Management Education and Training & Development – The world is too small? or Is it?

Business Sutra |5.3| Vikram and Vetal :: The Ancient India’s Case Study Method

Business Sutra |5| Education

We have covered four episodes of Devdutt Pattanaik’ TV serial on CNBC 18: Business Sutra.

The first presented to us the most visible form of the business – the corporation: its meaning, its purpose and its action perspective. In the second episode Devdutt Pattanaik discusses Leadership: Role of the leader, Context of the leader and Leadership in different business cycles. The third episode relates to the Business Ethics and Morals: business ethics and dilemmas, relationship between owner and the organization and The Right (Dharma) – the Ramayana way and the Mahabharata way. The 4^th episode deals with Conflicts, of the Board and the CEO and that of the means vs. ends.

The present episode takes unto the realm of Education, wherein Part 1 covered the basics of education to the (potential) leaders in Ram’s Education and Part 2 addressed the Knowledge Transfer to Next Gen.

The third part deals with the issue of student motivation.

Business Sutra |5.3| Vikram and Vetal

Here is a very simple scenario:

Most of the management trainers as well as trainees come across such situations almost every day.

We will take a short peep into the theory of motivation related issues and then an equally look at the Learning Organization.

Learning Motivation And Performance – Effective training practices are developed from theories and theoretical constructs that describe how learning occurs and what motivates people. An understanding of motivational theory allows a manager to improve employee performance levels by applying the principles of motivation to his firm’s unique circumstances. The same is true with training. Whether one company’s training program will work in another’s, will depend on the needs of the latter company, its employees, and the training system used. Copying without understanding is like taking someone else’s prescription drugs. Even though they may have made someone else better, they could kill you. The article very lucidly presents WHY ARE THEY RESISTING AND WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT IT?

Any search of the management literature will yield fairly huge amount of coded body of knowledge on “How To’ aspect to the motivation for the training.. So, we will not attempt to list such resources once again here.

One would wish that theirs is a Learning Organization that keeps recharging itself for bracing up the present and the future challenges.

So, How do you define a learning organization?

Peter Senge, Author of The Fifth Discipline, answers the question by first suggesting that “we jettison the jargon” and work on organizations where everyone works together successfully. He discusses how there are only two dominant factors within an organization: control or learning and the question is which one is dominant. He lays out the major factors that need to be present in order for an organization to be centered in learning.

So, how do we find out: Is Yours a Learning Organization? . In an HBR article, David A. Garvin , Amy C. Edmondson ,Francesca Gino have provided the conceptual framework. For an easy reference, we may listen to this video clip of “An interview with David Garvin and Amy Edmondson, Professors, Harvard Business School.

A Learning Organization –

Salesmen and author Zig Ziglar once wrote: “the only thing worse than training people and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay.” At a learning organization education happens as a side-product of working together, as everybody learns from each other to adapt to whatever the future might bring.

Here again, one can explore a huge data-mine of high-quality content in the present western management literature. So, we will leave it to the readers to whet their appetite, in their own context.

In the Segment 3 of the episode 5 Devdutt Pattanaik takes up the subject of Student Motivation through the metaphor of a well-known folktale of Vikram and Vetal.

Whenever the school bell rings have you seen the students?

The first thing that you hear when the school bell rings is a great amount of cheer-joy and children running out.

The children run out because it is almost like the cry of the domesticated beast, that has been tied and fettered in the classroom and suddenly he is being liberated. So he wants to run away from school. This is the education system, or for that matter even a training program in a corporate world we have created. You are dying for the lunch break and the coffee break because you just cannot keep your eyes open, You are being pushed into this space where they are going to domesticate you using various methods like 9:30 to 10:30 sessions where you learn something intensely, as if your brain is going to sort of get bombarded with lots of information. What does not get attention is the simple fact that whether the student is motivated willingly to enter the school. No. So he has to be pushed in, broken inside. It is almost violent to the process of education and training.

Now let us look at a different method. Let us look at the Indian method of training. This is a folktale- that of Vikram and Vetal, The Ghost. The folktale explains it in a very powerful way. Vikramaditya was a great king and one day a sorcerer came to him and said go to a cremation ground and find for him a Vetal, a ghost. Vikramaditya said. ‘Of course, whatever you want I shall give it to you.’ Being a great king he was willing to give anything to anybody who came to him. So he goes to the crematorium.in search of the Ghost. The instruction is that here is a banyan tree and the Ghost hangs upside down. You have to pull it down and carry it on your shoulders, but never speak to it. If you open your mouth and speak to the ghost, the ghost will fly away and then you will have to go back, and collect him.

So he goes to the cemetery, finds the ghost hanging upside down, pulls him down puts it on his shoulder and walks back. The ghost does not want to be caught, so the ghost tries everything in his power to make Vikramaditya speak. He keeps on asking questions, but Vikramaditya refuses to speak. Finally, the Vetal comes up with an idea. He says, ‘let me tell you a story and at the end of the story, I will ask you a question. If you know the answer to the question, and still do not speak up, your head will burst into thousand pieces. But if you don’t know the answer, keeping quiet it’s perfectly fine. This is what we call the case study method

Yes, the Harvard business school has put it to use for many years now very successfully.

I guess it is validated once it happens in Havard ! J

So the Vetal keeps asking questions and Vikramaditya being a very wise king is able to answer all the questions. So for 24 times the stories are told, 24 times the questions are asked and 24 times the answer is given, and all 24 times the Vetal flies back; much to the exasperation of Vikramaditya. Vikramaditya has to go back and recollect the Vetal and then go through the whole process of storytelling again.

It is a cyclic, boring thing. It is like that sales cycle. Every month at the business plan meeting you hear the some story, questions are asked and you reply them and cycle repeats next month. It is horrible. You want the liberation from that.

Finally the 25th time Vikramaditya is unable to answer the question.

He genuinely does not know, because if he would have known the answer, his head would have split into 1,000 pieces.

Vikramaditya heaves a sigh of relief. Now I have got the ghost and I take him back to the sorcerer. The ghost laughs, a typically Hindi film laugh. He says what a foolish man you are? Do you realize every time you answer the question you were saving your own life? The fact that you cannot answer the question means now you are in trouble. The moment you will take me to the sorcerer, he is going to bottle me and turn me into a genie. I will be very powerful genie and the first thing I will be asked to do is to kill you.

So, all the time when you were problem solving and you were getting irritated by that you didn’t realize that that is the only reason you are king. You exist to answer questions. You only matter when you solve problems. So you should welcome problems, rather than saying, ‘Oh I don’t want problems in life. If there are no problems, then what is the use of a king?

It is a beautiful metaphor, because the day the problems go away your utility as a king reduces to nothing.

The Smashshan Bhoomi, the cremation ground, where the ghosts exists, is the training room. No business happens there. It is a cremation ground and the trainer or the facilitator or the Guru, whatever be his role, the Vetal has nothing to gain by the training. He is paid for it anyway. If it is a good training or a bad reading, whoever gains or loses from the training session is the participant. Therefore, it is the Vikramaditya who has to come to this Smashan Bhoomi. The Vetal would not come to Vikramaditya.

So, in ancient India the teachers never went to the students. They did not have the advertisements for colleges and schoolJ. If you want to study you come. If you do not want to study, then do not come. It is the student who stands to gain or lose.

You keep hearing all the time that you do not give a man a fish teach him how to catch the fish. The Indian method would be very different. They would say, no do not give a man a fish, do not teach him how to fish either,r but inspire him to discover his own method of fishing because then

it stays. That is the teacher’s job. As he inspires the student he himself grows too. This is Saraswati Dan- the endowment of knowledge.

The essence of the discussion is that any training has to happen between an inspired trainee and an inspired trainer, so as the training result into intellectual growth of both the parties. It is not done as mandatory mundane task. It has to be performed in the spirit of making an endowment.

In our continuing journey of Devdutt Pattanaik’s TV serial Business Sutra, we will move on to the 6^th episode – Measurements.

Note: The images used in this post are the irrevocable property of their respective creator. They have been taken up courtesy the internet, so as to illustrate the point under discussion.

Business Sutra |5.2| Crossing the Vaitarani: Passing Knowledge to Next Gen

Business Sutra |5| Education

We have covered four episodes of Devdutt Pattanaik’ TV serial on CNBC 18: Business Sutra.

The present episode takes unto the realm of Education, for which we have covered the basics of education to the (potential) leaders in Ram’s Education in the first part.

The second part now deals with coaching and the next, the third one with student motivation.

Business Sutra |5.2| Crossing the Vaitarani: Passing Knowledge to Next Gen

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.”

– Charles Darwin

The change that is under the scanner here is the change in the role of a manager in his / her progression up the organizational ladder. In all the real life situations, the present set of competencies may not be fully relevant for the success at the next stage. Therefore, in practice, the incumbent is trained / coached/mentored during the transition stage of changeover from one stage to the another,

In Coaching through transition, not just through change, Susan Grandfield notes that ‘for change to be effective and achieve its goals, a transition needs to occur and that takes time. Change can be fast (i.e. a new process for doing X is rolled out across the business) but transition is slow (i.e. people fully engaging with the new way of working).

Time is precious, and managers are under pressure to deliver results as quickly as possible. So, the danger is, that they don’t give themselves, or the people they manage, sufficient time to make the transition. Which requires them to “let go” of the past first, before they can fully embrace the future.

It’s not that when change happens we should forget the past and cut all ties with it. After all, it is the past that has got us to where we are now. So, there are elements of what we did well in the past that should be brought with us into the future. However, if clinging on to the way things were done in the past means you have one foot in the past as you step into the future, it is unlikely that you will be able to fully make the transition into the new way of doing things.’

One can find volumes of literature in the Western Management theory and practice related to planning / training / coaching /mentoring during the succession transition. It is not feasible to cover references to all such material in this article.

Devdutt Pattanaik uses the metaphor of river Vaitarani, the mythological river that separates the mortal world and the world of bliss that an individual has to successfully navigate through, in order to reach the higher plane of the life after the end (death) of the present life on this mortal world.

In the Segment 2 of the episode 5 Devdutt Pattanaik takes the Indian mythology’s perspective of this transition phase of Crossing the Vaitarni : Passing Knowledge to Next Gen

From a corporate or an organization or an enterprise’s perspective that is almost one most important thing, and that which enterprises are constantly working to achieve, is that the people who are currently in positions of power train and impart their knowledge and their understanding to those who are their likely successors. That exchange of information / knowledge / experience transfer is not almost always perfect.

If you say the purpose of an organization is growth, the growth being the primary word. How do I grow? Normally growth is seen physically, in economic terms in terms of growth of Lakshmi. So my salary has to increase: my top line and bottom line at the company level have to increase. But, let us take another currency which also exists in India. Lakshmi is not the only currency; there is other currency as well – the Saraswati, the knowledge. So every person who walks into an organization is suddenly exposed to a whole load of knowledge as he does his work.

Now he says I want to go to the next level. What is going to the next level mean? If you look at from an Indian mythological perspective, we are saying that you know what the role that I’m performing I have done the best I can, I have lived it. Now I want to take up a new role. in a way, I have to shed the old role and take up a new role. The shedding of the old role can be equated with death. So when you die, in India you cross a river called of Vaitarani. So when I am saying I have been a good executive, so I die as an executive so that I can be reborn as a manager. But why should I be allowed to move on to the other Shore unless I have created a replacement for myself, because otherwise you are indispensable? Just as you were made an executive by someone else you shall make someone else an executive before moving on to the next role as manager.

So if you look at an organizational hierarchy, it is really one generation after another generation, and each generation is obliged to the previous generation and to the next generation. So there is a telescoping of ambitions across generations. This is what one is trying to achieve and this is how the ashram a system came into being.

In Ancient India they’d said that if you would go to live for hundred years, divide your life into four phases. The first phase is when you are a student. In the next stage you are a householder and in the third phase you are retired. Then, in the fourth phase you’re a renunciant – you’re a sannyasi . Now look at it metaphorically what it says in the first phase you gain Saraswati, in the next phase you use the knowledge of Saraswati that have got to gain Lakshmi. Having done the householders’ life, what do you mean by retirement, because that is a 25-years-span which is result of dividing 100-year life into i four equal phases. The retirement is not walking away from everything. It means passing on the Saraswati that you have gained to the next generation. Only then you can move on to the next phase of renunciation. Renunciation is moving onto whatever you want to do. It is kind of a cyclical process which is happening. In this retirement stage, I am talking to the next generation, preparing them to grow. I give Saraswati and move on to the next stage. So who grows? The new trainee is growing and in turn I am growing because otherwise I can go on not take the next position. This is like a perfect wave that is happening where if Saraswathi has been given Saraswati is being taken. That is what has been called the growth. As a result, Lakshmi is also being generated. There is growth at an intellectual level as well as in an economic level. That is what organization aspires.

I mean the whole idea of creating a separate training department is absurd because who has the knowledge? It is the person in the field who has the knowledge, not someone sitting in the classroom. Coaching is intrinsic to growth and that is what the Vishwamitra story in a way. He says that he has been a great king called Kaushik. He now wants to be Vishwamitra, a friend of the world. So he is saying that I will pass whatever I have learned to this young promising Prince called Ram and then move on.

But not all of us can be Vishwamitra. You call this a perfect wave. But the thing about corporate power or power in the workplace is that the more you know the more power you have, in turn, more indispensable you are or less dispensable you are. Therefore the incentive to pass this on to successive generations and empower them as well is very very low, because then it makes me less important.

Absolutely. The whole idea is we think knowledge is power. So I don’t want to give it. The reason I give it away is because in the process of giving it away I learn many more things. Saraswati is wonderful, unlike Lakshmi. if I have one rupee coin and I give it to you. Now you have one rupee coin. We exchanged one one rupee coin and both of us are still left with one rupee coin. But if I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchanged two ideas we both have two ideas. So, the wonderful thing about Saraswati is it doubles. So if I want to increase my understanding of Saraswathi the best way to improve my understanding of any subject is to teach. What happens is in the process is I figure out human dynamics, we figure out why does a person not want to study, because it’s so obvious. This is the way you negotiate and you will realize that the person in front of you is not learning. The teacher, by observing the student and his resistance to learning, figures out human dynamics; he understands how difficult it is to teach to someone who not obliged to learn. So you have to work very hard to make the subject attractive.

It is incumbent upon the teacher to find ways to help the student learn, as much as it is incumbent on the student to find ways to learn.

Let me rephrase this slightly. What I will say is that in the process of giving Saraswati I figure out the art of becoming attractive. Per force I focus on creating the honey and the students will come like the bees. The focus is on creating the honey and not in attracting the bees. The bees will come. Now that is the growth that I get when I am passing on my knowledge to the other. You gain and I gain. You gain some knowledge, you get the data but I gain the wisdom ……..

At this point, the discussion moves on to the subject of the next segment.

The essence of the discussion is that by training / coaching / mentoring your next generation during the transition phase, you are also destined to gain the wisdom, that in turn will help you to move on to your next stage higher echelons of management ladder and enhance my competence to face the future challenges more effectively..

In our continuing journey of Education in Devdutt Pattanaik’s TV serial Business Sutra, we will move on to the 3^rd part of 5^th episode – Vikram and Vetal.

Note: The images used in this post are the irrevocable property of their respective creator. They have been taken up courtesy the internet, so as to illustrate the point under discussion.

Business Sutra |5.1| Ram’s Education

Business Sutra |5| Education

We have covered three episodes of Devdutt Pattanaik’ TV serial on CNBC 18: Business Sutra.

The present episode takes unto the realm of Education. We don’t enjoy education even though we know education is good for us; it is a little bit like exercise or health food. The present episode discusses ancient Indian thoughts on education. The key idea here was that knowledge has to be taken by the student. Unless a student is motivated, no learning can take place. In modern education, motivation is provided using the carrot (promise of a job) and the stick (lower status) approach. But that does not stir the imagination of students. They feel like domesticated animals who resent training. So they get easily distracted. So they scream in joy when the bell rings and school ends. There is an increasing feeling that, today trainers behave like professional – their job ends with showing the power point presentation in the stipulated period of time. That is because everything is controlled – the content, the timings of trainings. Education efficiency is measured without considering effectiveness. The trainer is often far removed from the field and hence not taken seriously. The training should be part of the job. Unless one creates a replacement for oneself, one must not be promoted. Thus one has to give Saraswati to get Lakshmi. This is not easy but we need to relook at education and ask ourselves – who loses if the student does not learn, and the teacher does not teach.

The First part of the episode deals with experiential learning, the second with coaching and the third with student motivation.

Business Sutra |5.1| Ram’s Education

In the West Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) was conceptualized by David A. Kolb, who published his model in 1984. Kolb’s experiential learning theory works on two levels: a four-stage cycle of learning and four separate learning styles. Kolb’s theory has a holistic perspective which includes experience, perception, cognition and behavior.

Kolb – Learning Styles – Effective learning is seen when a person progresses through a cycle of four stages: of (1) having a concrete experience followed by (2) observation of and reflection on that experience which leads to (3) the formation of abstract concepts (analysis) and generalizations (conclusions) which are then (4) used to test hypothesis in future situations, resulting in new experiences.

Whatever influences the choice of style, the learning style preference itself is actually the product of two pairs of variables, or two separate ‘choices’ that we make, which Kolb presented as lines of an axis, each with ‘conflicting’ modes at either end:

A typical presentation of Kolb’s two continuums is that the east-west axis is called the Processing Continuum (how we approach a task), and the north-south axis is called the Perception Continuum (our emotional response, or how we think or feel about it).

Kolb believed that we cannot perform both variables on a single axis at the same time (e.g., think and feel). Our learning style is a product of these two choice decisions.

It’s often easier to see the construction of Kolb’s learning styles in terms of a two-by-two matrix. Each learning style represents a combination of two preferred styles. The matrix also highlights Kolb’s terminology for the four learning styles; diverging, assimilating, and converging, accommodating:

Experiential Learning: ‘What,’ ‘Why,’ and ‘How’ for Corporate Trainers – Holly Bradbury – Simply put, experiential learning is learning by doing. It takes learning beyond the classroom or the computer screen. Most of us learn better when we are directly involved in a learning experience instead of sitting idle in a formal training setting or clicking “Next” in an eLearning course. Experiential learning provides interactivity and participation and can be much more effective than traditional learning approaches.

Rethinking Kolb’s Theory of Experiential Learning in Management Education – The Contribution of Social Constructionism and Activity Theory –David Holman, Karel Pavlica, Richard Thorpe : This article seeks to critically evaluate Kolb’s theory of experiential learning from social constructionist and activity theory perspectives. It is suggested that while experiential learning theory has been extremely influential and useful in management education it is rarely seen as problematic. The article goes on to argue that Kolb’s experiential learning theory can be placed within the cognitive psychological tradition; a tradition that overlooks or mechanically explains the social, historical and cultural aspects of self, thinking and action. Activity theory is then described (but also drawing on more recent social constructionist perspectives) and offered as an alternative way of understanding these three aspects. Using this approach, experiential learning theory is re-conceptualized with particular reference to the learning cycle and managerial identity. It is concluded that learning can be viewed as an argumentative and rhetorical process in which the manager acts as a practical author.

Devdutt Pattanaik seems to have chosen the model of Ram’s Education in Segment 1 of the episode 5 as the Indian Mythology’s point of view.

Modern education and training systems ignore the age-old belief that knowledge can never only be given it must also be taken.

What people don’t realize is that the first part of the Ramayan is the education of Ram. It is called The Childhood Period (Bal Kand). We are told that after he grows up, he is sent to the ashram of a the sage Vashishtha, where he’s trained in the various royal arts, the martial arts etc. He learns a lot of things. After his education he comes back to the palace as a prince, fully ready, having read everything that sage Vashishtha would have to teach him.

Then suddenly one day another sage who walks in and his name is Vishwamitra. Vishwamithra says that they have a problem in the forest and he wants Ram to come and solve it. King Dashrath says but Ram is very young. I will give you my army to solve the problem. Vishwamitra insists that Ram come with him because he is going to be king, it is he who is going to rule and it is he who has to solve the problems. So, let him come with me. He literally drags this young man from the zone of comfort where his father was to keep him in a very safe place to the zone of discomfort, from the palace into the forest.

The first challenge Ram faces in his real life is that of a she-demon – Tadaka. She attacks him. Ram says that she is a woman and I have been told that you should not attack a woman. Killing a woman is a great sin.

That is a sort of law, which is what has been taught, and that is what we have thought all along.

Vishwamitra says it doesn’t matter whether it is a man or a woman. Look at the situation, look at the context, and see what the problem is. Right now the problem is this lady-demon and you have to kill her. So Ram raises his weapon and kills her.

That is quite against all his training of not resorting to violence.

In a way, when you look at a situation don’t get bogged down by theoretical rules and conduct, just look at the situation, find the problem and take the decision that you have to take it. If need be, let that be a ruthless one. So Ram has to shoot. The first act he does is he has been told by his teacher to shoot Tadaka. He kills her. But the story doesn’t end there. Then he goes on a journey with Vishwamitra. It is an interesting journey.

Vishwamitra takes him to another spot and at that point he comes across a stone and he is told the stone is one of a Ahilya, a lady who had had an extramarital affair. Vishwamitra looks at her and tells Ram that she turned into a stone because she had an extramarital affair, and this was her punishment. Vishwamitra tells Ram to liberate her from this punishment, by touching her with your feet and she will break free from this cursed life of stone that she’s leading.

So what you have is an extreme situation. On one side you have killed Tadaka, which is an act of ruthlessness and the other side is upliftment, liberation, compassion. So you move from being ruthless to being compassionate.

These are the two extreme decision-making behaviors that a king has to demonstrate. Sometimes he has to be ruthless and sometimes has to be compassionate and a wise King knows what to do when. This is a shift from the theoretical background that he was in from Vashishtha to Vishwamitra and Vishwamitra, if you read the scriptures, was once a king. So he knows the practical problems Ram will face once he lives in the society. In a way, Vishwamitra is imparting knowledge that this is what you’re going to do. There will be times when you have to be ruthless and there’ll be times you’ve become compassionate. When you know when to be ruthless and when to be compassionate you will be a great king.

Let us deviate a little bit from the broader theme of education and training and development. How do you know when do we compassionate and when to be ruthless? That is what the story narrates. Why Vishwamitra suggested in the first case Ram to kill the woman and in the second case be compassionate and liberate her from her punishment?

There is no such toolkit or a template that helps you to know when to be ruthlessness on one hand and compassionate on the other.. On one side if you do not take that decision, the forest will be destroyed, the community destroyed. It is violence happening. The only way to stop it is to be ruthless over it, because it there’s no there seems to be no other method to handle that. On the other side, it is that if you do not let it go then there is no hope for people. In other words, if someone has made a mistake in the life and if you never forgive them, then imagine living in a society where there’s no forgiveness. On one hand there is almost brutal punishment and on the other side is the forgiveness. So, there is always hope. But not only hope. If there was only hope then I can get away with everything. So there is a balance of the two. That is what is called the science of politics, of administration of Justice. On one side is the stick and the other side is not quite the carrot but , hope, in the form the carrot. There is forgiveness if you do commit mistakes. There is punishment but it is not forever.

I am still curious why did Vishwamitra not take these decisions himself and insist that Ram has to do this. Vishwamitra who was also a king at one time could have easily killed Tadaka or could have easily release Ahilya.

It is a very it’s an interesting point. Vishwamitra has moved to the next stage of his life. where he wants to go to the next level, which means that all his royal pursuits have to be managed by someone else. He is passing on the baton to the next generation. It is the next generation now that has to take care of the world. He cannot be there all the time. It is about the older generation saying that okay we have done what we had to do. We learnt, we made mistakes, we have figured out things. Now we pass it on to the next generation. The next generation will now be capable. This can be called as a capability building exercise. so that then Vishwamitra can move on.

So for every Ram you have to have a Vishwamitra, without which Ram would not have existed.

The education, in general as well as in the case of future leaders, is not about the knowledge of the present, but also for helping build the capability to face the unknown future; learning from the own as well others’ mistakes

In our journey of Devdutt Pattanaik’s TV serial Business Sutra, we will move on to the 2^nd part of 5^th episode – Crossing the Vaitarni.

Note: The images used in this post are the irrevocable property of their respective creator. They have been taken up courtesy the internet, so as to illustrate the point under discussion.