the new hr

Leadership
Schools are the right
she reaches nine. What they refer
place to start leadership
to as personality must include
leadership skills and orientation,
education, where the
which may be latent in the
student should be
individual. It is, therefore, obvious
helped in identifying, that schools are the right place
to start leadership education,
nurturing, and building
where students should be helped
their leadership traits in identifying, nurturing, and
and talents.
building their leadership traits
and talents.
One of the issues in which private schools score
over government ones is in incorporating an
inclusive concept—imparting knowledge as well
as developing personality. But the percentage of
children who get an opportunity to study in such
schools is rather small. While it is a good idea to
steadily keep building and supporting such special
schools, they are far too inadequate for serving the
needs of the burgeoning population of the country.
Therefore, we should give the private sector
a dominant role in managing our primary and
secondary school education.
What will really take us far and above will be
high-quality primary and secondary level education
that focuses on academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular
activities. Alongside this, we should also
create a strong parallel stream of technical schools
focusing on skill development.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prof. J. Philip
is President,
Xavier Institute of
Management and
Entrepreneurship,
Bangalore.
Role of corporate/governmental initiatives
Before taking up the issue of leadership
development in business schools, it would be
worthwhile to review experiences of leadership
development for public servants. Such initiatives
are available in many countries, whereby they try
to develop leadership at every level and in every
rung and sector of administration.
India too has a few institutes created for
the purpose of developing leaders at various
levels of administration. Two such institutes for
top-level administrators are the Lal Bahadur
Shastri National Academy of Administration,
Mussoorie and the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
National Police Academy, Hyderabad. These
two institutions together are expected to
develop administrative leaders and provide
the steel frame of administration and law
enforcement. Unfortunately, the critical aspect
of ethical leadership—character, conscience,
and compassion—is apparently missing in
their programmes.
Role of business schools
Just as we need leaders for the government
sector, we need them for the corporate sector
too. It is in developing leaders for the corporate
sector that business schools have a special role.
Like the administrative services, MBA attracts
the best talent of the country, including about
30% of the output of the IITs. These graduates
are extremely competitive. But MBA education
in the country does not give the kind of attention
it deserves when it comes to character, values,
or ethics. In other words, the MBA courses focus
too much on the ‘doing’ part, with the neglect
of the ‘being’ part.Many students do not even
look at the company or the job profile, but only
at the salary package. In this great scramble for
money what gets sacrificed is the development of
ethical leadership.
The top 10%—around 350 b-schools—produce
over 60,000 MBA graduates a year. This will
be more than the combined MBA strength of
the G4 of Europe: England, France, Germany,
and Italy. Assume that these and another 50,000
of our MBA graduates were trained well in
character, societal concern, and leadership; think
of the difference it would make for the country.
Unfortunately, b-schools which give attention to
these three aspects could be counted in tens.
If we do not bring in these higher order values
into the system, there is no sense in running
business schools. This is an aspect that concerns
many of us who have devoted almost our entire
lives to the cause of management education.
The onus lies with Indian management educators
to inculcate the values of character, social
concern, and ethical orientation—the hallmarks
of leadership.
I NDIAN MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER 2015 87