Business as unusual

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Macbeth could teach you a thing or two about leadership skills, canvases might teach you about the importance of price transparency and the Sourav Ganguly-Greg Chappell spat might give you a lesson on team building. Businesses are changing rapidly and so are business schools. Today, case studies are being increasingly drawn from fields other than business.

A recent entrant to the list of offbeat case studies at B-schools is saffrontart.com, which has made it to Harvard Business School. Its business plan was made during co-founder Minal Vazirani’s MBA at Insead in France. Explains Minal, “The market lacked transparency and the prices were not usually disclosed. We thought there was a need to look at this afresh. So, we did our bit and it worked.”

Work it sure did. In February this year, the Vaziranis walked into a class at Harvard, with Bollywood number chaiya, chaiya from Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se playing to welcome them. “It was a fascinating experience,” admits Minal. The case is being used to demonstrate “managing innovation” at the workplace.

B-schools are drawing parallels from real-life people and situations to give students an extra edge. Take, for example, Rajeshwar Upadhyay, who is part of the visiting faculty at Hyderabad’s Indian School of Business (ISB) and Thunderbird: The Garvin School of International Management at Arizona. His programme ‘Management lessons from the world of literature’ uses characters from literature to demonstrate leadership skills. The classes start with chapters on the Ramayana and the Odyssey and go on to cover the works of Bacon, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Emerson. Savita Mahajan, an associate dean at ISB, says that the student-response has been good in Upadhyay’s class.

For Upadhyay, it’s the simple logic of drawing comparisons between characters from literature and applying them to today’s times. “Take, for example, Macbeth, his leadership was flawed. His self-obsession and over ambition led to his doom. Hamlet’s case can easily relate to the Indian psyche of constantly getting into nuances of things. I have found these metaphors powerful. Often a comprehensive framework for practical applications is a consequence of this multi-pronged approach,” he says.