Politics of Commotion: Superficial Dialogue through Digital and Social Media

 

Over the last several years, we are witnessing, may be not perceiving it seriously, that political discourse in India is now getting confined to TV and Social Media and is commandeered by the scheduling consideration of these media options.

To enable the TV editors to gather participants for the debates and encapsulate content for prime time viewing, the messages are created no later than 5:00 pm. Likewise, to ensure proper rest for the media persons and the message sources, political activities, agitations, rallies, sloganeering, press-conferences, are all usually held after 10:00 am but before 2:00 pm.

The use and proliferation of digital and social media has radically changed both the way we are using language and the way we are ‘doing politics’ these days. Virtual space has now become the ‘natural habitat’ of an increasing number of individuals around the world; a space where they engage in discussions, work, shop, bank, hangout, relax, vote, find love partners, conduct their day-to-day activities, and so forth. A large proportion of day-to-day verbal and visual communication has migrated to various participatory web platforms. Social media have been hailed as either emancipatory tools contributing to a more participatory democracy, creating instant awareness about different social issues, a new public space of sorts (‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movement are two widely cited examples).

A public sphere is a space of political communication and access to resources that allow citizens to participate in it. In this sense, given the exclusionary and commodified character of digital and social media, they cannot be considered as public spheres nor should they raise our hopes that revolution will be tweeted. Social and digital Media is dominated by corporations that make money by exploiting and commodifying users and this is why they can never be truly participatory. On a serious consideration, digital and social media are just another tool of control and containment, a profoundly depoliticising arena that fetishizes technology leading to a denial of a more fundamental political disempowerment.

One can realize the magnitude and impact of the medium if they consider that in the famous ‘Russia meddling,’ posts from a Russian company had reached the newsfeeds of 126 million users on Facebook during the 2016 US election and hundreds of thousands of bots posted political messages during the election on Twitter alone.

Digital and Social media is a new kind of an effective political instrument that, in the context of advanced capitalism, both dehumanizes politics and struggles and absolves people from the guilt of inertia in the face of major social and economic crises. It serves as an escape from the stress of intelligence, the pain and tension which accompany autonomous mental activity. Social Media is actually an effective anaesthesia against the mind in its socially disturbing, critical functions – leading to the knocking out of the mental agitation. Social media, as tools for producing and consuming different kinds of texts promotes a one-dimensional discourse. Consider the characteristics of Twitter’s one-dimensional discourse:

Language used in Twitter is short, fragmented and decontextualized: it is a language that tends to express and promote the immediate identification of reason and fact, truth and established truth, essence and existence, the thing and its function leaving no room for a dialogue and counter-reason. Twitter demands simplicity, promotes impulsivity, and fosters incivility.

Digital media takes the pedestal of instrumental and technological rationality and reduce audiences to the status of commodities and consumers of advertisements.  Such audience commodities that the media consumers become themselves are than sold as an audience to the advertising clients of the media.

Face-book, Twitter and other sites serve as an escape from the mechanised work process, and a breather to muster strength in order to be able to cope with the next round of work again. This allows social media to be marketed as entertainment – an entertainment that is accessible, on demand, any time and every time. For this entertainment to remain as a pleasure, it must not demand any effort of independent thinking from the audience. This constructs an involvement through inertia that creates a false sense of participation, security, homogeneity and consensus. Everyone is presumed to be a producer as well as a consumer of content, and the meaning of the messages get lost.

While there is around-the-clock exposure, constant access, and immediacy (all content is immediately available for reading and commenting), the message in the digital and social media is often decontextualized. The context is always that of-the-moment, limiting broader interpretations, connections and exploration of ramifications. Such content have a planned obsolescence, as the next programme or tweet will draw even more attention, commentary, visibility, and currency. The contents history is the here and now, as an ongoing critique of reality. Meaning loses history.

It comes, then, as no surprise that digital and social media have been serving as the ideal medium for populist parties and their leaders promoting the Politics of Commotion.  Digital and social media constitute an alternative to the mainstream media. Political campaigns started using social media as early as 2009, but it was with the 2019 General Elections that their use was taken to the next level.

Today, most political figures and parties use digital and social media platforms to disseminate their agendas and this has largely changed the way politics is conducted. This is a time when politics is ‘branded’ through social media. While democracies need liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control,  it seems that digital and social media have a firm grip on a large percentage of the our population, while people, in turn, have no control over digital and social media.

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First published 05 Aug 21

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Honesty Is The Best Even Though It Doesn’t Pay!

 

Famed Duke expert on human dishonesty suspected of fraud. Manipulated data in study of truth and behaviour threatens career of popular TED Talk star Dan Ariely - this news headline hit me like a bolt from the blue. (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/famed-duke-expert-human-dishonesty-suspected-fraud) Dan Ariely (https://danariely.com/) is a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioural economics and author of best-selling books including “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.” Another headline screamed at me - Israeli-American academic Ariely is under renewed scrutiny for his role in research found to be based on falsified data. (https://www.timesofisrael.com/claims-swirl-around-academic-ariely-after-honesty-study-found-to-be-dishonest/). With age, I have learnt to expect the unexpected, but this news hit me hard because I am an ardent fan of the works of Dan and also because he is married to one Sumedha Gupta, a person of Indian Extraction, who is an accomplished academic in her field.

From fixing the traffic-rules violations on the roadside with the police to CAT-score scandals in admissions to IIMs, cheating and dishonesty are ever-present parts of our national news cycle and unavoidable parts of the human condition. Call it rational or call it irrational, the honest truth is that dishonesty is entirely human. We are dishonestly honest or even honestly dishonest.

Our teachers, parents and family elders always taught us to be honest. Later on, during the course of our higher education and learning, we were persuaded by the economists, ethicists, and business sages that honesty is the best policy. But when we hit the streets living our lives, to our surprise, our pet theories failed to stand up. Treachery, we found, can pay. There is no compelling economic reason to tell the truth or keep one’s word—punishment for the treacherous in the real world is neither swift nor sure.

Economists tell us that trust is enforced in the marketplace through retaliation and reputation. If you violate a trust, your victim is apt to seek revenge and others are likely to stop doing business with you, at least under favourable terms. Sounds logical but is unreal. Cases that apparently demonstrate the awful consequences of abusing trust turn out to be few and weak, while evidence that treachery can pay seems compelling. Compared with the few ambiguous tales of treachery punished, we can find numerous stories in which deceit was unquestionably rewarded.

What do professional athletes, football players do? They sign a long-term contract and after one good year, they threaten to quit unless the contract’s renegotiated. The stupidity of it all is that they get their way.

Does treachery eventually get punished in the long term? Nothing in the record suggests it does. Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud. Power can be an effective substitute for trust. Power, the ability to do others great harm or great good, can induce widespread amnesia. Switching loyalties to contrary political ideologies works around power. Sometimes the powerful leave no other choice. Babus and bureaucrats have to play ball with the politicians in power, no matter how badly they were treated in the past or expect to be treated in the future. Usually, though, power is not that absolute, and some degree of trust is a necessary ingredient in their working relationships.

Powerful people and business-people do not stand on principle when it comes to dealing with abusers of power and trust. When the expected reward is substantial and avoidance becomes really strong, reference checking goes out the window. In the eyes of people blinded by greed, the most tarnished reputations shine brightly. Even with a fully disclosed public record of bad faith, hard-nosed people will still try to find reasons to trust. Trust breakers are not only unhindered by bad reputations, they are also usually spared retaliation by parties they injure. The difference between the right and the wrong evaporates as ‘MIGHT’ becomes ‘RIGHT.”

Mistrust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. People aren’t exclusively saints or sinners; few adhere to an absolute moral code. Most respond to circumstances, and their integrity and trustworthiness can depend as much on how they are treated as on their basic character. Initiating a relationship assuming that the other party is going to try to get you may induce him or her to do exactly that.

By and large, most people are intrinsically honest. It’s just the tails, the ends of the bell-shaped curve, which are dishonest in any industry, in any area. So it’s just a question of tolerating them.

Honesty is, in fact, primarily a moral choice, but there is little factual or logical basis for this conviction. Without values, without a basic preference for right over wrong, trust based on such self-delusion would crumble in the face of temptation. It is also true however that by and large, most people are neither powerful nor power-seekers. For such people, honesty is the most logical policy for leading a contented life.

Most of us choose virtue because we want to believe in ourselves and have others respect and believe in us. And for this, we should be happy. We can be proud of a system in which people are honest because they want to be, not because they have to be. Materially, too, trust based on morality provides great advantages. It allows us to join in great and exciting enterprises that we could never undertake if we relied on economic incentives alone.

Dishonesty and mistrust are as rational or irrational as is greed or deceit. Forgiving past lapses can make a righteous and godly sense. People do change. After all Ratnakar, a dacoit, did become a Maharshi Valmiki; so we are told!

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First published 25 Aug 2021

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If Managers desire to be respected, they must first make their work virtuous

Every discipline or profession has its own self-glorifying vocabulary. It is how its proponents justify themselves, sell themselves, and think of themselves and what they do.

Professors arrogantly celebrate what they do in the noble semantics of truth and knowledge even when they spend most of their time and energy battling one another for position in superbly trivial but venomous campus politics and plagiarising to publish to escape perishing. But who would question their commitment to the truth, to illuminating young minds, and to protecting the values of civilization?

Politicians spread out in the concept of public service even while they pursue personal power and abuse the fears and prejudices of their voters. But who would question their virtue of devoting oneself to public service and public welfare?

Eminent ethical doctors feel terribly upset that the doctors, long known as saviours, play a key role in promoting kickbacks and bribes that oil every part of the healthcare machinery. Who would question the value of human life and well-being and Doctors as the angel-guardians who heal and save lives, an undeniably noble cause?

In the case of business, however, the language of self-description is hardly noble or self-glorifying. The simple phrase ‘the bottom line’ and the vulgar verb ‘making money’ summarize a one-dimensional image of business that is disgracefully uncomplimentary and, in the public perception, extremely negative.

We can readily understand why we should applaud people who devote themselves to public service, or search for truth and knowledge or cure illness and save lives. It is not so easy to understand why we should cheer for those who, as they themselves seem to claim, are out only for material gain for themselves. In many ways, business is an exemplary human activity, involving as it does mutual attention to needs, desires and demands, creative and productive activity, face-to-face negotiation, acknowledgment of certain rules of fair play, and the importance of trust and keeping one's word. When we talk about business as something less than fully human, or as degrading, then these virtues and concerns are lost from view and may even seem irrelevant. There is more than enough cynicism in the world about the callous attitudes in business. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose. The business world is heavily influenced by images and metaphors that shape the strategies, structures and processes of organizations.

Robert C. Solomon (A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) lists some common metaphors used by business that he considers inappropriate to think about business.

Again and again we hear business described as a jungle, a fight for survival, a dog-eat-dog world, a game defined by its so-called winners and losers. “It’s a jungle out there” is one of the most pervasive metaphors that brings into business the classical Darwinian view of the survival of the fittest where the rule is kill or be killed. But this metaphor is grounded on fundamentally wrong scientific premises. Evolutionary systems theory shows that cooperation is an essential strategy in nature, and the jungle metaphor completely ignores this fact. Of course, some of the animal metaphors are charming: A nice boss is a "teddy bear" and a tough negotiator is a "tiger," but most of them are demeaning. Employees, executives, and competitors are described as snakes in the grass, rats and a wide variety of other rodents, and insects and arachnids. Corporations in turn are described as fish tanks, shark-infested waters, and snake pits, as well as the botanical image of the jungle.

Closely related to the jungle metaphor is the conception of business as war and the marketplace as the battlefield. War, a familiar metaphor in so many corporate boardrooms ("the war room"), conjures up more bloody imagery than Darwinian Theory. The war metaphor feeds on our collective insecurity. Few of us as individuals would initiate a violent conflict.

Self-proclaimed realists will tell you that the world is a rough place, that life is unfair, and that only the ruthless survive. But what they call "real" is only the projection of their own bad faith. Why are hostile takeovers considered good business, whereas taking care of employees is considered soft-hearted and un-business-like? Military metaphors are intrinsically nationalistic, alarmist, pessimistic, conservative, and authoritarian. This has grim implications for the mental health of a productive organization. Paranoia is not usually conducive to creativity or competitiveness.

Just as every discipline has its own self-glorifying vocabulary, it also has its heroes, its role models, those who are admired from afar, looked up to and emulated. University professors sing the praises of Socrates, Newton, Einstein, Vishwamitra, Tagore, Ramanujam and Raman. But in popular culture and films, managers are stereotyped as masculine, selfish, mercenary, conscienceless, greedy, fixers, or out an out idiots. In business, we have a cascade of best-selling books lauding the management secrets of Attila the Hun (a major tribal military ruler in 5th-century Europe, best known for his savage fighting) and Machiavelli (connotes political deceit, deviousness, sneaky, cunning, and lacking a moral code). They are full of enthusiasm for "Sun-Tzu" (the art of war), but they neglect his compatriots Confucius and Kautilya, who know the real "secret" of Asian prosperity: virtue, integrity, and a real sense of community. Now, what does all this say of a civilized modern executive that he should take such characters as a guide to business strategy? And what does it say about business, that it honours such "heroes"?

Less violent but as dehumanizing as the jungle and war metaphors is the idea of business as a money-making machine. The machine metaphor transforms everything human into something cold and mechanical. Emotions, affections, and relationships disappear, to be replaced by mere causes and effects. Corporations are no longer to be identified with the people and personalities that make them up but with the system in which people are replaceable parts and in which personality serves as a lubricant or as grist and inefficiency. The business world as a whole ceases to become a matter of human aspiration and is reduced to market mechanisms. The notion of "re-engineering," for example, captures in a word what is wrong with so much of our current thinking about business. Employees and managers are, after all, "human resources," to be replenished as needed. Do we expect the carburettor to be loyal to the engine? And what does the engine owe to the carburettor in return?

The sad truth is that the image of materialistic selfishness easily eclipses the many virtues of business and people in business, their dedication to their work and their companies, their surprising selflessness in facing the job to be done, their pride in their products and services, and their relationships with colleagues and customers. People do not just serve purposes; they first of all have purposes and personalities of their own. It is the "art of the deal" that gets celebrated, not the production and distribution of quality (even lifesaving) goods and services. It is the windfall profit, the "killing" in the market, the outfoxing of the competition, the cost-cutting and axe-to-the-max downsizing that make reputations and headlines, not the routine addition of jobs, the satisfaction of jobs well done, the camaraderie within the corporation, the unpaid (but not unrewarded) compensations of integrity.

Competition is extremely valuable and often necessary in business, but it is not as such the purpose or goal of business life. There is healthy competition, and there is sick, debilitating, depraved competition. There is constructive, positive, even inspiring competition, and there is mutually destructive, negative, inhibiting competition. War and jungle metaphors give us the latter, along with all zero-sum games whose point is to punch out your opponent, debilitate the competition, and win at his or her expense. Business competition, by contrast, offers us the best example of the former, in which competition serves as a spur to one's own excellence and productivity. It provides incentives to improve, creating new heroes, ideals, and possibilities.

How we do business, and what business does to us, has everything to do with how we think about business, talk about business, conceive of business, practice business. If we think, talk, conceive, and practice business as a ruthless, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog activity, then that, of course, is what it will become. And so, too, it is what we will become, no matter how often, in our off hours and personal lives, we insist otherwise.

If, on the other hand, business is conceived, as it has often been conceived, as an enterprise based on trust and mutual benefits, an enterprise for civilized, virtuous people, then that, in turn, will be equally self-fulfilling. It will also be much more amiable, secure, enjoyable, and, last but not least, profitable.

Unless we transcend the dominator paradigm (to control, govern, or rule by superior authority or power), which seems to permeate the thinking and actions of people in Western civilizations, it will be difficult to come up with alternative metaphors and new visions like ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम् the world is one family)’ to guide the evolution of the business world and the emergence of evolutionary corporations. Let us be reminded of Trimurti or Trideva (त्रिमूर्ति trimūrti, "three forms" or "trinity"), the triple deity of supreme divinity in Hinduism, in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified as a triad of deities, typically Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Let us not forget that the Supreme-Manager is Bhagwan Vishnu and let us draw out the symbolic and inner meaning of each of His incarnations (https://www.amrita.edu/news/inner-significance-dashavatars).

 

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First Published 28 Jul 21

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Management Education Requires Radical Reconstruction

 

Having successfully impressed upon the entire business community the need for ‘vision statements’ and ‘defining their purpose and mission’, it is the business schools themselves who have failed to internalise these ideas and their own management leaves much to be desired.

 

If one were to use a simple input-process-output model to examine what they do, business schools are unsure about what the input (incoming students) they seek is, what the process they subject this input to is, and what is the output they churn out.

 

Business schools are unable to articulate, say and implement if they educate, train or facilitate learning among - future managers who would also have leadership and entrepreneurial capabilities; or future leaders who would also have managerial and entrepreneurial capabilities; or future entrepreneurs who would also have leadership and management capabilities; or something else.  

 

Business schools fail to comprehend that their process for teaching and learning is completely different from the processes adopted in other streams of knowledge. Most other streams of education use methods of description and recreation of phenomenon through attempting to describe the how/why of occurrences and then letting the learner recreate the occurrence in the laboratory – thereby generating one’s own data to see if one can arrive at the same descriptions of occurrences leading to acceptable and replicable generalisations about the how/why of such phenomenon. In contrast, business-schools enable learning through ‘mimicry’ of some singular phenomenon. Learners receive descriptions of some episodes with some speculation about how/why of that occurrence. A learner is unable to generate own data to arrive at similar how/why of such phenomenon. No acceptable or replicable generalisations about the how/why of similarly repeating episodes is possible.

 

Unsure of what output they intend to produce using methods of mimicking, business schools are even unsure of the kind of student they wish to recruit. Business schools are unable to define the prior-learning (both through formal education and through experience) with which their students would come on board for a graduate degree in Business.

 

Many economic and competitive forces have directly impacted management education institutions during the last two decades or so over which, business schools had little control. Most institutions were far too risk-averse to adequately respond. There should be no doubt that the economic and competitive market in which we all operate has been permanently altered by Covid-19. 

 

The demands of today’s marketplace call for a new set of skills and abilities. In this sense then, business schools must align themselves with an evolving context for leadership, which should be embedded in the curricular and co-curricular experiences of business students. These new models of leadership would be defined by instability, non-repeating and unlikelihood of events.

 

While ‘change is a constant’ and ‘all management is change-management’ are the clichés, the realisation that in spite of nearly everything changing continuously or discontinuously, human beings are not changing, and hence human needs are not changing, has to sink-in. The needs for survival, safety, affiliation, self-realisation (esteem, cognitive, aesthetic), self-actualization (achievement, accomplishment) and self-transcendence (visionary intuition, altruism, unity consciousness) are the same as they were in the last century. How people connect as informal organisations or formal organisations changes, but why they connect is not changed.  Greed and selfishness for power and wealth has not changed, nor has altruism vanished. Right was never the might in human history and there is no change in this facet of civilisation. Might is right as it always was. What constitutes might may change. Means are constantly changing not the ends.

 

Business schools need to create reciprocal, mutually beneficial collaborations with all kinds of business and non-business organisations in order to prepare today’s students for an economic marketplace that, in many instances, doesn’t yet exist. This reflects an uneasy, but an essential sea-change.  Curricula and related activities have historically been the sole domain of the faculty and an extension of the academic enterprise but business schools have to recognise that the curricula and related activities required for succeeding tomorrow is neither their monopoly nor does it probably exist with them.

 

Business schools have to equally appreciate that access and delivery methods – blended, synchronous, asynchronous, full-time, part-time, virtual or physical are all methods of delivery of knowledge and education. Learning is independent of these methods. Learning has always been blended and facilitated or mediated by multiple actors including peers. Business schools can only design and control the delivery systems but learning is a personal and internal process for an individual learner. Yet, business schools have to bear the responsibility of learning over which they have little control besides being enablers and facilitators. The need for business schools to adapt their approaches, as well as their requisite business and revenue models, to evolving learners’ convenience is imperative.

 

Near commoditization of the management education industry makes it difficult for all but the most sophisticated consumer to discern the difference between many of the programs offered and the new platforms for delivery. Undifferentiated products and undifferentiated marketing is recipe for failure. The opportunity lies in designing differentiated products for different learners segmented on the basis of differences in their prior learning. Allowing customer-self-selection would provide the benefit of customer preference rather than institutional prescription.

 

Business schools have to define the input-process-output of their enterprise and these three are the themes for defining the management education sector.

 

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First Published 29 June 2021

 

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Do We Prepare MBAs To Avoid Mistake-Repeating?

 

Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Lessons from the past may not always ward off doom, but they can provide insights into the present and even the future.

 

In June of 2009, an interviewer asked the legendary economist Paul Samuelson what advice he would give to someone entering graduate study in economics. “This is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger,” Samuelson replied, but “[I would urge them to] have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings’ will come.”

 

When you ask any faculty member if economic, financial, or business history is important, they would almost for certain say yes. Yet business schools in India rarely recruit a business historian as a member of their faculty. At most business schools, history provides marginal value at best, it makes an interesting elective, but is not at the core of what they provide to students. While historical questions rarely arise during placement interviews for jobs in investment banking or consulting, the ability to think in historical frameworks provides students of all stripes the capacity for analytical depth that outstrip their peers.

 

Teaching economic, financial, and business history enables students of business schools prevent the ultimate analytical error: fighting the last battle. Since humans intrinsically look to the past for guidance, they tend to find solutions in the past as well. Formal education in history prevents bad, ad-hoc uses of history in decision making.

 

While our businesses are unlikely to break the tyranny of the quarterly report any time soon, teaching history forces business school students to think in the long term. Analysts who think in the long term are less susceptible to mistaking volatility spikes for the greater trend, and thus better structure investments and firms that are successful over 20, 50, and even 100 or more years.

 

Business students are likely to carry a wrong notion that their forerunners were less sophisticated than them, because they have better data, more developed analytic theory, and better computational tools. So they believe that they would not have made the mistakes made by their predecessors. Once they study business history, they would realise that the people of the past were not ignorant bumpkins. We are subject to asymmetric information, negative externalities, and deficient regulatory apparatuses just like they were.

 

Not political or social trends but economic crises cause profound societal shifts. Political crisis of 1975-77 did not change India but the economic crisis of 1991 forced us to shift our priorities. Not undermining the science, humanities, technology or policy studies, it is largely business school graduates who will make the economic, financial, and business decisions that prepare the ground for massive societal change. As business schools train students to make these decisions, they have the duty to remind them of the implications of these decisions as well.

 

Business history, together as a body of literature and a community of academic researchers, has both a narrow and a broad definition. The narrower definition includes researchers who conduct primary archival research, although using a plurality of sources and methods, on the history of business enterprises, who belong to the professional business history societies now established in many countries. The broader definition comprises scholars from a variety of social science disciplines (including management studies) who study the historical development of business (sometimes doing original archival research of their own, and sometimes bringing new theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks to bear on existing research). These two circles interact and enrich the field, which remains open to multiple methodologies and new questions, without falling under the spell of crippling orthodoxies which constrain research agendas.

 

The “open architecture” of business history as a discipline means that it is unusually well‐placed to participate in vigorous two‐way exchanges with scholars in adjacent fields. On the one hand, careful empirical research by business historians can effectively challenge or qualify many of the “stylized facts” on which influential theoretical analyses in the social sciences sometimes rest. Corporate governance and financial systems are particularly striking examples, as few if any of the typological frameworks influential in the comparative literature (insiders vs. outsiders, stakeholders vs. stockholders, banks vs. capital markets, common vs. civil law) can account persuasively for the range of variation observed by historians over long time periods within and across countries. On the other hand, comparative social‐scientific analyses suggest new questions for business historians, concerning the morphology and explanation of cross‐national differences in the organization of business interest associations, the development of vocational education and training systems, and other similar issues which have not hitherto figured prominently in national historiographies.

 

A sense of business history is important for business leaders to develop a contextual intelligence; that is, a strong sense of the business environment they are navigating. “11 future lessons we can learn from the history of business” by Jonathan Wichmann (10 September 2018) is a very insightful read from the World Economic Forum (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/11-things-business-history-can-teach-us-about-the-future/). 

 

Indian Institute of Management at Ahmadabad had initial collaboration with Harvard Business School. The institute followed Harvard tradition of the case study approach that required management students to probe into past business dealings to understand the evolution of business operations and strategies. This initiated a new course called Business History. This course was introduced in the post-graduate curriculum under the able guidance of Dr. Dwijendra Tripathi, former Kasturbhai Lalbhai Professor of Business History at IIMA. Nearly all management schools in the country boast of using cases as the pedagogical tool in imparting business education without actively acknowledging that cases are historical events and case-method of teaching involves simulating and emulating history for acquisition of wisdom.

 

India does not have any “core” business history journal, resembling the international journals like ‘Business History’, ‘Business History Review’, ‘Enterprises et Histoire’, ‘Enterprise & Society’, ‘Japan Business History Review’ and ‘Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte’. With apologies to other authors for my ignorance, I am aware of two popular books contributed by Tripathi ­– ‘The Oxford History of Contemporary Indian Business’ and ‘The Concise Oxford History of Indian Business.’ Three popular books contributed by Tirthankar Roy are – ‘A Business History of India’, ‘The Economic History of India, 1857-2010’ and ‘The East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation.’

 

Paul Samuelson came to realize only in 2009 that history, economics, business, and finance are interconnected and inseparable, and need to be treated as such. By relegating history to the far-flung corners of a few elite business schools, we deny the intrinsic character of the subjects we study and teach, and risk condemning our students to a cycle of mistakes that can, in fact, be avoided.

 

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Articulated by borrowing liberally from https://som.yale.edu/blog/the-importance-of-teaching-history-in-business-schools and https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199263684.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199263684-e-001

 

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First published 26 July 2021

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