Women and work!

When an airline company's staff became law-enforcers! 17 April 2018, 8.00 a.m., Sahar Airport, Mumbai, India! I entered the airport and headed to the Ethiopian Airlines counter. [I was scheduled to fly at 11.05 a.m. IST by Ethiopian Airlines flight number ET 641 to Johannesburg; my ticket confirmation number was RXBZVY.] I stood in the queue. At 8.30 a.m., the booking clerk at the desk called, "Next." I moved forward to finish the check-in formalities. He looked at my passport and my tickets, and said, "You can't board our flight." "What?" I exclaimed. He repeated, "You can't board our flight." I was appalled and asked, "Why?" He replied, "You don't have a valid return ticket." "Come on, are you kidding me?" I politely retorted. He was thoroughly impolite and said, "You've a Kenya Airways return ticket. I can't find the confirmation of your return ticket. I therefore can't issue ...

Business ethics demand versus supply and B-schools Indian banking industry at present is in the midst of controversies. The recent high profile scandals notably PNB fraud involving the Gitanjali Group and ICICI bad loans involving Videocon, have created tremors across corporate corridors, e.g., change in leadership in both the banks. It seems business ethics is once again on the Board Room agenda, as always at the time of crisis. However, these instances of surface surfing unfortunately are far from the deeper realities. In 2012, in an article entitled: Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? Luigi G. Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, had argued that the scandals that expose corruption and deception in business were not merely the doing of isolated crooks; rather they were the result of an amoral culture that business-schools helped foster. He emphasized that the cleansing should start from B-school classrooms, which is a herculean task consideri...

In Search of the Motherly Manager: Unlocking the KADAMBINI code " All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother. " - Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President of the United States of America) " Achieving the highest possible return on human capital must be every manager's goal ." - Brian Tracy (Canadian-American motivational public speaker and self-development author) 'M' for Mother, 'M' for Manager! Mother! She conceptualizes us during her marital bliss, being unaware of who we are or will become. She bears us in our embryonic state, compromising with many of her normal ways of living. She gives birth to us, being in unbearable pain. She grooms us, sacrificing much of her comforts. She wipes our tears away, even if she's chocking inside. She attends us when we are sick and weak, spending sleepless nights. She ties our shoelaces, enduring back pain at times. She helps us in our homework, forgetting her favorite soap ope...

Apathy toward business ethics! Are we confused between the message and the messenger? “ Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do .” — Potter Stewart (Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1958 to 1981) While teaching the MBA Oath 1  (Nohria & Khurana, 2008), I mentioned Prof. Nitin Nohria, the first Asian Dean of the Harvard Business School, as one of the pioneers of teaching business ethics and discussed what MBA Oath referred, why it should be administered, and how to create ethical conduct in leaders and managers. Many of the students were not convinced. One of the reason could be the composition of the class (nearly 85-90 percent of the students have engineering background); they mostly believe that the crux of scientific causality is (traditional) positivism 2  and many aspects of ethics are based on antipositivism 3  and/or constructionism 4  paradigms. Hence, wh...

While teaching the MBA Oath (Nohria & Khurana, 2008), I mentioned Prof. Nitin Nohria, the first Asian Dean of the Harvard Business School, as one of the pioneers of teaching business ethics and discussed what MBA Oath refers to, why it should be administered, and how could create ethical conduct in leaders and managers. Many of the students were not convinced. One of the reason could be due to the composition of the class (nearly 85-90 percent of the students have engineering background); they mostly believe that the crux of scientific causality is (traditional) positivism and many aspects of ethics are based on anti-positivist and constructionism paradigms. Hence, when it comes to business ethics, most of my students are of the opinion that it does not deserve a space in the management science curricula nor in manager practitioners’ field.      In the middle of the classroom discussion, one of the students quipped, “How can he [Prof. Nohria] talk about ethics [M...

Gender equity is defined as: “fairness of treatment for women and men, according to their respective needs[, which] … may include equal treatment or treatment that is different, but which is considered equivalent in terms of rights, benefits, obligations, and opportunities” (Forbes, 2017). Gender equity has become a buzzword globally across corporate corridors to create an equitable workplace and be a socially responsible company. However, ground realities reveal that equitable workplace is excessively tilted toward men, leaving the women highly vulnerable. For example, if there is only one woman in a recruitment round, her selection chances, statistically speaking, are negligible. There are many factors behind such unfair treatment. One of them is motherhood. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, cited in the Guardian (2015), “around 54,000 new mothers are losing their jobs across Britain every year – almost twice the number identified in similar research undertaken ...