a desire to get filthy rich. The existing system, says Yunus, has created a one-dimensional human being to play the role of business leader. We've insulated him from the rest of life, the religious, emotional, political, and social.

He is dedicated to one mission only-maximise profit. If you want to change the system being part of the system, you are welcome to IIM Kozhikode. Here we encourage not exclusive mercenaries, but inclusive excellence. We are privileged here to create socially sensitive citizens who would some day lead India in their chosen paths of excellence.

(The author is Director, IIM-Kozhikode.)

Source: The Financial Express