The Great B-school Ranking
Tamasha: What Went Wrong!
Page - 2
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...
