While, of course, B-school helps with basic skills for fruitful employability, the art of excelling at work -- and making an indelible mark while you are at it -- cannot be mastered from the structured instructions-based education it provides.
Concepts and practices related to vision, strategy, entrepreneurship, business ethics, change management, corporate responsibility, seamless communicability and so on, which are quite important for today's businesses, remain under-emphasised.
Frankly, I doubt if these can be taught. In fact, to an extent, it is our individuality, and thinking shaped accordingly, that help us pick or reject these matters in due course.
Based on my experience, I can say that after a certain level of career advancement, we reach a peerage where almost all peers have a near-equivalent degree of operational knowledge and technical expertise.
After such a level, the skill that differentiates an individual's growth is largely the ability to understand the many elements that contribute to the success of his company. The ability to genuinely appreciate the essence of every component of your organisation helps you enhance your own output. An honest understanding of "team-building" and its importance only starts to dawn then.
In a similar vein, many professionals often get the feedback to 'show initiative'. What they are actually being told is to be enterprising and chalk out a roadmap for oneself.
This ability to draw-up success for oneself requires an understanding of what's good for the company, the vision to make it happen, the charisma to motivate team members, and the imagination to garner resources for it.
These values and traits get developed by the exposure you get in life. Many of us often get bogged down, since the process has a hard coating of "stress", which, in fact, is a character-building exercise. B-schools try to replicate such situations through case studies and so on, but this experience itself is calibrated and vicarious, while the dynamics of corporate life is too random to allow that.
Sandesh Kirkire graduated from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, in 1990.
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