Unmuddlings!!

The private engineering colleges and b-schools are going through another bad phase. The overcapacity, because of which many colleges are reeling under significant financial stress, is intriguing when seen against the backdrop of a modest Gross Enrollment Ratio. The reasons are quite straight forward, students enroll into professional education for jobs.  Starting from the mid-1990s, riding on an economy growing at a fast clip with the promise of dollar jobs students thronged the higher education professional courses. When the global economies plateaued and the Indian growth rate isn’t much better, job creation is poor and so also is the demand to join professional courses. The professional education institutes, must know that the role they need to play is to create industry worthy professionals. That needs to be the focus.  For the past 20 years, institutes have focussed on two areas – infrastructure and admission network. This strategy worked, when large organize...

Organization communication encompasses both the pre-planned formal, arte-fact centric communication and micro-level need centric informal, impromptu interactions. The former includes vision, mission, goals, job descriptions, performance targets, standard-operating-procedures, client proposals, periodic customer feedbacks, sign-off criteria, SLAs, performance management, performance appraisals, workshops, seminars etc. While the latter comprises verbal client feedbacks, impromptu team meetings, informal discussions in the café, unscheduled dip stick checks and associated discussions. The fact that organization communication is something that needs to be given emphasis is obvious. But the reality is that generally, including in our organization, the arte-fact centric communication dominates the communication plan while the power of the micro-level communication is largely unrecognized.  Communication systems – and we are not talking of technology here – offer a huge opportunity to ...