Management of Change

Change is inevitable in life. One who anticipates it is better prepared to manage it effectively when it does occur than one who either complacently awaits the future or is so exclusively preoccupied with the present as to be oblivious of what is to come.

The Programme at the Institute aims at preparing its participants to face the world of jobs at a particular level of responsibility. While all the courses you have taken so far in the programme, hopefully, gave you the knowledge and skills required for your worklife, they could not for various valid reasons prepare you for a specific job. That would have unduly restricted your education. At the end of the programme, however, it is appropriate for you to spend some time thinking seriously about the particular kind of job you want to take up; about the various demands the job (its content and context) will place on you; about the problems that are likely to arise as a consequence of your joining (or rejoining) the organisation; the opportunities you can carve out for yourself; the resistance you will encounter there and about how you should cope with and manage all these. Your later success is, in very subtle ways, shaped by your initial attitude and strategy.

Management of Change (originally christened as Coping with Organisational Realities, CORE for short) is a formal forum in which you could anticipate and plan for the career that is looming large before you. Cases of first-job experiences of people like you, along with selected readings, will be some of the instruments used for the purpose. A few alumni and executives from employer organisations will also be invited for discussions. Timely recollection and analysis of relevant experiences from your Summer Training will enhance the efficacy of these inputs.

Much of a manager's day-to-day work involves management of change. At times, the manager may need to introduce certain changes himself/herself. Successful introduction of change in an ongoing organisation requires attention to factors such as the need for change, anticipated pay-offs, potential resistance, appropriate strategy, etc. The course will devote time for discussion of these aspects.

Your formal education may very soon come to an end, but your need for learning will persist long after this education will have ended. Classroom learning will cease only to give way to another kind of learning, where the methods you've been accustomed to will prove inappropriate or elusive.

Lectures and notes of predigested knowledge, segmented subject areas (such as Finance, Marketing, OB, MOC, etc.), neatly circumscribed cases and simulated situations, scheduled learning sessions, guided analyses, CPs from peers and opportunities to offer cost-free solutions will all very soon be things of the past. The situations you'll have to face and tackle are multi-dimensional and learning will have to occur through your being in the thick of it all.

In this course, you will have a chance to identify your dominant learning style as well as try out a method of learning that will suit the complexities of real-life situations and help beat the phenomenon of obsolescence.

You are expected, during the classroom discussions of this course, to visualise the given situations in all their complexities, get involved in them, take cognizance of your emerging inner responses and examine the possible consequences of those response tendencies.

The course, as may be clear by now, is an opportunity for acquiring an anticipatory socialisation to your worklife. What you will get out of the venture, however, is dependent on how far you are in consonance with the objectives stated in the foregoing lines and on the extent of your personal involvement in the various activities of the course.

Finally, the point of evaluation! Howsoever cumbersome and unsavoury it may in fact be for the parties concerned (you and me), evaluation of sorts has been retained by the programme office as necessary. This burden will be administered as follows: