What’s broken with MBA ?

Hersh Kathuria
Nov 1 · 3 min read

MBA was designed to create mangers & leaders across industries. But as the businesses are transforming fast thanks to the new digital economy, MBA edu. needs to transform as well to create future digital leaders.

Tech offers tools to create solutions which in the new digital economy means the coders can get started with creating solutions (software that solve problems), they create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product), test it out, pivot to get the product-market fit and scale.

MBA offers tools to manage businesses which works fine in context of established companies where managers can scale & manage business. The current economy (with startup led disruptions) thrives on ability to identify user’s problems & create digital products that solve it much better than the existing solutions. This scalable product live experimentation around the customer which is transforming businesses & is a big part of the tech edu. culture is missing in MBA edu.

So what’s needed

MBA needs a bias for creating things.

In a digital age when creating and shipping out products is really easy, the management edu. could focus on helping students work on live users problems across sectors, create a MVP, put the MVP in hands of the customer, capture feedback & pivot to get to a product-market fit. The best part is in all this does not need any tech expertise (besides creating a basic app or website, which is easy to outsource). The core idea is to help students start creating things rather than just study management theory.

Creating a basic customer-focused solution (without tech.) to identify and solve user problems is the key.

The biggest Indian tech driven startups- Flipkart & Ola started off with solving the user problem first using a low tech solution (and later on build out the real tech capabilities & scaled). Initially, Flipkart founders put up the online book store and once they got orders they went and manually bought the books from store and delivered. Same with Ola, the founders put up the website for booking cabs online and personally called up partner cabs to offer rides in early days.

The playbook is pretty straight forward- You create an online user interface (or digital solution which does things manually at the backend initially) that solves the user problem in a way that is 10x better than existing solution. You listen to the user feedback & make changes as needed to validate user’s interest. Only after you’ve got users interested & coming back you need to build out the real tech to scale (it will also be easier at this point to find tech guys interested as they would understand that you are building solutions to real user problem)

B-schools need to focus on helping MBAs create digital products around user-problems so that the future manager gets better at managing, leading & building the new digital businesses.

Hersh has done his MBA from SIBM (a leading Indian B-school), managed business segments with large firms in India and has been an entrepreneur over last few years with retail-tech, Spexy.co (Google Launchpad co.). Hersh helps leading B-schools & businesses empower students & employees for digital businesses.

Hersh Kathuria

Written by

Founder RupeePro.in, Business guy turned serial entrepreneur with retail-tech & fin-tech startups.

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