Towards better MBA programmes

RECENT LARGE-SCALE management studies, conducted by The Gallup Organisation and McKinsey & Company conclude that, the talents employees bring to their jobs are companies' most valuable assets.

Furthermore, they project that those companies, which attract and retain the most talented personnel, will be the winners in the globally competitive business world, and so recommend redesigning HRM practices accordingly.

The reports counsel against focussing on HRD, since past experience of the half lakh managers interviewed found talents to be unaffected by job training and education. Thus the reports also conclude that talents are innate and unalterable - fixed at birth.

They distinguish between talents, such as the ability to learn new concepts; and skills, such as learning a new programme language. Talents reflect the ability to act effectively - ``doing the right things'', whereas, skills develop efficiency - ``doing things right''.

The difference between the two can be assessed by observing that, while a remarkable growth in IT applications has increased efficiency locally, uncertainty concurrently waxes globally. Greater uncertainty implies decreasing probability of making the right decisions.

Unfortunately, conventional MBA training still emphasises the development of skills, a limitation it shares with all modern education, as judged by a century of U.S. educational research.

The body of research has failed to uncover undergraduate or post- graduate curricula capable of systematically improving talents or any of the fundamental competencies that underlie the development of talents, such as creative intelligence, learning ability, field independence and moral reasoning.

A failure to develop talents and thus add value to companies' major assets suggest that MBA programmes do not best serve their customers, the companies that hire their graduates.

This observation seems at odds with the fact that employees who leave jobs to pursue an MBA degree command higher salaries when they return to work, with the increment of addition varying with the reputation of the B-school.

As reported in Newsweek, ``We all `know' that going to college is essential for economic success. The more prestigious the college, the greater the success. The bonus flows (it's said) from better connections, brighter `peers', tougher courses or superior professors.

Among many parents, the terror that their children won't go to the `right' college has supported an explosion of guidebooks, counsellors and tutoring companies to help students in the admissions race.

``The trouble is that what everyone knows isn't true. The graduates of prestigious colleges do well because they are talented (better schools) and may expose students to brilliant scholars and stimulating peers. But the schools don't make the students success. Students create their own success; this makes the schools look good.

``Evidence of this comes in a new study by Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, and Stacy Berg Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation.''

Their study determined that mid-career salary levels are a function of the most prestigious of the colleges one is admitted to, not of the college one chooses to attend and from which one graduates. B-school reputations reflect their admissions screening processes, and not value differentiation from their curricula, for the latter remains undetected and, therefore, unproven.

Thus, though MBA-imparted skills may establish a uniform base salary for MBA graduates, innate talents determine the range of graduate salary variations.

Tacit acknowledgement of this disappointing finding is the flurry of activity of premier B-schools to refine their admissions testing to better predict the candidates most likely to succeed - the most talented.

Their graduates enter jobs with the same talents they possessed before entering their MBA programme. Their skill levels are raised during the usual two years of study, but this improvement can also be attained through job training.

Unless MBA programmes can solve the talent dilemma, companies in the future may choose to provide company-specific skills training in order to attract the most talented at an earlier stage, and improve their retention rates through developing a management staff with less transferable skills. Students, thus, will have the option of considerably reducing their educational expenses at a cost of less job mobility.

Until recently an inability to improve talents is traceable to the failure of modern science to locate the source of creativity and intelligence, key ingredients of talent development.

However, the discovery in quantum physics of a unified field of all the laws of nature, which create and maintain the orderly evolution of the material universe, has now located this source in the organising power of Natural Law. Nonetheless, prevented from directly investigating the Unified Field because of prohibitively enormous energy requirements, physicists predict no applications from this discovery in the foreseeable future. The source of creativity and intelligence, though found, remains inaccessible to management, education and training.

Without a means for increasing creative intelligence business strategies and tools impact and efficiency, with a seemingly limited supply of talent, businesses continue to compete for scarce resources - the most talented, creative, and intelligent individuals. In such a competition, market share plays a strong role, and it becomes difficult for late entries to gain market share at the expense of established leaders.

This is a challenge facing India today. Based on its brain power reserve, predictions of an optimistic future for India in this knowledge-based, high-tech era may be paying insufficient heed to companies, like those in Silicon Valley.

To maintain their competitive advantages they will continue striving to allure the most talented from everywhere at the expense of their native lands.

However, this need not remain the case that creative intelligence is a scarce resource whose redistribution frequently offsets brain gains with brain drains. The knowledge preserved by the Vedic Pandits of India proclaims, on the contrary, that Atma, pure consciousness is an all-time, inexhaustible reservoir of creative intelligence. Nonetheless, as His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has explained. ``On the level of its expressions, it can be lost to memory simply because the level of expression becomes primary and the transcendental level of intelligence becomes secondary.''

He has observed that ``What India has lost, and what every generation is constantly losing due to its non-Vedic, non-Indian, foreign brand of education, will be clear only if one understands... what Vedic education is.''

``Real Indian education aims at developing the full creative potential of Natural Law in every student. Real Indian education is Vedic education, which develops the full creative potential of every student, enlivens the infinite organising power of Natural Law in the mind of every student, cultures his physiology to sustain the wakefulness of infinite Creative Intelligence, and develops in him a good level of mastery over Natural Law, which enables him to spontaneously think and act according to Natural Law. Vedic education leads every student through the corridor of total knowledge within himself.

``This high level efficiency in Vedic education is available to every student within himself, because Vedic education locates Veda, the field of total knowledge, within the physiology of everyone, and furthermore, within the mind, intellect, and within the Atma of everyone - the Self of everyone - within all levels of life of everyone.''

To date, over 600 scientific studies, conducted at 210 leading universities and research institutes in 31 countries, have measured the effectiveness of Maharishi's Vedic technologies to improve all aspects of life.

Included in this research are educational studies, which show previously unseen development of cognitive capabilities and the reflection of this development in the growth of academic excellence. For example, IQ, field independence, and ego development continue to increase to higher levels, even though the growth of these qualities is generally not observed in young adults or adults.

The Vedic approach to education succeeds because it locates the source of creativity and intelligence - the infinite organising power of Natural Law - in pure consciousness, Atma, and develops full creative potential through Vedic Technologies of Consciousness.

``Consciousness is the most fundamental element of creation, and therefore the `technology of consciousness' is the most fundamental `technology of creation'. That means, on the basis of the `technology of consciousness' anything can be done and anything can be achieved in the whole field of creation.''

Scientists have recently confirmed this enlightened aspect of human potential - the ability to achieve anything. Quantum physicists, Drs. John Hagelin and Volker Schanbacher have equated the Unified Field with the field of pure consciousness - on the basis of their self-sufficient, self-referral natures and identical structures. They observed a precise structural equivalency between the mathematical notation of the Lagrangian of the Superstring and the syllabic notation of Rig Veda, the expressed value of pure consciousness.

Thereby modern science arrives at a confirmation of the ancient truth of India's Vedic tradition that the Atma of everyone is the home of the infinite organising power of Natural Law governing the universe.

Professor Tony Nader, working under the direct guidance of Maharishi, has precisely located 40 qualities in the human physiology, as well as the Devas responsible for administering the laws of Nature, as elaborated in the 40 branches.

These values of intelligence reside in every cell of the body, just the United Field resides in every particle of the universe. His research proclaims that the individual is Cosmic, the infinite potential of the organising power of Natural Law resides in every human physiology. Unfolding this potential is the key for harnessing the creative intelligence required to manage for success and to solve all problems facing mankind.

Hitherto, even the toppers of the most prestigious MBA programmes worldwide have been unable to guarantee success either to the companies they join or for themselves in their private lives. This deplorable MBA deficiency has been redressed by establishing management universities and institutes around the world to educate enlightened leaders for creating problem-free management through management based on Natural Law.

This is an MBA education for this millennium: career and life- oriented education development of unbounded managerial competence capable of bringing success to individuals, companies, nations and the world enlightened Indian management will successfully meet the challenges of globalisation, maintain their country's cultural integrity and raise it to leadership within the family of nations.

Eradication of poverty, creation of abundance and fulfilment for every individual and establishment of self-sufficiency and invincibility for every nation are achievable goals for managers unfolding their full potential of an organising power capable of creating and maintaining the orderly evolution of the entire universe. These goals will be the benchmarks for the age to come.

The alternative is to continue with Western MBA curricula that focus on skill enhancement, leading to managerial lifestyles characterised by stressful preoccupation with uncertainty and events beyond one's control. The choice is at hand for India to make.

IAN BROWN

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