A laborious MBA

'A manager must learn how to perform under pressure.'
'A leader must learn to manage deadlines.'

This is a common refrain given to justify the heavy workloads given in B-schools. But according to me, focusing on urgency and deadlines is not the only thing for a manager. What this would do is to create firefighters and crisis managers. And not all people perform to their fullest under pressure. Being a manager is not only being able to perform under pressure but being able to create something different, something which no one else has thought up of. And genius is something which normally needs patience. It may happen once or twice in the middle of the night but mostly it needs to be cultivated patiently. When you give assignments and ask students to submit them a couple of days later, sometimes two to three assignments in a day when you consider all the subjects, you rob the students of their creativity. In their haste to 'get it done', they do a shoddy job and mostly copy it from seniors or from the net. Just type out a sentence or two from the case in Google and you'll, in most cases, get a solved version of the same from the Internet. There is a difference in a presentation given by copying sentences from the net and breaking them down into bullet points and a presentation made after reading articles or reports and by developing unique insights from the group. There is a difference in a presentation given by dividing the slides among the members and a presentation made together after brainstorming and arguing the possible alternatives. The presentations have become so cliched that I can safely bet with my eyes closed that the slide after the title slide will have an Agenda and the last slide will be a Thank You slide.

One may be able to fool some of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time. This shortcoming easily glares up in the corporate world. When you do this in front of a customer, he or she is most likely to see through the bull. What needs to be done is to make the MBA course thorough but not urgent/laborious. Give us the motivation to read the Economist, to read McKinsey reports, to read HBR. Make us study them. Do not give the case studies two three days before the submission. Give them at the beginning of the quarter/semester. Set a deadline, preferably at least two weeks before and give the students the time and space to work out something. Point them to reports or articles which will help them out in their quest. Let the students know that original thoughts will be appreciated. And yeah, most important of all, set up a peer evaluation. This is most important to ensure that everyone works or at least shows up for the meeting. (<-- This deserves a separate post)

Appendix A: Here's just an example of the number of cases which might crop up in an average week.
Financial Management - 1 case per week. 2-3 pages only but impossible to decipher.
TQM - 1 case per fortnight (as of now) 5-6 pages. Somewhere on the easier side but supremely boring.
OM - The mother-in-law of all cases. One case per week, which will soon scale up to two. Ranges from between 4-10 pages long. Totally hopeless unless you're an operations freak.
MIS - The best and the simplest to understand but (yes, I'm an IT engineer, but still) painfully long. Two cases per week (at 8am), each case 14-20 pages.

That works out to around 5-6 cases every week. Couple that with average of 6 hours of class daily and surprise quizzes always around the corner. Where is the time to smell the roses?