Debi S. Saini

• M.Com., LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D., GPHR
• Professor at Formerly Professor of HRM Management Development Institute

During the last some years, artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting most areas of management, including the different functions of the management of the human resource. Which aspects of HRM, you think, are being affected the most in this regard and through what interventions?

What is your experience about a more effective aid to teaching university students. Some people believe that PPTs help promote focus and coherence of thoughts of the teacher, others feel that the use of blackboard draws better attention of the audience. Of course, we presume that other things are the same in both cases e.g.competence of the teacher/facilitator, relevance of the contents, infrastructure, and motivation level of the students, etc.

Teaching in university is not training, but expanding the intellectual horizons, ability to think & cross fertilize, and imparting education to mature scholarly minds. Only few teachers at the university level can attain the status of a great educator. What skills and abilities should a person possess and focus on so as to be a great university teacher?

As guest of honour in an alumni meeting of a business school I was invited to give a speech of about 15 minutes. It was organized in the large room of a hotel. There were about 150 alumnus/students in the room. While those in front were keenly listening, many of those at the back were interacting with old classmates whom they might have met after a long time. Some were even standing and talking. I am mostly uncomfortable in such an environment. I did not know whether to stop speaking by way of protest or continue speaking. There was another speaker who face a more severe problem than me in this regard. I am sure, those sitting in the front rows were enjoying as I could observe from their body language and interaction with some after the speech. Somehow, I kept speaking for about 15 minutes. When I told the organizers that it was their duty to make the audience behave in a disciplined way, they said that alumni does like to be so told so as we tried to do that in the past, and they say that they come there for networking with batch mates. I was wondering what are the options to the speaker in such a situation!

Often, a teacher wants to deliver rigorous content intertwining various research perspectives in it, but especially management students are more interested in being trained in "how-to" skills. The latter approach often undermines the causality linkage and strong clarity about conceptualization of realities and issues involved. It also undermines intertwining research in teaching. Trainers often do not link to the causality, thus leading largely to only perfunctory learning. But management students find the training approach easier and prefer teachers (often professors of practice from industry) who adopt that approach.What are your views on this issue.

Human relations school of management emerged consequent to Elton Mayo's experiments in early 1930s, which challenged the scientific management school of F. W Taylor. The human resource management approach to management is a post-globalization development. How similar or how different are the two?

Both terms appear very similar. How do they differ?