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Second failure is on the part of these business magazines where they failed to exercise their judgment and got carried away by the survey samples, methodology, etc. In market research, an innocuous question can change the outcome of the whole survey and, hence, much discretion is required on part of editors. In fact I remember in my B-school days, a senior professional from a marketing agency came to our institute to deliver a lecture on market research and showed us the whole process of carrying out market research for the clients. She showed us a 70-slide presentation where their company had done whole research for launching a toilet cleaner and have done all complex analysis on attribute research / mapping / number-crunching using SPSS, etc., but in the last three slides, plain percentage analysis was also given. So one from the curious lot asked the reason of doing plain percentage analysis after doing such a comprehensive study, and the answer was that the client rejected the analysis as the client felt that the findings are not in sync with their feel of the market and asked research agency to do a simple percentage analysis as well, and then went ahead with the findings, and surprisingly the clients' gut turned out to be right.

Similarly, the disastrous launch of new Coca Cola in 1985 based on a detailed market survey is quite well-known and so we expected these business magazines to be aware of these nuisances and use their editorial discretion and come out with a more sensible survey, which unfortunately did not happen, and the results are for all to see.

The problem with these ranking surveys is not about top choices as there is no confusion about Top-10 (with or without ranking), but dearth of data / knowledge base for next 50 or 100 B-schools, as there is a real need for data / pointers on B-schools which are in 20-100 category. For an MBA aspirant with a CAT percentile of 80 or 90% there is not much data / advise available and when MBA is a pure hype degree, then choices become much more difficult to make and hence these surveys have failed miserably even in that count of guiding MBA aspirants. As unfortunately, given the ability of magazines in ranking Top-10 schools, one can but only guess about the real ranking of those schools in 20-100 cadre where not much data is available and, if available, then highly doctored and cooked and, hence, the challenge remains.

Probably some other survey some other time...

Concluded.

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- CoolAvenues' Editorial