What They Don't Teach You at Indian B-Schools

Straitjacketing approaches:

The straitjacketing approaches that are taught in B-Schools and promoted in the Indian corporate world are not helpful in posing or answering such questions. Innovation requires breaking boundaries not just in application, but also more importantly in thought. Paradigm shifts should not be just the effect, but should be, again more importantly — the cause for innovation. Would it be a deviation to teach B-School students that Porter's framework and the concept of positioning is not all that there is in strategy, that the core-competence approach in spite of its brilliance has limited application, that Blue Ocean for all its attractiveness does not tell you what to do when your blue water is bloodied by lean and mean sharks? Would it be dissent to teach them that all these approaches to strategy are necessary but not adequate conditions for strategic success? Isn’t it important to teach them that we need to stop thinking of organizations and businesses as mere machines to which we apply formulas and frameworks, and instead think of the next cutting edge in strategy where we will have to work with organizations as if they are living, breathing, humans who have stories to create, live, and tell?

It is time to teach them to find the self-confidence, their own voices and brand Indian ways of innovation that go beyond the stereotypical and that seems to be the only answer to innovation.