IIM Ahmedabad’s flagship symposium, The Red Brick Summit (TRBS), concluded on October 2. The day began with the 4K marathon run, which saw participation from not just the IIM-A community but also people visiting the campus. The four-day extravaganza ended with the flagship event of TRBS, the Motilal Oswal Think Equity Think QGLP contest, which declared the team from IIM-A as winners.
Finalists from all over India, notably IIM Bangalore, IIM Kozhikode and NMIMS, Mumbai had come to participate in the biggest stock pitch event in India. The last day of the management festival ended with a slew of amazing workshops such as UberEats’ Operations Management, Tata Trusts’ building social enterprises, Studio carbon’s design thinking and building sustainable organisations, and enthralling speaker sessions. The entire team of TRBS worked incredibly hard to make the second edition a huge success.
Speaker sessions
Sangeeta Talwar, manager of iconic brands and campaigns such as Maggi and Tata Tea’s Jaago Re, spoke about learnings from her corporate life in a session moderated by IIM-A’s Prof Arvind Sahay. She highlighted the importance of knowing why a certain brand succeeds. This, in her opinion, prevents a blind replication of success stories to incompatible businesses. She also highlighted the importance of drawing one’s own inferences from market research, and using data as an illuminator instead of a support. She spoke about her idea of the ‘flyvision’ leadership strategy, as discussed in her book, The Two-Minute Revolution: The Art Of Growing Businesses .
Social entrepreneur and founder of the NGO Goonj, Anshu Gupta, conducted a talk on rural development and sustainable social entrepreneurship. He spoke about the deplorable state of the farmers in our country and gave startling statistics on the rate of farmer suicides. Speaking about the high dropout rate from government schools in socio-economically backward regions, he said that one of the reasons for this could be that the students are unable to see the blackboard and simply can’t afford a pair of spectacles. He ended the talk by saying that one doesn’t need to enter social entrepreneurship to do good and there is ample opportunity in any career to make a difference.
Medha Patkar, a social activist working on various crucial political and economic issues faced by the marginalised community, engaged a packed classroom in an interactive session. She addressed various concerns around the social movements she has been a part of and the impact her team has created. In her words, “Development is not limited to activities driven by money and the negative impact of development should be analysed with greater severity.”
Biswapati Sarkar, co-founder of The Viral Fever, reminisced about his days at IIT Kharagpur, where he was hugely involved in dramatics. When his sketch of a Roadies spoof went viral, he knew he enjoyed being a writer. He believes his delusion about becoming a famous writer eventually pushed him into taking up a risky profession and eventually making an impact in it. When asked whether we would see him sharing the same platform with Arnab Goswami, whose impression Sarkar does flawlessly, he said we can expect something similar soon. He addressed the queries of struggling content-writers explaining that the shelf life of a content is very small and it is truly challenging to stand out among the huge pool of good content available now.
Workshops
The workshop by Tata Trusts discussed their work, in particular the one by Social Alpha, which focussed on supporting social innovations and early stage social enterprises. The speakers talked about the spectrum of socially-focused entities and how the very definition of a social enterprise is so broad. By discussing examples of enterprises being incubated by Social Alpha, the speakers sought to encourage participants to look at the space as adding value to the society — something fundamental in the ethos of the Tata Group.
UberEats hosted an operations management workshop where they discussed how they ensure the timely delivery of the orders placed. The speaker also focussed on the expectations of various stakeholders — eater, delivery partner and restaurant — and how to incorporate them to create a successful delivery management platform.