Manegerial Perspective: A course offered for the first time in the World
The Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK) made yet another landmark achievement by innovating in cutting edge management education, with the launch of the week-long rigorous and compulsory course for its flagship PGP participants. The 6-day course which is entitled "Managerial Perspective", was inaugurated by Prof. Debashis Chatterjee, Director IIM Kozhikode in the presence of the faculty and students, on 17 September 2011 at IIMK Campus. 32 faculty members of IIM Kozhikode and select invited dignitaries from top notch corporate such as Satish Pradhan Director, HR of Tata Sons, Thulsiraj of Aravind Eye Care System, Ramesh Thomas & Nappina Sampath of Equitor Consulting, Rama Reddy of Cooperative Development Foundation (formerly) et al., will team teach in this perspective course.
An excited Prof. Debashis Chatterjee says "This course challenges the tyranny of territorial thinking and development based knowledge dissemination. This course, offered for the first time by any school in the world, will challenge our industrial age teaching and make learning more learner centered than ever before. IIMK will reinvent classroom democracy by making learning, rather than the learned, the real leader".
Most real-life managerial decisions cut across functional and organizational boundaries and require an interdisciplinary perspective to problem solving. A change in one department requires that we understand its consequences in other departments. A profitable move in a narrow context may not be so when examined in a broader context. To survive and stay competitive, decisions must be made time after time in an uncertain world. A management student needs theoretical insights and an intuitive feel of the various disciplines and their interconnections. These disciplines are not limited to business organizations, but extend to the larger society and the world.
By design, the course is participative. The course promotes learning while students, as active participants, have fun. Students analyze and decide in teams and then share their experiences and insights with the rest of the class at the time of debriefing. Instructors are facilitators.
Managerial Perspective would offer a series of simulation cases, movies and lectures. The simulation cases require interdisciplinary analysis followed by managerial decisions. While the real life is richer, simulation cases enable students to develop the ability to put diverse pieces of qualitative and quantitative information together, invoke the relevant knowledge and synthesize multiple perspectives. By providing feedback after each round of decisions, simulation cases guide the students towards better analysis.The focus of the simulation cases is on thoughtful decision making or problem solving. The process of analysis is more important than the end result. A student who makes less money but thinks deeply about the underlying problem would gain more than another student who does not reflect on the problem but is lucky enough to make more money. One would be surprised at the number of inferences he can draw from seemingly sparse data.
The course seeks to create the need to gain expertise in dealing with and contributing to social change. To sensitize the students to evolving social issues, the course will rely on selected movies, and lectures or discussions. The movies and the lectures are part of the course on all six days to emphasize that the underlying issues are not add-ons but are an integral part of one's interdisciplinary analysis and decisionmaking. The movies have been selected to focus on certain key social issues. For example, a student watching "Manthan" can think about the knowledge he or she must acquire to succeed in creating an organization like Amul; it surely goes beyond the standard functional area courses. Students can think about ways to make profit while contributing to a society in transition.
According to Prof. Anadakuttan Unnithan, Chair, Post Graduate Programme, IIMK, "Managers must be trained to operate in unforgiving reality. They need opportunities to experiment, test their assumptions and learn from their mistakes to revise their unexposed mental models. This course is a 'sandbox' to provide the students with such an opportunity".
According to IIMK's Dean (Development) Prof. Sanal Kumar Velayudhan, "Managerial Perspective course is the first of its kind in not only India but to the best of my knowledge anywhere in the world. It was developed to suit the needs of our context, bright young minds that would be motivated to learn by focusing on decision making without the shackles of functional area disciplines. The creative element in the design of the program was made by a small team of three professors spending more than a year followed by a larger team of faculty members testing and refining it. We then had facilitation workshops for thirty two faculty members".
The Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK) made yet another landmark achievement by innovating in cutting edge management education, with the launch of the week-long rigorous and compulsory course for its flagship PGP participants. The 6-day course which is entitled "Managerial Perspective", was inaugurated by Prof. Debashis Chatterjee, Director IIM Kozhikode in the presence of the faculty and students, on 17 September 2011 at IIMK Campus. 32 faculty members of IIM Kozhikode and select invited dignitaries from top notch corporate such as Satish Pradhan Director, HR of Tata Sons, Thulsiraj of Aravind Eye Care System, Ramesh Thomas & Nappina Sampath of Equitor Consulting, Rama Reddy of Cooperative Development Foundation (formerly) et al., will team teach in this perspective course.
An excited Prof. Debashis Chatterjee says "This course challenges the tyranny of territorial thinking and development based knowledge dissemination. This course, offered for the first time by any school in the world, will challenge our industrial age teaching and make learning more learner centered than ever before. IIMK will reinvent classroom democracy by making learning, rather than the learned, the real leader".
Most real-life managerial decisions cut across functional and organizational boundaries and require an interdisciplinary perspective to problem solving. A change in one department requires that we understand its consequences in other departments. A profitable move in a narrow context may not be so when examined in a broader context. To survive and stay competitive, decisions must be made time after time in an uncertain world. A management student needs theoretical insights and an intuitive feel of the various disciplines and their interconnections. These disciplines are not limited to business organizations, but extend to the larger society and the world.
By design, the course is participative. The course promotes learning while students, as active participants, have fun. Students analyze and decide in teams and then share their experiences and insights with the rest of the class at the time of debriefing. Instructors are facilitators.
Managerial Perspective would offer a series of simulation cases, movies and lectures. The simulation cases require interdisciplinary analysis followed by managerial decisions. While the real life is richer, simulation cases enable students to develop the ability to put diverse pieces of qualitative and quantitative information together, invoke the relevant knowledge and synthesize multiple perspectives. By providing feedback after each round of decisions, simulation cases guide the students towards better analysis.The focus of the simulation cases is on thoughtful decision making or problem solving. The process of analysis is more important than the end result. A student who makes less money but thinks deeply about the underlying problem would gain more than another student who does not reflect on the problem but is lucky enough to make more money. One would be surprised at the number of inferences he can draw from seemingly sparse data.
The course seeks to create the need to gain expertise in dealing with and contributing to social change. To sensitize the students to evolving social issues, the course will rely on selected movies, and lectures or discussions. The movies and the lectures are part of the course on all six days to emphasize that the underlying issues are not add-ons but are an integral part of one's interdisciplinary analysis and decisionmaking. The movies have been selected to focus on certain key social issues. For example, a student watching "Manthan" can think about the knowledge he or she must acquire to succeed in creating an organization like Amul; it surely goes beyond the standard functional area courses. Students can think about ways to make profit while contributing to a society in transition.
According to Prof. Anadakuttan Unnithan, Chair, Post Graduate Programme, IIMK, "Managers must be trained to operate in unforgiving reality. They need opportunities to experiment, test their assumptions and learn from their mistakes to revise their unexposed mental models. This course is a 'sandbox' to provide the students with such an opportunity".
According to IIMK's Dean (Development) Prof. Sanal Kumar Velayudhan, "Managerial Perspective course is the first of its kind in not only India but to the best of my knowledge anywhere in the world. It was developed to suit the needs of our context, bright young minds that would be motivated to learn by focusing on decision making without the shackles of functional area disciplines. The creative element in the design of the program was made by a small team of three professors spending more than a year followed by a larger team of faculty members testing and refining it. We then had facilitation workshops for thirty two faculty members".