MG (Ambi) Parameswaran got his B Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras (1972-77) and then graduated with an MBA from IIM Calcutta in 1979. Here he talks about the key learnings from his MBA.
How the MBA helped me in corporate life
My MBA degree helped me right through my career. So did my B Tech degree. Strangely, one of my first assignments when I joined Rediffusion Advertising in 1979 was to work on a Pune-based company’s advertising account. This happened to be Wanson, which later became Thermax.
So, while working on the corporate campaign, I got to use both my B.Tech as well as my MBA degrees. Almost as a flashback, last year, our Cogito Consulting arm worked with Forbes Marshall and again my B.Tech and MBA were both put to good use.
That aside, my MBA has been of great use to me right through my 35-year career. Right from understanding corporate strategy, marketing strategy, consumer behaviour, advertising… everything was what I learnt at IIM Calcutta. Obviously, the world around us has changed and I have tried to keep pace with this change.
The key learnings from my MBA
I think the key learning at IIM-C was that management is something that is not learnt in one day or two years. It is a lifelong journey. And the day we think we know it all, we have lost it all. I suppose that can be said of all education.
If I were to re-visit my MBA, what I would have liked to see as part of the course
At IIM-C we had great Economics, Finance, Operations and HR faculty. But our marketing faculty left a lot to be desired. Except for Prof Pradeep Kakkar and Prof Subroto Sengupta, two profs who were much loved. And, in some way, Prof Sengupta inspired me to get into advertising. The faculty line-up in IIM-C in marketing today is very different and there are some top-class academics and even adjunct professors at Joka.
The chief ingredients in my success in corporate life
I have tried to build strong teams that worked together for years on end. That has been a key ingredient of our agency’s success. In addition, we have approached each client engagement as a long-term obligation, not a quick-fix assignment. This led to us immersing in the client’s business bottom up, investing in understanding the product, the consumer, the market. And this led to long-term client engagements. Till date I call some of my clients my best friends.
What my best and worst moments have been…
I think winning an account against a tough competitive line-up is always a big high. We won Tata Motors against 13 agencies in 1998. Recently, we won the Tata Salt account against the top three agencies in the country. Equally, low moments are when we lose accounts, for whatever may be the reason.
My advice to young MBAs joining the corporate sector
I think students need to see an MBA education as the start of their ‘learning journey’ and not the end. If they don’t develop an ability to learn new skills they are doomed. So my advice to MBA students is to focus learning whatever one can on campus, make good friends who can be soul-mates through your work life and, importantly, learn to keep learning.
Can the MBA be structured differently from what it is today?
I think there is always scope for curriculum reform in the way MBA education is imparted in our country. There are well over 3,500 business schools in India. If we take out the top 100, I would suspect the quality of teaching will fall off a precipice. But there are possible solutions. I would strongly urge students and faculty to explore what is available in the free-to-air domain.
Even if every course is supplemented with three Youtube or TEDx/TED videos, we will be able to move up education a notch. Finally, students have to raise their voice if the quality of pedagogy is found wanting. The cosy relationship between faculty and students needs to be put to test.
What young MBAs should be reading
There are so many great books to read, right from the classics of Peter Drucker, Charles Handy and Alfred P Sloan to more recent books by Philip Kotler, David Aaker and Kevin Lane Keller.
In addition, there are numerous wonderful Indian books that can act as a supplement; books by R Gopalakrishnan, Arun Maira, Rama Bijapurkar and Gurcharan Das should be compulsory reading.
For those students wanting to explore interesting topics related to marketing and leadership, books by Devdutt Patnaik, Harish Bhat, Santosh Desai and Prakash Iyer are strongly recommended. My book For God’s Sake can make an interesting side-bar for a course on culture and marketing.
To read more from the My MBA Lessons section, click here .