Emerging contours of Business Education

In this short 11 minute interview with McKinsey Quarterly, Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business explains how the Business Education is shaping globally. Highlights: 

• Changing attitudes/interests of students - broadening horizons
• Need for a shift from the inter-disciplinary structure to an inter-scholastic structure
• Industry's need for humble leaders and how to create them
• Emergence of B Schools as truly global, more industry specific and a clear demarcation between the top notch schools and mediocre schools

NITIE - my alma-mater partially at least qualifies as futuristic in terms of having a deeply ingrained structure to develop humble leaders - students run the school in most dimensions and have an amazing exposure to team-work/ leadership while on campus!!

HBR's best performing CEOs

I recently read the HBR article rating the World's best performing CEOs. Apart from the fact that Mukesh Ambani featured at the 5th spot, a couple of points struck me. 

• Steve Jobs topped the list. Once again proves how closely the share holder's value is dependent on customer-centric innovations - Staying Hungry & Staying Foolish helps!
• The top 3 ranked CEOs are non MBAs. However it also reveals that MBAs on an average tend to do better than their counterparts with an MBA beating them by about 40 odd places in the ranking.   
• CEOs promoted from inside the company tended to have stronger performance than those brought from outside. This perhaps in a way confirms my intuitive conviction that to lead an organization one must assimilate thoroughly its DNA and that the surest way of achieving this understanding is by spending time there. 
• 3 of the top 5 CEOs run companies based in Emerging markets.All of the Top 5 CEOs run  Energy / Technology companies.

The study primarily ranked CEOs on the net change in the Market Cap (corrected for Geography and Industry adjustments) of companies during a CEO's tenure. Only CEO's who assumed their roles between 1995 and 2007 were rated. 

P.S.: I am not very certain if the quantum of jump in Market Cap can correctly determine a  CEO's success. For example:

1. A CEO who takes over a overvalued company arguable enjoys greater investor confidence. This in turn could be a key-enabler to his success. A CEO who takes over in difficult times starts with a dis-advantage. 
2. The interesting thing is that the contrary could also be true. A CEO who takes over an undervalued company could be in a better position to show the same quantum jump in the Market Cap compared to one who takes over an overvalued company. 

Decision making Eco-system

Life surely is about the choices we make and not about the options we have. Most of life's life changing decisions come without a warning and as a result, one is not left with time to think and decide. Therefore most such decisions tend to be intuitive and are fueled by emotion.

Very rarely do we find ourselves with enough time to think and then decide. I think I am going through one such phase! My thoughts over the past few days have led me into hypothesizing certain aspects of decision making. Hence this post.

As popular jargon goes, decisions are either rational or intuitive and driven by emotions. There are enough and more success stories of either kind of decisions. In the process of decision making, we consult and solicit advise from a variety of quarters - collectively I call these quarters the decision making eco-system. My hypothesis has to do with this conscience keeping eco-system that we bank on.

Strong emotions of the doer propel him/her to great levels of courage, passion and perseverance - the essential traits in any success story. The same cannot hold true when the eco-system throws up emotional advise, since the doer doesn't own the emotion.

Intuitive/emotional decisions work only when the 'doer' resorts to it. When the eco-system too resorts to an intuitive approach, then certainly all is not right. For a balanced decision to happen, the eco-system needs to throw up purely rational advise while the doer could rely on both reason or a strong emotion that the issue rakes up.

While this may seem obvious, it is important to be understood. Like they say, there are no guarantees in life.

PS: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards