And, I meet with Harvard (HBS) Professor Datar who wrote ‘Rethinking the MBA’!!

It seems to be the week of Business School posts for me.

First I wrote a post early this week titled  ‘what i learnt at Marwari Business School‘ (MBS) and then as luck turns out, I got invited for a nice morning cofee session with Srikant M. Datar – the distinguished Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Srikant is constantly in India, meeting some lots of  interesting people and more importantly doing some high quality work in the field of education.

I was privileged to meet him and spend an interesting hour discussing what it took me (a PROUD NON MBA) to create a digital business in India – in the 1998 era when the Internet etc was barely understood.

Srikant was really warm and made me immediately comfortable. He explained that I was typically one those ‘right’ brained guys who think of ideas and out of the box creative solutions to solve problems that people like see around us..

While the crux of the discussion is beyond the purview of this post (since its work in progress for Srikant), I must share with you some very interesting snippets of the conversation:

– Shrikant confessed that he constantly meets lots of hard nosed, very thorough ‘left brained’ thinkers (typically MBA’s) who try to logically and systematically solve problems using ‘Linear’ thinking.

He told me that when he meets these  ‘hard to convince, rigid thinker’ types, he poses a question to them –  to kind of disarm them and get also them to try and think using their Right Brain:

The Question he asks them is:

“How do you describe the color Red to a man who is blind” ?

Srikant told me that he slips this question in just before or in the middle of a very cut and dry conversation and tells the other person to ‘think about it’.

The reactions he gets from his audience is very funny. One person told him that he was so distracted by this question that he could not continue the ongoing conversation anymore. Another person said he had ‘several solutions and wanted time to choose the best one’. Another person asked him if he could ‘mail him some theories’…

I was in splits when I heard this and recounted my favorite tale:

In Zen spirituality, teaching via ‘koans’ or riddles is very common.

Often, disciples wait outside Zen monastery doors for weeks before they are let in. Once inside, they meet the ‘Sensei’ or guru who typically gives them ONE riddle to think of.

The favorite riddle is –  ‘What did the face of your parents look like before you were born’? 

Do read the Koan above, again.

Trainee monks are expected to meditate on THIS ONE RIDDLE and then come up with the answer.

I told Srikant that most monks later meet the Sensei and reply ‘ I have meditated on this riddle. The answer is that …….. ”it doesn’t matter”.

The interesting part ? It takes 10 to 15 YEARS for the Monk to come up with this answer :-))))

Both Shrikant and I  laughed and concluded that probably Monks and Left Brained MBA’s had lots in common 🙂

*****