Inside the new management playbook: Why Indian B-Schools say MBA must become a mindset

At a time when management education in India is being asked to create an enduring value, rather than merely deliver placements, an ET Career Talks webinar, in collaboration with ISB&M, made the case that the modern business degree must prepare students for uncertainty, adaptability, and execution. The conversation, moderated by Beverly White and featuring Dr. Pramod Kumar, President, ISB&M and Rajesh Padmanabhan, CEO, Talavvy Business Catalysts, framed the question bluntly: what does it take to build a high-growth career now?

The conversation comes amid a changing economic landscape, where the job market is more varied than ever.

The evolution of management education in India mirrors the nation’s socioeconomic realities, its priorities, and ambitions in the decades that followed the Independence. In the 1960s, it was conceived to contribute to nation-building and produce leaders who could spearhead the country’s economic vision.


In the 1990s, economic liberalisation redefined the very scope and meaning of management education, where it soon came to be seen as a vehicle for social mobility. It produced leaders who shaped a new era of banking, consultancy, technology firms, and consumer-facing brands.

However, today, as India aims to achieve economic growth of $5 trillion by 2027 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the management education script needs a significant overhaul. As moderator Beverly White pointed out: The management education scenario in India has followed pretty much the same path for about a decade, but that path perhaps is not quite enough for a high growth career.

Beyond a degree and a certificate
Dr. Pramod Kumar, President, ISB&M reminded that management education has always been shaped by the economy around it. Looking back to the 1990s, he said business schools often saw themselves as places of learning rather than career factories. “Historically, management education was looked upon as one more education. You learn, you study,” he said, recalling an old debate he had heard at XLRI: “Are we an educational institution or are we a placement bazaar?” The answer, in Kumar’s view, changed as India’s economy opened up and private enterprise expanded.

By the time he launched ISB&M in 2000, he had already concluded that management education needed to become something more focused and applied. “This is not another degree and the certificate; it’s a professional education,” Kumar said. “A professional education must blend two important things: one is theory, knowledge, and insights. But all ideas need to be executed. A good idea that cannot be put in action cannot be a business,” he added.

Reinventing management education
That distinction between knowledge and execution ran through the entire discussion. Rajesh Padmanabhan, CEO, Talavvy Business Catalysts, drawing from years of hiring and workplace experience, argued that the old pipeline from education to career has been replaced by a far less linear process. “What used to be conventionally a four-step track called education, leading to jobs, leading to growth, leading to leadership,” he said, explaining that this was the conventional track for five decades. Today, Padmanabhan said, the real track is “learning, experimentation, reinventing, and then growth.”

He laid out what industry now values. “First and foremost, real business problem, not simulated keyboard business simulation,” he said, stressing that students must be present in actual business situations, rather than only training on screens. He pushed the point further by treating failure as part of competence. “If you build something, fantastic. Don’t worry about failure,” Padmanabhan said. “If you fail, so be it because you’re walking up this repeated chain again and again, and it’s recognised and it has a premium and a value in the industry if you fail,” he explained. For him, that willingness to test, break, learn, and restart is not a weakness but a marker of readiness.

The mindset shift
Kumar picked up that thread when he spoke about mindset. Students, he noted, arrive at business school from very different backgrounds, and that diversity matters. “They come from 300 different homes. They come from more than 100 locations. They have their own upbringing, they have their own conditioning, they have their own value system, they have their own mindset,” he said. Yet the workplace increasingly expects a common set of behavioural capacities. Citing global training trends, he pointed out that “almost 65% of it gets spent on behavioural training.” The implication was clear: a business education cannot focus only on domain knowledge. It must also shape how students behave, respond, and lead.

That idea surfaced again when the discussion turned to a subtle but telling student attitude. Kumar said one of the things he has been seeing in recent years is “a mindset that I want to do marketing, but I don’t want to do sales.” That, he argued, reflects a misunderstanding of what business actually is. “Can you really say, I do business and not sales?” he asked. In his view, students need to move beyond narrow identity labels and towards a broader business orientation. “To belong to where you want to go,” he said. “There should be a value system transformation. The value system, social habits, the objective towards life, and your approach to everything you do must change,” he added.

Padmanabhan was equally eloquent about what the market no longer rewards. There is, he said, no room for old assumptions about hierarchy, entitlement or status. “I think the first one is hierarchy,” he said. “Having a mindset that I’m going to manage people, I’m going to manage teams. No one likes to be managed. Come out of that mindset,” he explained. He also dismissed workplace fantasies built around status symbols: “There is nothing like corner offices, you know, splurging and splashing lifestyle.” The modern workforce, he argued, is inclusive by necessity, and anyone who resists that reality will struggle. “If the entire aspect of the value systems and the inclusion part of it needs to be in,” he said. “Even if you have the slightest iota of any kind of difference or non-acceptance of inclusion or a diversity, I think it’s a clear no, no,” Padmanabhan added.

The changing geography of opportunity
The conversation dived into the changing geography of opportunity. With jobs spreading beyond metros into Tier-II and Tier-III cities, White asked how institutions can prepare students for both global and local paths. Kumar answered with a story meant to widen the imagination of students from smaller towns. In 2006, he said, a young woman from a very small town joined ISB&M’s PGDM programme. Today, Kumar noted: “She’s a senior director at Walmart Technology in Washington DC.” Before that, she worked at Amazon across Europe and later in Washington in an HR role. For him, the lesson was not just about mobility but transformation. “Your history is behind, your future is ahead,” Kumar said. “You must belong to where you want to go,” he added.

AI and the MBA vision ahead
That readiness, both speakers agreed, now includes technology as a baseline skill rather than a specialist add-on, with Kumar pointing out that he had long treated technology as part of basic professional literacy. “Even in 2000 I knew you had to look at technology skills, like communication skills,” he said. He recalled that ISB&M had a course on artificial intelligence (AI) as early as 2000, when AI was still “a concept.” Today, he said, it is something “every educated, literate person should have.” But he also cautioned that the use of technology must be intelligent and grounded in business thinking.

Padmanabhan agreed, adding that the right response to automation is not fear but integration. “You need to have a tech orientation,” he said, while also stressing judgement, empathy, and decision-making. “Intelligence is scalable. Intelligence can be borrowed. Intelligence is accessible, even at a later stage, through machines and through other means,” Padmanabhan added. That makes softer capabilities even more important, not less. “Judgement, decision-making, empathy, emotional intelligence, how do you really hold the entire balance, prudence, the entire aspect of handling complexity, ambiguity,” these, Padmanabhan suggested, are the qualities that distinguish the merely-trained from the genuinely-prepared.

The practical bridge between campus and workplace, according to Padmanabhan, lies in stronger industry-academia collaboration. “Internships of high quality are very essential,” he said, because that is where students get “the entire business readiness.” He also called for more case-based learning, greater exposure to tech trade fairs, and closer collaboration on AI toolkits. Most importantly, he urged students to seek mentors beyond their immediate circles. “The students who really dare to connect with senior mentors and senior industry leaders, they’re happy to do it,” he said. “It can’t be just networking for the purpose of networking. There needs to be a collaborative value that comes in,” Padmanabhan added.

Both experts agreed that while grades and entrance scores may still open the door, as Padmanabhan said, but after that, “it’s pure performance, pure business impact that you create.”

Kumar framed the same idea in more personal terms: students need to become “all-weather” people who can handle uncertainty, learn from experience, and keep moving. “You need to have a doer’s mindset,” he said. “Your knowledge, your insights, your imagination, your vision, all of these give you the ability to visualise the future,” he added.

Taken together, the experts argued that the modern MBA or PGDM is no longer just a credential. It is a process of learning to think, act, and adapt in a world where career growth depends less on linear progression and more on reinvention. As White’s opening premise suggested, placements alone are no longer enough. The missing link is not just a better degree, but a better-ready graduate.