KOZHIKODE: The Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK) has launched a week-long course on ‘Managerial Perspective’ for students of postgraduate programme. The aim of programme is to enable students develop the ability to put diverse pieces of qualitative and quantitative information together, invoke the relevant knowledge and synthesise multiple perspectives. The course includes a series of simulation cases, movies and lectures.
Inaugurating the event on the campus the other day, IIMK director Prof Debashis Chatterjee said, “this course, offered for the first time by any school in the world, will challenge the industrial age
teaching and make learning more learner-centred than ever before. It challenges the tyranny of territorial thinking and development-based knowledge dissemination. IIMK will reinvent classroom democracy by making learning, rather than the learned, the real leader.”
As many as 32 faculty members of IIM Kozhikode and select invited dignitaries from top corporates including Satish Pradhan, director, HR of Tata Sons, Thulsiraj of Aravind Eye Care System, Ramesh Thomas and Nappina Sampath of Equitor Consulting and Rama Reddy of Cooperative Development Foundation are leading the perspective course.
According to Prof Anadakuttan Unnithan, Postgraduate Programme, IIMK, “managers must be trained to operate in unforgiving reality. They need opportunities to experiment, test their assumptions and learn from their mistakes to revise their unexposed mental models. This course is a ‘sandbox’ to provide the students with such an opportunity.”
Says IIMK’s Dean (Development) Prof Sanal Kumar Velayudhan, “the Managerial Perspective course was developed to suit the needs of context and bright young minds that would be motivated to learn by focusing on decision making without the shackles of functional area disciplines. The programme was designed by a team of three professors spending more than a year, followed by a larger team of faculty members testing and refining it. We then had facilitation workshops for 32 faculty members.”