WHY ARE B SCHOOLS
OBSESSED WITH
‘STRATEGY’?
THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE WORD STRATEGY
E
nter any B school in India today and the most abused
word you would find on campus is ‘Strategy’. Anyone and everyone starts the answer to any problem with ‘Strategically….’ with
at least a hundred repetitions of the word by the time s/he aims
to finish the answer. Recently, during the induction program for
HR leadership programs of one of the leading conglomerates,
similar views were shared by one of the HR heads – “I see a lot of
young people coming into our programs and blabbering all the
possible jargons possible, without actually trying to make sense
of whatever they are saying. HR is really not what is being taught
in B – Schools these days. At the end of the day, if you don’t know
how to make someone comfortable in the office on the first day
of joining, then you have failed as an HR, no matter howsoever
strategic you believe you are.”
the competitors. Strategy is a mere word that is used to coin those
logical extensions.
What good is the B school grind if an intern from one of the premier B schools can’t work on software such as Microsoft Excel or
During a recent interaction I had with the new batch at my Alma
matter, which coincidentally happens to be one of the best in the
industry, I was flummoxed to see the kind of answers people had
for very simple questions I put up to them. Although, I too am
very new to the industry, but whatever little I have seen in the
industry, you are not expected to be the business partners on day
one, neither would you be given an opportunity to be one, until
at least 5 years into your careers. Then why is it that everyone is
trying to become one during their formative years?
I am not against gaining the knowledge and understanding of
business from strategic point of view. I am against bypassing
the fundamentals of various functions just because you gained
an entry into one of the premier schools who have groomed the
industry stalwarts and made them into business partners, CPOs,
CEOs or CFOs. B School junta should know that they reached
where they are, because they got their fundamentals in place and
applied logical extension to those basics to achieve an edge over
33 • Designfreebies Magazine • www.designfreebies.org
Word. What is more humiliating than after getting selected into
one of the premier companies, your manager mockingly asks you
– “ Mr Khanna, weren’t you even taught how to draft a mail properly?” Something somewhere is going drastically wrong and the