Management mantra: Sometimes it's better to lose

What the educators at B-schools often forget is that management is an experiential discipline. It is not about the law of gravity or the theory of pure dynamics, where things happen in one particular way.

In management, a particular approach or a set of policies could work well in one company, but not in another. Similarly, a management style may work well in one organisation, but may fail in another.

What B-schools largely miss out at one level are the softer issues, and at another, the more practical issues that make you succeed. The focus is more on being analytical.

In the real world, you can be analytical, but if you are not sensitive to emotions, you may find several situations and business problems hard to handle.

To give you an instance, at B-schools the focus is always on how to win -- in business, negotiations and so on. No B-school teaches you that sometimes it is important to lose.

In the corporate world, there are situations when you could easily win, but strategically, it is good for you to get some allies for a larger objective you're trying to achieve.

To get more people with you, it's important that you give more weight to someone else's view. So long as you can live with the other idea, you may let the other person win, because that's how you can win the person to achieve your larger objectives.

There are a few more things that B-schools haven't focused upon much. One, authority should not be mistaken with titles. The authority you get should come from the value you add, and companies too should value their employees in the same way.

Two, there are few business schools that focus on the need to be entrepreneurial. Today, the business cycles are rapid, things change quickly and we need people who can think out-of-the-box, we need managers who have a strong entrepreneurial sense. Unfortunately, B-schools haven't done much on these fronts.

Saurabh Srivastava is executive chairman, Xansa Outsourcing and Technology. He did his masters in Management Sciences and Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1969.

- As told to Amit Ranjan Rai