Part - I

One thing that every B-school student is asked is what specialization they are going to do? Prompt comes the reply - marketing, finance, operations - or some may say dual. I have observed this perception about management within management students. They tend to think marketing, finance, operation and other parts of management in isolation. That I think is contradictory to the MBA itself.

Management is similar to human anatomy. Surprised! But yes it is. Let's see how a holistic view of management of business can change your thinking about it. Let us try to see business as a human body. Then I think from my brain, in business, strategy department thinks for the company. All the marketing functions for me are done by my eyes, ears and my speech; same things are done for business in marketing department. I perform daily chores by my limbs, same thing is done in operations department.

Well, we can't forget our finance guys. They are equivalent to heart of a business pumping blood (read capital) in the organizational body. All said and done now can anyone guess about the soul of a business organization. Please the skeptics about this school of thought need not answer. But businesses do have a soul like humans. Its people are its soul. People with their attitude, synergy and symbiosis always keep that organization alive and growing.

Now many of my friends will ask then why we study marketing, finance, operations as separate subjects or specialize them at the end of the of the MBA. Can't we study management as one subject? To find its answer let's go back to our simile. Whenever your body part gets unfit you visit a doctor. If the defect or problem is minor any general doctor can fix but God forbid a problem with heart or an accident affecting your limbs you would require a specialist, won't you? Similarly, in organization small defects are removed by any person in charge of it. But whenever we have a major issue to be solved in specific departments we call specialist. We require persons with certain degree of knowledge specific to one department.

Let's take an example of Dell computers because it's one organization whose distribution channel has overpowered its competitors. So, shall we say Dell is a pure marketing success! No, we can't say that Dell is a success because of its operations management, its strategic thinking and its financial problem solving. It's the whole organization that performed well and that is the Mantra of its success.

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* Contributed by: -
Tejinder Singh,
MBA (IInd year),
International Management institute, Delhi.