Management Development

Summary

“Management Development”, a 1971 Forum of Free Enterprise pamphlet based on a public lecture delivered by Dr. Surinder P. S. Pruthi in Bombay on 11 May 1971, surveys the problem of building India’s first generation of professionally trained business managers. Pruthi addresses three constituencies — the post-graduate business schools, the companies that hire MBAs, and the management trainees themselves — and argues that a “happy synthesis of their collective objectives” requires all three to recognise how poorly they currently understand one another.

The bulk of the lecture diagnoses what each party gets wrong. The schools, modelled on a British heritage that prized utilitarian clerk-training and “status quo”-oriented Arts curricula, started late and remain over-reliant on text-book prescriptions, part-time pontificators and case-method formulae; they need a healthier mix of academic and industrial faculty, more emphasis on “doing-orientation” and “problem-finding”, and serious investment in in-company and on-the-job programmes, which Pruthi calls the locus of “something like 90%” of a manager’s actual development. The trainees, in turn, are warned against money- and title-consciousness, reflexive job-hopping, pomposity and an “all-knowing” attitude derived from their MBAs. The long-term currency, Pruthi insists, is “qualities of character and intellect rather than mere knowledge”; “leadership requires sacrifice and hard work”, and the trainee must learn to find the right things to do, not merely to do things right.

The closing sections widen out into a brief on the Indian corporate scene as it stood in 1971 — the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, bank nationalisation, abolition of the managing agency system, financial-institution and joint-sector participation, new labour and company legislation, and growing union and government scrutiny are all flagged as forces displacing the self-made, family-firm manager with a professionalised, accountable, “philosopher”-type executive. Pruthi calls on Indian business to expose existing middle and senior managers to systematic developmental programmes, to elevate Organisational Development and Manpower Planning to a board-level function reporting at the highest level, and to design a flexible salary structure that pays for the job rather than for age or seniority. The rendered pages stop in the middle of that closing prescription, before any concluding paragraphs or the Forum of Free Enterprise back-matter.

Key points

• Pruthi frames Indian business education as a roughly ten-year-old infrastructure that must professionalise in step with the companies and trainees it serves; without that three-way synthesis, MBAs will go the way of mismatched engineers.

• India’s inherited British educational philosophy privileged utilitarian clerkship and ruling-class “status quo” training; business education started at home before London and Manchester set up their own schools after Independence.

• Curricula over-weight “respondent behaviour” (analysis, debate, case-method) at the expense of “operant behaviour” (action); the corrective is doing-orientation, work experience, an industrially seasoned faculty mix, and a more imaginative Summer jobs scheme.

• About 90% of a manager’s growth in knowledge, skills and attitudes occurs on the job, making in-company and on-the-job training non-negotiable adjuncts to formal classroom education.

• Trainees are urged to resist money- and title-consciousness, casual job-hopping, pomposity and an “all-knowing” attitude, and to invest the first year or two as an “ears and eyes” apprenticeship that builds character, judgement and continual learning.

• Indian business is being remade in 1971 by the MRTP Act, bank nationalisation, abolition of the managing agency system, joint-sector arrangements, financial-institution participation and tighter labour and company law; the self-made family-firm manager is giving way to a professionally educated administrator under simultaneous union and government pressure.

• Concrete remedies proposed for industry: systematic developmental programmes for existing middle and senior managers, organisational development and manpower planning as a board-level function, and a flexible salary structure that pays for the job rather than age or seniority.