Developing Arjunas

When a largish IT company in Pune, India, asked me to put together a development program to create the next generation of leaders who would take the company into the next orbit of growth, we made a conscious decision NOT to call it a 'Management Program', for it is doubtful if conventional 'managers' are needed in today's time and age.. neither did we want to call it a 'leadership' program, for that is another over-used term - what use are leaders without followers? And is it not leaders who have brought the world to its current sorry state?

In the Mahabharata, the central figure of Arjuna inspired us. In this epic, Arjuna is portrayed as the confluence of three streams - Karmayoga (the yoga of action), Gnananyoga (the yoga of knowledge/understanding) and Bhaktiyoga (the yoga of devotion).. loosely translated, we thought Arjuna presented the epitome of what an organization needs today: someone who acts, with understanding, and yet knows why he is acting - that is, infused with the right values.

The single biggest problem with management education today (I speak from the experience of having taught for 10 years at IIM Ahmedabad, India's premier management school and in countless executive development programs across the world) is the inability of management education to instill a sense of purpose, ethics and purposeful vision in students.

We followed the following Guiding Principles:
1. select students who have already shown they are capable, in their current jobs
2. drip irrigation is the best irrigation
3. every student learns differently - the program is about helping them learn, not about us teaching
4. we learn best at the periphery of our current experience
5. concepts need to be provided when the student really needs them, not when it suits some logical structure the instructor has dreamed up
6. in every thing the student does, he/she needs to consider the value system he is explicitly or implicitly espousing.

The program ran over a year. Broadly, there were three modules:

1. Building Perspective: understanding self, and understanding the world. Participants read novels, watched movies, visited other organizations, and kept a daily diary. They went through a theatre workshop to learn how to create context and how to communicate in many dimensions, and also to feel comfortable with themselves.

2. Tools for Analysis and Synthesis - we bagan with the big picture and then drilled down - strategy, building business plans, first, then business processes, organization design, marketing, and so on - rather than the other way around.

3. Action projects - participants had to undertake a change project in the company. Inputs on dialogue, negotiation, selling skills, how to run meetings - were provided when the project's success demanded it, rather than in some logical order. Every participant also had to write a story, from his or her experience in the organization, that illustrated the organization's core value system. We believe culture is best built with stories, not a list of corporate values.

We will finally evaluate the program one year later - on a series of measures that test whether participants have really grown into the next big role, faster than they would otherwise have. The usual 'feedback' taken after the program is of no value, we felt, since this is not an entertainment program!