THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
THE ACADEMY FOR MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE
Award Ceremony for the First Cohort of MBA Graduates
Chennai, India
6 November 2000
A New Generation of Managers for a New Economy in a New World
Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
Distinguished guests, graduating students, colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a very great pleasure to be here with you in Chennai today. This is a historic occasion because we are seeing the graduation of the first cohort of Open University MBA students in India. You have been pioneers and it is a pleasure to acknowledge your success.
The Open University is very proud of its association with ACME, the Academy for Management Excellence, because we are extremely impressed by the quality of ACME’s work and the strategic thinking behind it. ACME’s mission is to train and develop a new generation of managers who will make Indian industry globally competitive. We at the Open University are very proud to be associated with that mission.
In the United Kingdom the Open University now accounts for nearly one in five (24%) of all MBAs awarded. The thousands of graduates of our programme have made a huge difference to the competitiveness of Britain. They have also changed the way in which MBA studies are perceived. Most employers now believe that people who study part-time, as you have done, while in employment, come out with a more useful qualification than those who study full time outside the business and industrial environment.
It’s obvious when you think about it why this should be so. You have studied a part of your course in the evening and then been able to think about what you learned and apply it in your jobs the next day. Moreover, while you are doing your jobs, because you are also students, you reflect more profoundly on the challenges that you are facing and you ask yourself questions. When you come back to your studies later in the week you study more effectively because of the reflective and questioning frame of mind that you are in.
Employers often say that students like yourselves, who study a management programme part-time, become noticeably more effective and productive at their jobs well before they graduate. Now that you are graduates you have that extra cachet and confidence. I congratulate you and I wish you success. I am sure that you will all help to make Indian business and industry more competitive so that your wonderful country can play its full role in the modern world.
I congratulate you the graduates, but there are others whom I wish to congratulate as well. I mentioned the advantages of part-time study that relate to the efficiency and the depth of your learning. But part-time study has disadvantages as well. It makes you take time away from your family and friends. You have less time for family and social events. So your family and friends have made sacrifices to help you achieve the success we celebrate today. I would like to give you, the graduates, the chance to show your appreciation with a round of applause to the family, relatives, friends and colleagues who have supported you.
I know too, that you would like to show your appreciation of your tutors and all the staff of ACME who have made your success possible. Right from the beginning of the Open University’s partnership with ACME I was told about the high quality of what is done here. I heard of the excellence and experience of your tutors and the determination of ACME to make this programme the best MBA in India.
Being the best takes time, but with 200 students who have embarked on the MBA programme and eight of you now graduating we are beginning to see growth. I am pleased that we have added the Certificate programme and some of the forty students who began studying for the Certificate earlier this year will progress to the Diploma and then to the MBA.
From these foundations of quality we have gained the confidence to increase the scope of the ACME - Open University partnership and I look forward to seeing its activities expand into other parts of India.
So I ask you to show your appreciation of your tutors and all the staff of ACME and the Open University who have developed the programme the success that we celebrate today.
You are a new generation of managers working in a new economy in a new world. Let us reflect together on what that means.
A New World
When ACME was created in 1991 by the Institute of Financial Management and Research the Berlin Wall had only just come down, bringing to an end a long period of division between eastern and western Europe that we called the Cold War. The Cold War had an impact on countries all over the world as they had to decide whether to align themselves with one of the superpowers or remain non-aligned. There was no agreement on what made for a successful economy or a successful enterprise.
Then for most of the 1990s we talked about the post-Cold-War period. Some tried to refer to it as the new international order, but since it seemed to be characterised by plenty of disorder in both politics and economics, that name didn’t seem very suitable either.
Today you hear more about the new international system and about the driving trend of globalisation that seems to define it. Under the disorderly surface of the 1990s things were happening which have created a world very different from the world of the Cold War years. In those Cold War years you in India and we in the United Kingdom shared a common humanity and a common commitment to democracy but most other aspects of our day-to-day experience, whether economic, political, or technological, were very different. Today we share a much wider set of experiences and attitudes. What has made the difference?
It seems to me that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a symbol of a process of democratisation that was already moving, that picked up much greater speed during the 1990s, and that is still going on. Let me identify four areas.
First, there has been the democratisation of finance. As barriers between countries came down capital flowed in ever increasing volume and with ever increasing speed around the world. Individuals in all countries became much freer to invest their money as they chose. A corollary of this trend was that governments lost power to determine the shape of their economies in a unilateral way. I don’t need to dwell on the problems and policy choices that this trend has created for you in India.
Second, there has been the democratisation of technology. Again, this is a long-term trend that creates technologies that can be controlled by the individual. As well as trains, on which we travel in groups, we now have cars that we can drive ourselves. As well as the cinema, where we watch films in groups, we have television that allows us to select our own viewing. Computers used to be big expensive machines that only governments and big firms could afford. Today they are devices that individuals can own and use.
Technology has helped to drive a third process of democratisation, the democratisation of information. It is now much more difficult for powerful people to control what people can know. Freedom of information was already growing with the spread of newspapers, radio, television and telephones. Today the Internet and the World Wide Web have made it easy to spread information, whether true or false, all over the globe. Indian scientists, engineers and businesspeople have played a large role in the development of the Internet industry; not just here in India, but in Silicon Valley in California, in Britain and all over the world.
The fourth process of democratisation, in which we are all engaged, is the democratisation of education. This has travelled a very long way in the education of children. There are now very few states that do not have as a goal to allow all children to attend school free. However, democratisation still has a long way to go in higher education. Universities in all countries still restrict entry to relatively small numbers of students. I am proud to lead the Open University, which has made openness to people its fundamental ideal. And the Open University is proud to work with ACME because you are dedicated to providing higher education of quality to working people.
Those are four processes of democratisation: of finance, of technology, of information and of education, that have advanced rapidly during the 1990s and which continue in this new century. With all this change it is interesting to do a ‘before-and-after’ comparison. What are the key differences between the Cold War era and this first year of the new century? There are some interesting contrasts.
First, the central fact of the Cold War era was division between east and west, symbolised by the Berlin Wall. Today the central fact is the integration of all parts of the world, symbolised by the World Wide Web.
Second, another symbol of the Cold War was the hotline linking the red telephones in Moscow and Washington. We trusted the two presidents to remain in charge and avoid blowing up the rest of us in nuclear war. But today, in the integrated world of the web, no one is in charge in that way. The Internet lets everyone communicate with everyone else.
You could compare the Cold War era to the Japanese sport of sumo wrestling. It was a slow contest where what counted was weight and size. Today the best sporting analogy is a series of sprint races over 100 metres. What counts is not size and weight but speed and fitness.
Finally, one powerful symbol of the totalitarian state in the Cold War era was the phrase taken from George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty Four, that ‘Big Brother is watching’ you. This expressed the role of the state in maintaining an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and distrust in order to ensure that citizens did not dare to create alliances against the power of the state. Today Big Brother has gone, but has he been replaced by lots of little brothers who can use the Internet to invade our privacy in new ways.
All these examples show how much the world has changed in ten years. I am sure there are many people in India – as there are in Britain – who wonder whether it has all been a change for the better. This new world is more challenging to individuals. We may not have liked all aspects of the role of the state and governments in our lives but it was predictable. Work may not always have been exciting but we could rely on it. Today everything is much more uncertain. The role of government is smaller. Innovation is constantly changing the devices and tools that we use in everyday life. We have constantly to learn new skills. The forces of change are not under anyone’s control; rather it seems as though we are all being stampeded along in an electronic herd.
All this puts a special responsibility on higher education and nowhere more so than here in India where the challenges of change are so enormous. What is the role of universities today? How should universities operate?
The first universities were actually created by the students who got together as a community and paid the professors to teach them. Over the years the religious organisations and secular rulers played a larger and larger part in establishing and maintaining universities, many of which became independent, self-governing foundations.
Then over the second half of the 20th century, most universities came to have a very close relationship with the state, which provided most of their funds and gave them direction through the Ministries of Education. Today, as a result of the increasing demand for higher education and the changes I have outlined, new types of university organisations are springing up and the partnership between ACME and the Open University is an example of this.
These new types of university organisation are of various kinds. Some, called corporate universities, are being set up by large companies for the training of their staff. Others are being set up as profit-making ventures. At the same time many states are reducing their financial support to the public universities, so that they too have to pay more attention to the market.
So there are many kinds of university today. Do they have a common purpose? Should they have a common purpose?
I believe that there should share a common purpose and I suggest to you that the role of universities is ‘to help people maintain an independent understanding of their world’. What do those words mean?
The word independent is there to capture the unique role of universities as creators of understanding. In a knowledge society many claim the right to help us interpret and understand the world. However, most of those claimants such as the press, television, and governments cannot be independent of commercial and political interests. The individualistic and impartial nature of the true university remains unique.
The word understanding means going beyond information, it means going beyond knowledge, it means knowledge acquired with the sense of responsibility for how it comes to be known that can make it the foundation for action. That, I hope is the kind of understanding that you have gained in your Open University MBA course.
Universities help people to understand their world. Today our world includes our local community, our nation and the earth as a whole. These components of our worlds – and the relationship between them – are constantly changing so our understanding needs to be constantly renewed.
And the focus is on people. All people. University education can no longer be limited to an elite. Everyone needs to understand their world in order to take effective action. I am very proud that the first goal of the Open University is to be open to people.
How do universities help people maintain an independent understanding of our world? My final point is that good universities do not do this by giving people answers. They do it by teaching people to ask questions. It is by asking questions and testing the answers against further questions that people come to an understanding.
That is a key principle of Open University teaching. We always try to give students several perspectives on an issue and lead them, through asking questions, to decide which perspective is most satisfactory, or whether none of them is convincing. Most students begin by finding this frustrating but end by finding it liberating. I hope that this was your experience as MBA students. You will increase the competitiveness of Indian business and industry by asking good questions, not by having ready-made answers.
I end by congratulating all of you here who have studied with the ACME-OU partnerships. We think that this partnership is very important for the future of management education in India. We are very proud of your achievement. I hope that you have gained understanding, which will enrich your life and your work. I wish you every success in the future.