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Civil Society News |
IT is Vasanthi Srinivasan’s mission to make
management courses more sensitive to
Indian social realities. As associate
professor at IIM Bangalore, she has been
teaching a course on Business, Governance
and Society. It will soon be called
Responsible Business. In Delhi recently at
the invitation of the Business and
Community Foundation (BCF), she spoke to
Civil Society on how management teaching
needs to change to produce better managers.
You have been trying to make management
courses more socially relevant.
The more I taught leadership development,
I found that that a lot of questions young
leaders in organisations were asking us
were of ethical dimensions. They related to
making trade-offs between profitability and
conscience.
We also realised that people in the course
who had spent time in industry were asking
the most critical questions. They were also
the ones who were finding it most difficult
to do anything which would follow their call
of conscience. They had jobs to hold on to, EMIs to
be paid and so on and so forth.
It was then that I started looking at ethics and
justice as a part of leadership development. One
has to think of rights and justice in the Indian
context.
Is the course demand driven?
The course is on business, governance and society.
You see what has happened to management
education globally is something to be concerned
about. Business ethics is taught more like moral
education. You have CSR courses which are no
more than stakeholder frameworks. You can have
an intellectual analysis of what a mining or a
pharma company has done. And then you have
governance related courses that deal with the role
of directors, board responsibility and so on.
But that there is an undeniable ethical premise
across all these courses is not something I think
management education has internalised.
We are very good at methodology, techniques
and tools. So everything gets down to being a
course on methods. But the question we are asking
is – who is responsible? It is a multi-level problem.
You have a responsibility as a citizen, as a
manager in a corporation and then you have the
corporation and its responsibility to other stakeholders.
Teaching something like this is a challenge
because it is inter-disciplinary. You need some
understanding of philosophy to be able to teach
ethics. You need to be familiar with corporate
decision-making to understand ethical decisionmaking
in the corporate context.
Then you are talking about ethics in marketing,
media, HR. It is a large canvas which
includes the millennium development
goals, sustainability and reporting on sustainability.
Do management students take any of this
seriously? They covet jobs in finance and
marketing.
I don’t know. We offer an elective course in
social entrepreneurship which attracts a
good number of students. Similarly there is
one on environment sustainability that
doesn’t get numbers but does draw students
of a high quality.
I don’t think you have to change the
world to actually have an impact. I only
have to touch 20 per cent of those students
to make a difference.
Students need to be sensitised so that
when they are later making managerial
decisions they are aware of the ethics of the
choices they make. One of the things I have
thought about extensively in the Indian
context is corruption. There is a taker
because there is a giver. So we need a mechanism
for sensitising the giver.
So how do you define your course? What do you
call it?
Responsible business – which is basically an integrated
course looking at the individual, the organisation
and society/economy at large. Our task is
to provide the inputs that sensitise students to all
the three.
It bothers me when I’m asked if what I am
doing is ‘value inculcation’. I say no it is ‘value
clarification’.
In Europe, there is a lot of context that goes
into a course like this. In the US it is CSR focused.
What would be an appropriate course for India? In
my view it has to cover corruption, millennium
development goals and international perspectives
on ethics.
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