Formalisms, Frameworks and Frustration

At the risk of "slandering" ( lol ) my own tribe, I make the claim that there are way too many engineers/scientists in the MBA field. This is not at all a good thing and let me explain why.

Remember way back in school, we learnt about this really cool thing called the "Scientific Method". Basically it is about how you observe something in nature , create an idealistic model and start testing your model out. One fine day, it might just happen that some chap comes up with a scenario where your model bombs , and hey- everyone is all excited to try out a new model now. And on goes this cycle..


Yeah, its fun . But, folks - I think we are suffering from a hangover. We want to make EVERY DISCIPLINE under the sun comply with these sacred steps. Du-uh? Why this one-size-fits-all approach ? The 'scientific way' is the only LEGITIMATE way to study any subject. For the writers who write textbooks , it is the only way they can make their discipline 'attractive' ! This is a really dangerous trend affecting not-entirely-scientific disciplines , MBA being no exception.

Here's an example :-

In my MBA course, I study Organization Behavior ( more specifically, "Managing People and Performance in Organizations" ) which tries to understand people's personalities , their mutual interaction in an organizational setting and how their environment can be made conducive to the organization's benefit . My biggest complaint against this course is its extremely 'formal' treatment. By formal treatment , I mean that the course proceeds so much like a textbook on science - where you make observations , try and standardize whatever you see and draw generic conclusions. As a consequence of 'forcing' the scientifc method, you create this huge machinery of


a) Definitions
b) Frameworks : I am referring to complicated Graphs, Diagrams, Tables, Matrices and what not.
( Its like Newton who ended up inventing Calculus while describing astronomical phenomena )

Just what ARE we trying to do ?? Don't we realize that so much of it is meaningless formalism. Where is the so called 'human element' ? It seems to have hopelessly got lost in all the quibbling.
To illustrate a point, one section in my textbook talks about different styles of leadership and goes on to PLOT them on an X - Y axes with ORDERED PAIRS such as ( 1,1 ) , ( 9,9 ) etc ! And that is not all , it goes further to describe a new ' style ' and tries to project it on 3 dimensions - finally the reader is staring at a sexy figure straight out of a 'Math Challenges' magazine !

Give me a break folks. If the eternal debate of whether Management is a Science or an Art has hit a new level, it is due to such illustrations. I am afraid if my coursework requires me to 'remember' such 'creations' for my examination. I have a good mind to rebel and fill my entire answer paper with equations I learnt in co-ordinate geometry.

So, that's one. Now, the other 'casualty' in my MBA course seems to be 'Marketing Management'. At the outset, let me agree that marketing ( especially market research ) DOES require a lot of quantitative analysis and hence the subject needs to be analytical and 'scientific'.
But , why have elaborate analytical frameworks for something like consumer behaviour or advertising psychology ? In our coursework, we are simply bombarded with words , theories , definitions and more theories.

To me , most frameworks that populate textbooks are of dubious worth - they are hardly applicable in a situation which is not the same as the one which led to the creation of the framework itself ! ( Sort of these perpetual machines we used to imagine! )


Then came something to spruce up our grim life :-)
Today , we had this talk on Marketing by this awesome guy called Santosh Desai. You can probably google him up , but here's one link for those of you who follow the marketing industry.

Man, he was SIMPLY AMAZING. His whole talk , titled 'Life Backwards' was about two simple ideas :
a) Advertising should speak to people when they are busy being people. ( In other words, don't sit in your Ivory tower making marketing plans to these unknown creatures you call as "consumers" )
b) The central quest of human beings is the quest for meaning , and the concept of brand should address that.

He stressed the importance of getting out of straight-jacketed thinking and look for simple insights in everyday life. For example , how do you say that the Indian Society is getting more "modernized " ? No, don't point to the urban westernized youth who visit pubs and discos. Show me the heartland of middle-class India. Women in 'Nighties' ! lol . It was quite an interesting / amusing point he made - what a nightie offers them is really 'Freedom from Shape!' ( Women' Lib? ) and then think about how names such as potty, pinky, sweety in middle class India came about -( an indication of a 'greasy' modernism?) . Or look at little girls from poor families who go to Government Schools - They sport bob cuts! -( a paradigm shift from the traditional plaited hair , a shape of things to come? )

On the whole, a very engaging talk - I should probably reserve a separate blog entry for this some other time.

That brings me to the end of this blog entry and back to my basic point -

If the MBA world wants to encourage innovation in its truest sense , they better start by ruthlessly cutting down excessive formalization and steering away from obsessing on the 'Venerated' Scientific Method. The sooner this is done, the better it is for us all.