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          It may not be an overstatement to say that the country is now caught in a frenzy of business education. Institutions with new programmes on business education regularly enter an already crowded market. The breadth and flexibility of these programmes catering to the various needs of business is enormous. The programmes offered range in diversity from the traditional undergraduate programmes such as the BBA to the highest level Doctoral degree, from the non-traditional skill enhancement programmess of workshops, short duration certificate courses to the long term diplomas. Programmes tailored to specific needs in terms of duration, choice to mixing elements of courses, spreading a total course as per windows in a busy schedule make these programmes very participant-friendly. The flexibility of switching between different modes of offering, say from a day to an evening, from a weekday to weekend, from one place of residence to another as per individual circumstances make these programmes almost faultless as far as participants preferences are concerned. The various pedagogies, from the traditional style of lecturing to intensely active participatory style add to the irresistibility of these programmes. The willingness of the programmes to innovate and adapt as per general and specific needs of business are the core strengths of these programmes. Considering all these factors it may be said that business education, as a product, is still in the ascending stage of a life cycle.
The driving force behind this enthusiasm is the demand created by the increasing number of businesses to cover almost all requirements of life. Though technology is the main propellant of this expansion, business education has an inherent advantage over other competing areas of vocation such as information and biotechnology. First, due to a very open structure that embodies parts of other applications. Second, the corporate pyramid values generalists over specialists as one climbs up the hierarchy.
The current rave of the MBA degree may give one the impression that these were there from the beginning of time. But in reality this education is a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. Though the formal MBA programmes started much earlier in the North America, towards the beginning of the century, its main fruition took place after the Second World War, about the time when most of the big business houses that rule today came into existence. An entrepreneur does not necessarily need a business degree. But as a business grows, the need of formal education in management shows up.
In Bangladesh the business education à la North American style began with the IBA at Dhaka University during the sixties through collaboration with some North American Universities. At that time many of the prestigious business schools in Europe were at best bound within plan folders. Though the initial lethargy of West Europe turned into a stampede in the seventies, Bangladesh took a little longer to join the tide though IBA was able to maintain the expected quality. This happened at a time when education in the public sector came under sharp criticism for not being able to meet the needs of time either due to a lack of resources or of commitment. IBA still dominates the arena of management education as per employer's interest and market perspective.
An institution is very much a product of the vision of a faculty. But it also needs the support of the larger group of stakeholders, in particular the alumni and the clients. The dependence is mutual, having both a push and a pull effect. The push is the placement of students in the business. The pull that feeds the increasing corporate hunger of more and more. The two stakeholder groups have all along been very supportive in this regard.
Background: Business education as we see today was very different in the earlier days of seventies. The BBA program was nonexistent. The MBA students were mostly drawn from other areas of discipline. These students obviously entered a new area of discipline with some trepidation. Personally, I still remember one of my earlier projects, while a graduate student in a business school - that of developing a replacement schedule for streetlights in the university neighbourhood. The alternatives that were available include the following: replace all the bulbs at periodic intervals, replace all when a number of bulbs had failed and replace each bulb as it failed. For me, then a fresh university graduate from another discipline, it was difficult to comprehend how one could throw away good bulbs just because others in the group had not performed as well. I was not alone with this dilemma as that was a time of frugality when one would buy a squeezer to bleed the last granule of toothpaste out of a tube. The world had not been so much corrupted by the wasteful lust of today's consumer society. Akio Morita of Sony, in his biography, recounts how he had to help a friend in New York to dispose of the accumulated Sunday newspapers, as his friend did not have the heart to throw away the thick pile. That is how my induction into the rational world of management began where we were taught to develop the total perspective of a problem than to eye through portholes. The transformation was not easy, in particular for someone like me, who grew up in a very quantitative world where one would worry on how to fry three loaves of bread on a hot pan, having space for only two, so that the total frying time was minimum. A similar uncomfortable concept was the idea of many solutions to a problem. That was contrary to what we had been taught so far, that a problem, say a set of equations could have only one solution. That required a quantum shift in perspective.
During our student years, there used to be a course called production management that delved into the methods of industrial production systems. When I started teaching, the title of the course had been changed to operations management to reflect the shift in emphasis of the economy from industries to services. The contribution from services to the GDP had overtaken that of industries. Many things were happening too soon. And, there was more to come, of another move towards the information economy. How did all these changes transpire on the life of the consumer, of goods and services? More choices? Better prices? Superior quality? These are some questions that keep surfacing all the time.
The practice: Two popular areas in our curriculum today are Marketing and Finance. This is a reflection of the current demand of the market. Human Resources Management, though an important area, has not been integrated into our corporate culture as it should have as there it is treated as a place for training individuals as per fixed menu and of course the annual ritual of APAs. A closer follow up of individual career path as per evolution of a business has not yet materialised due to a myopic corporate vision on this important but fragile resource. A similar under-developed area is the Management of Information Resources due to an overall perception of it being a technology area in the main. Its problem is the missing communication interface between the technologist and consultant with the senior management. As a result, the potential of this resource is very much underutilised and is still focused on the glamour part such as internal mailing and Internet connectivity. This is not to undermine the success of this technology in changing the face of business such as in banking, travel, retailing and inventory management. We are merely pointing out that somehow this progress has still the character of a 'black box of application' from which it should have come out by now. In order to bridge this gap some organisations have now created an interface, in the corporate hierarchy, of a CIO so that the voice of technology gets proper hearing at the higher level. But it takes a business executive to understand the needs of a business and very often a grand design falls flat on the pedestal of communication. The need for a technocrat CIO has come under criticism as the newer generation of CEOs should now be quite comfortable with the strategic information needs. The view is that the IT has been with us for a while and should have now become a part of corporate infrastructure. It should now mesh as seamlessly with the corporate culture as water and electricity. Just like a corporation does not have a chief electricity officer reporting directly to the CEO, so should senior managers be able to perform the role of information officers. Instead of taking a side in this prognosis, we would like to draw a parallel with the Japanese style of management of the past decades which, until recently, had an edge over the American style of management. A reason for the Japanese success of the eighties was attributed to the career path in Japanese business where the senior executives rose from within rather than being grafted from the job market. But there is now of shift from this practice as the Japanese companies have started hiring senior executives from the non-Japanese job market. Engineering excellence such as quality is no more considered a strategic tool to winning a business but as an entry requirement into the market.
The strength of today's business education is its ability to respond quickly to external stimuli that keeps shifting focus from one area of excellence to another, from quality to relationship to value chain to changes. The life cycle of business education gets reconfigured all the time and the alumni of the past are brought back time-to-time for the necessary fresh up. The education curriculum gets tuned to the current needs of organisation through this two-way feedback. This is very important in an unforgiving corporate world where today's employers carry two slips in their sleeves for an employee, one for a raise and another for an exit. Recently, I was discussing this changed environment in business, with a friend in the banking sector, about how their work life has changed from the past '3-6-3' work rule where one would borrow at 3 per cent, lend at 6 percent and hit the golf course by 3 pm. Fun part of life require integration with the business schedule such as a game of golf, if one can still call it a lazy afternoon. This has also shrunk the total work life at the higher end of the corporate pyramid. For example, a CEO at 40 is now a common sight in business houses. But how many can stay 'lucky' at the top like Jack Welch of GE? (Our business houses are still wrapped around the owner-entrepreneurs). Some may retire earlier as there is nowhere else to go. The mortality rate at the higher end of corporate pyramid has picked up a disturbing momentum. This is why there is now suggestion of a second career for business executives who may have become too old for the corporate roller coaster ride but are too young to join the granddad chores. One effort of business schools is to stop this waste by keeping their products as current as possible, if necessary through reconfiguring one's area of expertise. The management development programs of various types try to fulfil this objective. One biographer of Peter Drucker in the late nineties lamented that the professor still preferred electronic typewriter against computers for his writings, in case the gizmo made him verbose. Unfortunately, a senior executive at the centre of a corporate mayhem may be denied this kind of privilege.

The writer is Director, Institute of
Business Administration (IBA),
Dhaka University