Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Politicians would have been the least expected to have mba qualifications

P. D. Rai, Member of Parliament from Sikkim, agrees that his knowledge helps him to do better planning with the funding he gets for performing activities in his constituency. “MBA is a capability qualification and so it can be said that analysis of issues would be done perhaps differently. An MBA is a professional degree and the attainment of professional outcome and values will certainly impact my own Parliament work and indeed in my political work. The domain is different but the principles of how to manage political issues versus say business issues do not change. In my own Parliamentary constituency, Sikkim, over the last 17 years, I have painstakingly built my political career and have balanced it with my professional work. This has been possible because of my educational qualifications.”

This is not to say that an MBA is essential in politics – in fact, it is not at all. For example, Rahul Gandhi, who formally joined politics in 2004 and has emerged within five years as a key strategist for the party, is not an MBA. But then, he too has worked as a consultant for a few years with management guru Michael Porter’s Monitor Group.

An MBA is becoming a more popular degree among current politicians in the US as well, especially experts in finance or management analysis. The most powerful woman in corporate America, Carly Fiorina, who once headed HP, plans to run for the US senate. She says that government spending is “out of control” and she may be able to make things better. Anne Mulcahy, Chairman Xerox, is a member of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board. But popularity aside, from Manmohan Singh to Obama, it’s quite an accepted fact that qualifications in law, finance and related sciences beat management education hands down when it comes to the political circles. But then again, we have Chidambaram who not many know is an MBA graduate from one of the world’s topmost ivy league institutions, the Harvard Business School. Clearly, maybe one day, we could well have a Prime Minister who’s an MBA.

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Source :
IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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