I have come across very few teachers in my life who have been as inspiring as you. Sir, your lectures were very passionate and full of life. After attending your classes, I have found what I need to do with my life and know where I want to be...’

Prof. Ramnath Narayanswamy’s course at IIM Bangalore aims to sensitise students to the creative process and understand their potential

‘I have come across very few teachers in my life who have been as inspiring as you. Sir, your lectures were very passionate and full of life. After attending your classes, I have found what I need to do with my life and know where I want to be...’

That’s an email IIM Bangalore graduate Manjunath N.S. wrote to Prof. Ramnath Narayanswamy shortly after graduating. What course might have inspired such emotions in a hard-nosed B-school graduate? And how does the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything get revealed through finance, accounts and marketing — the standard courses in an MBA?

Well, it doesn’t. Prof. Ramnath’s course inspires precisely because it is not about management, as is commonly understood. His course, ‘Tracking Creative Boundaries’, aims to sensitise students to the creative process and understand their potential. The full-credit course, spanning 33 hours, comprises interactive sessions and workshops with artistes who are into theatre, cinema, poetry, drama, music and dance.

The interaction leads to both managerial and personal insights. The system of evaluation is unusual too. The student is expected to compose a learner’s diary, a personal record of experience, on each session. This year, there was an end-of-the-term exam with questions on a modern fairy tale and an intriguing exercise where each had to identify his/her core incompetence.

The course has been voted the ‘best elective’ by students at IIM-B for five years consecutively. So you can be sure there are tangible benefits. And it’s just one of the many unorthodox courses now being offered at premier B-schools across the country. They are courses that prod students to think out of the box and to introspect before taking on the world.

Take Shodh Yatra, which means a journey of exploration. This second-year elective at IIM Ahmedabad takes 35 students on a seven-day trek to the Himalayas. In the first three days, the students are stretched to their physical limits. Prof. Anil Gupta, who pioneered the concept, explains: “The idea is to drain the ego and allow students to listen to their inner voice.” At evening sessions, the participants share their thoughts, hopes and fears.

Shodh Yatra was conceived to further the work of Sristi, an NGO set up by Prof. Gupta to propagate sustainable technologies. In March 1998, the first set of yatris walked 250 km through 47 Gujarat villages to discover creativity and innovation at the grassroots. It is now a bi-annual networking and knowledge sharing exercise between scientists and farmers.

The elective course is an adaptation of this idea. It was born out of student demand. Although it is primarily a journey within, Prof. Gupta has retained some elements of the original Yatra. For one, the trek is designed to include interaction with the locals. “Sometimes, the everyday life of simple folk offers wisdom we miss otherwise,” says Prof. Gupta. The chance to seek out this wisdom is much in demand — despite the course being held during term break.

A similar long-running IIM-A course is ERI, or ‘Exploring Roles and Identity’. In it, participants camp for five days at a beach or a wildlife sanctuary to introspect and discuss core life issues with the aid of ‘facilitators’ like Prof. Indira Parikh. Things can get pretty intense — some of the 22-year-olds are known to have broken down in public.

Beyond the emotional cleansing, many credit ERI with helping them achieve clarity about their goals. That self-awareness could have a significant impact on a manager’s effectiveness. Author Daniel Goleman has long argued that emotional intelligence matters twice as much as IQ or technical expertise when it comes to distinguishing star performers from average employees.

Goleman says: “The fundamental task of leaders is to prime good feeling in those they lead…. if you are a resonant leader, you tune in to your own values, priorities, sense of meaning and goals — and you lead authentically from those.” Self-awareness and self-management are, thus, essential building blocks in the leadership toolbox.

Whether MBAs can be leaders — not mere quant jocks — has long been a matter of debate. Says Prof. Debashis Chatterjee of IIM Lucknow: “My own conviction is that leaders can be made, provided they are born. In short, they need to be discovered, not developed.” Prof. Chatterjee has been taking a second-year elective at IIM Lucknow called LEAD (Leadership Discovery) since 1997. LEAD has also been offered in organisations like British Petroleum, Motorola, Ford Motor and as a seminar course at Harvard Business School.

The aim, at the end of the workshop, is to engender a shift in perspective from ‘information’ to ‘insight’, ‘analytical thinking’ to ‘possibility thinking’, and from ‘strategy’ to ‘purpose’. Chatterjee adds: “True leaders do not lay claims to developing others. That is not leadership — it is dealership. True leaders lead people to themselves… to their inborn capacity to belong to something greater than their body, mind and senses.”

Prof. Anil Gupta takes 35 IIM Ahmedabad students on a sevenday trek to the Himalayas, where they “listen to their inner voices”

Everyone agrees that that greater something cannot be revealed through standard textbooks and case studies. Two decades ago, Stanford Business School Prof. James March pioneered the idea of using great works of literature as lessons in leadership. For nearly two decades, close to 400 undergrad and grad students flocked to his organisational leadership class, where classics like Don Quixote, Othello and War and Peace have been discussed.

The concept was borrowed by Prof. Sampat Singh and offered at IIM-A as ‘Leadership, Vision, Meaning and Reality’. The course includes a wide selection of non-Western books such as Irawati Karve’s Yuganta, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Tughlaq by Girish Karnad and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Prof. K. Unnikrishnan Nair goes a step further and supplements literature with classic films in the leadership course he takes at IIM Kozhikode.

Not surprisingly, some of those who take these unconventional courses have an unconventional background. Prof. C.P. Bhatta was an Indologist at Pondicherry Central University before being wooed by IIM-C’s Centre for Human Values. His ‘Management, Culture and Creativity’ classes use the poetry of Kalidasa, tales from the Panchatantra and the work of Patanjali to understand the creative process.

And he is not alone in the belief that management, essentially Western as a discipline, can learn a thing or two from India. Prof. Sanjoy Mukherjee uses classical texts like the Vedas and Upanishads as well as the Koran and the Bible in his course titled ‘Managerial Effectiveness & Human Values: Indian Insights’ at IIM-C. He also uses the example of leaders like Gandhi, Aurobindo, Tagore and Vivekananda, who created successful institutions.

But can a couple of offbeat courses at a B-school really impact the character and thinking of a twenty-something? IIM-L graduate Manjunath sacrificed his life for principles. On the other hand, IIM-B graduate Vivek Prakash is now on trial for allegedly embezzling crores from former employer Samsung.

So yes, ethical and emotional wetware is embedded into us by family and friends long before an MBA. But courses that attempt to address life issues do impact some, if not all, of those who sign up. And that can’t hurt either.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The author is an IIM Ahmedabad graduate and founder-editor of the popular youth magazine JAM (www.jammag.com). She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it