Know-How Exchange : Strategy

K C R Raja,

The areas you mention - emerging sectors like global business, tourism, insurance and other financial services - these are hardly areas of differentiation any more. Aside from being covered and covered and covered in current literature and in many curriculum's, they are "fads." A business school should not concentrate on fads but instead, the fundamentals that are transferable into any given industry at any given time. In five years, there will be five more areas that are "emerging" and half of these emerging sectors will either be passe or laughable because they never panned out. An MBA program should be geared to providing the fundamental tools to the candidates that are extendable to any area. And MBA degree isn't a vocational/technical degree where you learn a specific trade like tool and die making. An MBA grad should be able to analyze situations and match the right tools to these situations to drive a business to excel given the environmental conditions of the day. The first two semesters concentrating on basics are great toward this aim. After that, specialization can concentrate on how to apply these tools to real world situations in many different conditions. This tact will be far more valuable to the MBA students than the fad du jour. This is what will get Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies on the map.

I hope this helps.


Wayde

Raja sahab, what advice can i give you, you have train lot of MBA's like me, but as for your question i would like to add that there is a college in delhi called IIPM www.iipm.edu who focuses more on functional specialisations in corporatge growth and entrepreneuralship and have position itself as providing 100% campus requritments to all the candidates. and you can offer programes in the field of retail industry as i have noticed that there are few or none who are providing this kind of programmes in india, as retail industry will be booming in india when big retailers like walmart is coming there. hope i was of some help to you, good luck

mustafa

Many thanks for the responses that I have received from you, Wayde, Mustafa, ethnicom and Puru. They have certainly set me thinking!

I certainly realise that "emerging sectors" will cease to be "emerging" in a short while. I would also agree that apart from locational advantage the institution should try to differentiate its offerings in terms of attributes like academic rigour, industry relevance, physical infrastructure and basic management of processes from admisions to learning-teaching , job training and placement. However what I am looking for is something different. I am lookig at a brand new institution which has the opportunity to choose from among several options. A general purpose MBA with functional specialisation -all too common in our ountry-is one option. There are over 1100 management institutes offering this kind of a programme to fresh graduates. The market is of course huge-1.75 lakh students took the CAT exam this year and I guess altogether 3.5 lakh students would be seeking admission to MBA for a total capacity of 91000seats.The top 20 institutions have an intake capacity of approx 4000 and probably get students with a CAT score of 95 percentile or its equivalent . The initial challenge for the institute would be to attract these students with an excellent offer that combines faculty and learning resources, strong industry linkages leading to bright placement prospects and a pedagogical approach that enhances the managerial relevance of the entire programme. This is the route that some of the succesful management institutes have apparently taken.
The other option for the institute is to go for a specialist programeand make it its niche area. The IIFT is perhaps an example: they also have been able to build an image over along period because of their early mover advantage. We also see now institutes being set up for studies in IT, peroleum/energy management, pharmacy management, agri business and so on . An institution that obviously does not see itself growing to a big size n the short run could probably benefit more from this approach than from a conventional MBA programme.

When I invited comments I was wondering whether any business school in India or abroad had done a detailed exercise in positioning prior to its being launched and if that was available.

Incidentaly I did not have JBIMS in mind although I am associated with that institution.

I would like to thank all of you for participating in this dscussion. I was looking for something different- what strategy planners in business schools do to position the school and if any unconventional approaches have been adopted.
K C R raja

What an interesting topic.

I work with a Graduate School of Business at a university in the US. We offer over 20 masters programs. The Dean has asked me to assist him with a marketing evaluation of the school. None of the masters have a stated value proposition nor a positioning statement.

My intuition tells me that each graduate program should have their own statement so they can each have their unique way of differentiating and communicating their value.

Am I wrong? Or should there be only ONE Value Proposition, One Mission Statement, One Positioning Statement for the School of Business alone?

Your opinions are valued.

Thanks,

Rudy