Best B-School in the World

The other day there was this article in FT Business Standard about the 100 best B-schools in the world. Only one school from India made it to the list and that was The Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. To the great consternation of the IIMs A, B,C, L, K, and twenty one other alphabets, XLRI, FMS Delhi, SPJIMR and NSSFLMISMQG (Narendra Shenoy School For Losing Money in Stock Market Quickly and Gracefully - New school, but very good at what it specializes in).

Angry questions were asked about methodology, period of existence, how many of their graduates own Beemers, how many have shifted paradigms lately and so on. We thought we should shed some light on this fascinating and controversial topic, namely

What makes a B-school great?

To answer this question, we must ask another question. Why do people go to B-School? Any one? Yes you, who look like the before guy in a deo commercial, what do you think? To get a high paying job, did you say? Close, but no cigar, as Bill Clinton told the intern they had to hire after it was found that Lewinsky had stained her reputation. (Blot on her escutcheon, as one authority put it. But we digress.)

See people, the purpose behind going to a B-school is not to land a high paying job. It is to land a high paying job with no duties and responsibilities. Alas, there are not enough of these around, and the competition for them can be intense. One of the major factors that employers consider when making such preferments is which B-school you went to.

Now you might think that a job with no duties and no responsibilities would need no formal qualification but you would be making a mistake. Such a job carries the enormous challenge of having to look stressed out and busy while being blissfully unoccupied.

There are many techniques for doing this. One is meetings. A good B-school will teach you how to sleep without closing your eyes. Indeed, the best B-schools even teach their graduates how to sleep without pausing in speech.

All the while, you will be frowning intensely and saying things like "paradigm shift". Paradigms are things that are shifted when your company is going down the drain. No one knows how these things are shifted. Definitely not by hiring a moving firm. But you don't have to worry about these details. You just have to suggest that a few paradigms be shifted. Your Christmas Bonus is secured.

The other major criterion is how many of the B-school's alumni have landed such jobs. Cutting edge corporate theory is that a B-school alumnus will hire someone from his or her alma mater. No one knows why this is so. Speculation is that there is a deep-rooted primal fear in all MBAs that someday every one will know how ignorant they are. This is probably true. Though there are takers for the other theory namely that the average B-school grad does not have enough brain cells to remember TWO B-school names.

Anyway, the purpose behind this little lecture was just to orient your minds to this deep and fascinating field of research inasmuch as the relevant parameters of the global market economy and the sub-prime crisis do not impinge upon the five year moving average of the adjusted Dow Jones Index unless there are significant paradigm shifts in multilateral directions. Bullshit, did you say? We prefer to call it bovine digestive residue.