There is a framework in the making of a professional management person on which there is a broad emerging consensus. A management professional should be able to diagnose structures and analyse solutions related to professional issues.
Traditional management learning has used ‘from symptoms to the cause model’. This, however, cannot be done without the ability to keep investing in your own self and to keep growing.
The fact of the matter is that in operational terms, it means to have high-level professional maturity and skill to source knowledge. Be it academics or consulting or a corporate executive, it is being increasingly recognised that knowledge-based approaches get far more mileage than the ones that are structured, often tried and weather-beaten paths.
This is not an easy task because it requires many skills, some of which are yet to be identified. In fact, identifying what is relatively new on the radar is a less complex task than developing sensors to deconstruct the new elements.
An illustration may help to understand the point better. Diversity is not a new topic, it is fundamental to the human civilisation and physical anthropologist have not only made careers, but have also generated a full discipline of a physical anthropology for doing up the typology of diversity.
The breed of learning and development facilitators in the domain of management will do well to sensitise on the method of not just physical anthropology, but also social anthropology, to breathe life into the explorations of diversity.
Diversity is a fact of life which confronts every thinker and that includes a management professional. There are various kinds of diversity: Gender, demography, culture, pay scales and quality of life. That said, preparation of a career as a management professional is rendered quite subtle and complex.
Moreover, the coming in of technology has compounded a complex situation. Digitisation may be politically the correct thing to talk about, but little or no literature is available on the successive stages of embedding of digitisation in an organisational frame.
This writer had the opportunity to do some consulting work, to help create a paperless office in Exim Bank. The details may not be relevant here, but one thing did come out very powerfully in the course of the study.
Creation of a paperless office in this organisation, as indeed would be the case anywhere, meant a confrontation with a widely diverse set of organisational structure in different divisions or silos of the organisation.
This because the narrative of each division of the organisation had only so much in common with another division. There can be very little of an organisation wide standard module. This made the task onerous and domain of analysis, to begin with, focused on the legal division of the organisation. Digitisation is not and cannot be an organisation wide symmetrical effort. Because of the content, there will be a wide range of variation.
Hence, dealing with diversity requires far more skills to include the skills which will cover the diversity which technology will create.
It is, therefore, necessary to register that the making of a management professional requires the skills to deal with diversity in a manner that is wide ranged. Technology is not within the organisation, but also outside the organisation.
Meaning thereby illustratively having the ability to live in an era where doing business with and through social media is living realities. The experience of Patanjali shows how in an overtly Westernised ethos and idioms, the appeal to roots and legacy symbols promote agile business.
Whereas, the traditional appeal of a soap, to enhance beauty, was through cinematic ladies; Patanjali products have gone ahead to project prakritik soundrya. Packaged as Patanjali riding on the crest of nature, the appeal resonates far more than a multinational name backing up cosmetic beauty on the screen where everyone knows the part that make-up plays.
To sum up, time has come to register that the making of a management professional today requires re-visiting the paradigms of the making of a practitioner. It is not only necessary to understand concepts such as diversity in all its forms, but it is also the psychological pre-conditions for an action frame.