‘Corporate life is one long road, don’t be in a hurry’

Charath Narasimhan, CEO of menswear brand Indian Terrain, believes corporate life is one long road and his advice to young MBAs is: “Don’t be in a hurry; you are passing out in your mid-’20s and you have 30 years of your working life ahead of you. Learn as much as you can, and cultivate relationships, they will hold you in good stead.”

Click hypertext to view a video of Charath Narasimhan looking back on his MBA . Narasimhan, a chemical engineer from IIT Madras and an MBA from IIM Lucknow’s, batch of 1996, says dealing with people is what corporate life is going to be all about, and an MBA doesn’t and cannot teach you that. “B-schools can’t teach you how to deal with people, you learn that only on the ground. You can, perhaps, get a fair idea through the framework offered in an organisational behaviour class, but you will truly learn all about relationships only once you’re on the job. We can only tell young people to be prepared for what they will face when they go into the corporate world,” he explains.

The MBA programme, he says, helps students by providing them a framework of what corporate life is all about as it gives a rounded holistic view of what they will be eventually getting into.

Contemporary case studies

Narasimhan says that he did his MBA at a time when there was no tech world, no internet, FB or Google and in 20 years things have changed so much that all this (social media) is now built into an MBA programme on offer today. “Perhaps, we could have had a little more emphasis on contemporary case studies of that time during our MBA,” he says.

To read more from the My MBA Lessons section, click here .