Field Sales Experience for Becoming Business Leaders

This is a guest post by Ravi Balgi who works at Larsen and Toubro Ltd and is interested in entrepreneurship,enterprising education, grassroot economies and rural empowerment. He writes about the concept of "Mandi" at NITIE.

Dr T Prasad is known as Mandi professor, who pioneered the concept of Mandi at NITIE as action learning pedagogy for MBA curriculum. Dr. Prasad believes that Mandi can be pedagogy for teaching any kind of subjects for graduate and post graduate students. This project is being funded by DST GOI so as to improve the pedagogies for entrepreneurship education.

Mr J N Ghosh is particularly known for designing and conducting some special programs like a. Train the Trainers, Managing change, Creative proactive work ethos and effective managers.

Dr Sudheer Dhume is associate professor @ NITIE, having an industry experience entered academics teaches various marketing related subjects at MBA level. He believes in ‘Action Learning’ and ‘Learning by Doing’ pedagogy in Business Education.

Dr Dhume has received the prestigious BOLT (Broad Outlook Learner Teacher) Award 2007 from the then President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.

Mandi started in a small way@ NITIE Mumbai. During the last six years, at least 3000 students from NITIE were trained Mandi way. Mandi has been taken to many other management colleges and the reception has been very over whelming.

What is Mandi?

Mandi involves - selling educational toys with a purpose to learn Management lessons. Mandi method is developed on the Principle of ‘Learning by Doing’ which focuses equal stress on ‘Knowing and Doing’. It should always be remembered that irrespective of mock drills and real world simulation, practical world experience has no parallel. Mandi complements the classroom teaching with the practical experience available in the real world.

The program goes to incorporate the field experience with the management curriculum, thus bringing out a synergy between the things learnt in the classrooms and things practiced on the field.

This helps in learning better as we have observed and makes the individuals more enterprising.

The students have to go through the experience and document them in a format that is prescribed within the Mandi curriculum. The students are graded on this document which narrates their learning and experiences and also acts as a feedback for improving the program as per changing needs.

The Mandi program can be customized as per any curriculum needs and we have the proof of concept in the form of over 600 experiences documented here.

More information about Mandi can be found here.