By Professor Pankaj Chandra
In the early twentieth century, as industrialisation reshaped economies, organisations began to face a new challenge, as family run enterprises were becoming large corporations and decision making could no longer rely on instinct alone. When Harvard Business School launched what is widely regarded as the first formal MBA programme in 1908, it sought to professionalise management in much the same way that medicine and law had been professionalised earlier.
India’s own engagement with management education followed soon after Independence, with the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Management in the 1960s reflecting a national commitment to building professional leadership for a modernising economy. The mandate of these institutions extended beyond corporate success, as they were envisioned as crucibles for leaders who could strengthen public enterprises, build industrial capacity, and contribute to the larger project of nation building. Over time, particularly after economic liberalisation in the 1990s, the MBA acquired a new meaning in India, becoming one of the country’s most powerful pathways to social mobility and creating a generation of professional managers who helped shape banks, consultancies, technology firms, and consumer brands, even as the world that made the MBA indispensable began to change more rapidly than management education itself.
India today is a very different economy, society, and global actor, yet much of management education remains anchored in principles shaped by an earlier era that now seem out of sync with the realities of the twenty first century, where geopolitical change can alter supply chains almost overnight and where technology is starting to upend the entire organisational stickiness and tech products from small enterprises are becoming tools of leverage for the large. And then there are challenges like Climate and Health that are crying for solutions and posing opportunities for new firms. If India is to emerge as the next manufacturing factory for the world, it will need a new kind of manager who can connect design and technology to managerial decision making and who can deploy multiple knowledge systems to innovate. The new free trade agreements with the US and the European Union bring a promise of opportunity and a sure competition especially in the product market.The challenge before us is not that the MBA has failed, but that it has succeeded for too long in doing the same thing at a time when the context around it has shifted dramatically. Knowledge is increasingly becoming accessible to all through new technology and its possession no longer carries the premium it once did, making discernment rather than data, and judgement rather than answers, the new sources of value in leadership.
This shift fundamentally alters what we must expect from management education, because today’s business leaders are no longer simply optimisers of efficiency but navigators of complexity who must interpret uncertainty, connect ideas across disciplines, and make decisions when the right course of action is not immediately evident. They are expected to understand technology without being technologists, policy without being politicians, and society without being sociologists, yet still operate confidently at the intersection of all three, in a world where leadership is less about what one knows and more about how one thinks, listens, and decides in moments that resist easy resolution.
Despite this reality, most MBA programmes in India continue to organise learning in traditional silos of finance here, marketing there, and strategy somewhere else, even though real life no longer works that way. Startups fail not because spreadsheets are wrong but because culture is broken, and corporations falter not because the balance sheet is weak but because they misread public trust, regulation, or geopolitics, failures that are rarely about intelligence and far more often about judgement, empathy, and ethical clarity, which is precisely why management education must now respond to these realities by reshaping both what it teaches and how it prepares students for the complexity of leadership.
A reimagined MBA for India must therefore move decisively from functional mastery to systems thinking, from case discussions to consequence discussions, and from teaching students how to compete in markets to helping them understand what kind of markets should exist in the first place, recognising that in an age of abundant information the real task of education is no longer the transmission of knowledge alone but the cultivation of capacities that cannot be automated, including sense making, ethical reasoning, long term thinking, and the ability to lead people through ambiguity. Making and doing have to be the new pathways to learning.
The more important question today is whether graduates are building resilient organisations, responsible technologies, inclusive growth models, and leadership cultures grounded in trust and accountability, outcomes that speak not just to career success but to the kind of society business helps to shape. This will require them to learn ethics from philosophers, behavior of the new consumer from sociologists and anthropologists, geopolitics from international relations experts, properties of new materials from physicists and engineers and also learn about public health so that they could develop a new product that saves lives. This must be the training of a new manager.
India stands on the threshold of becoming one of the three most influential economies in the world, and the managers who will lead that transformation cannot be trained on old assumptions and through exemplars of an economy that has gone by. They need an education rooted in Indian realities, informed by global standards, and deeply attentive to the social and institutional contexts in which business now operates, making the task of reimagining the MBA not merely an academic exercise but a national imperative.
Professor Pankaj Chandra is the Vice Chancellor of Ahmedabad University and has taught management at some of leading management schools in India and the world.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETEDUCATION does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETEDUCATION will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
