He's got degrees in economics and civil engineering, played defense for U-Penn, worked for the FBI, and has definitive views on management education in the New Economy. The Wharton School's newest Dean (and Reliance Professor of Management & Private Enterprise), Patrick T. Harker, spoke to BT's R. Sukumar during a recent visit to India. Excerpts:

Q. I'm sure you get asked this question at most interviews. Do you think physical business schools will go out of business as learning on the Net picks up?

A. No. We've thought about that a lot. With Wharton Direct, we've done about seven courses on-line; and we're about to launch to a new course in conjunction with ft (Financial Times) Knowledge. So, this isn't a theoretical discussion for us. We've offered a significant number of courses over distance already. What you learn when you do that, is that technology-enabled learning-it's not just about distance; you can still do something with CD-ROM technology and other training devices-can go a long way in teaching basic skills and concepts, but it doesn't allow easily for the development of the person. Education is a mixture of analytical skill development, personal skill development, and perspective building. That perspective is not just a perspective about business but also about yourself. Business education is not just about facts and figures being pounded into one's head, but also a process of learning about oneself-particularly at the undergraduate level. But this is also true at the graduate level. It is even true of the executives who come running to us worried about how they can accelerate their career.

If you really look at education in terms of what's the most efficient way-efficient not just in terms of what's efficient for the school, but for the learner-some things are best learned via distance; some things are best learned by students themselves through technology that is enabled on their desktops, and some other things are best learned by being in a room with other human beings. So, the future of education is clearly hybrid-it's a mix of all those. The pure play-the Net alone-doesn't work.

Can you give us some examples of things that need to be learned in the classroom?

The basic skill of learning how to discuss, debate, and communicate is important because what we're trying to do in the school is creating leaders. Leaders need to have the fundamentals-they need to have the business basics-but they also need to learn how to lead. So we put our students into teams in the first year of our MBA programme and in the first year of our undergraduate programme. They'll have to live and work as a team, irrespective of how much they may hate each other. They're stuck for a year. In the economy that we are in, nobody can know enough to do it all by himself. It's just not possible. So, people have to learn that skill: it's a learnable skill; it's a crucial skill; and probably not one of the things that can be done on the Net. We do have some team building on the Net. We have some virtual team projects, but you really need a mix of the two.

Do leaders need to have different skills now? Do New Age leaders have to be very different from old economy ones? And does that mean the curriculum in schools needs to change?

You need new skills. And you need to revisit some old skills. Take marketing. The old concepts of how you market are being turned on their head completely. Operations and supply chain management have been radically transformed. So, are the business schools transforming? Sure, because business is transforming. Some of it is not about new skills per se, but really about rethinking the core disciplines of the business-the core functions of the business. At the same time, there are a couple of new skills that are necessary. One is on how to lead with teams that come and go, and to manage employees who are, to use an American phrase, footloose and fancy-free. The idea that someone will come and work for you for the rest of their lives is gone. The idea that someone will be loyal because it's good to be loyal is gone. You, as a leader, can't give orders any more: you have to lead by creating an organisation that allows people to be creative. That's very different from the old command and control type of leadership. Do this, or you're fired! Today, lot of employees are telling the employer: ''Give me this, or I'll quit.'' So, leaders have to learn how to manage very differently.

Related to that, they have to learn to manage an environment that's very uncertain, very fast moving. There's been a quantum change in the speed with which business is moving, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. One of the core skills we're trying to teach is how to make decisions effectively and quickly. Think about most organisations. They are terrible decision-makers. They take forever to make a decision.

If you look at most business schools as old as yours, they were set up mainly to cater to the managerial requirements of large companies. But increasingly lots of MBAs graduate and jump into entrepreneurship. Is this good or bad?

I don't know whether it's good or bad. It just is. One could argue that it is good. We're producing people who go out and generate new wealth-creating enterprises that the e