My MBA from IIM-A has certainly helped me in several ways, not just in my brief corporate career but also in my entrepreneurial life.
Key learnings from my MBA
How to think better, how to look at any issue in a holistic manner, the importance of people, process and purpose in order to deal and decide more effectively. Above all, the need to constantly learn and challenge oneself so as to continuously grow as an individual.
If I had to re-visit my MBA
What inputs I would liked to have had is in improving key soft skills like negotiation, cross-cultural understanding, ethics and justice plus ‘hard’ doing skills like coding, new languages.
The key ingredients for my success as an entrepreneur
Just showing up every day, maintaining a certain equilibrium at the best of times and the worst of times, not ducking tough situations and people, willingness to learn and adapt plus take certain gut-wrenching decisions, and finally, take what I do seriously but not myself so seriously.
My best and worst moments
Best: Being part of one of India’s pioneering KPOs and at the vanguard of India’s fledgling dot com/e-commerce movement in the early 2000s.
Worst: Dispute with partners and parting ways; inability to maintain a certain work-life balance at certain junctures.
My advice to young MBAs joining the corporate sector
Like Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education,” I would urge everyone to treat the MBA as but one step (however important it may be) in the journey of life and to be a lifelong learner-doer. By and large, when you do things right, the right things happen to you.
Am I happy with the way the MBA is structured / taught today?
There are as many flavours of the MBA as there are ice creams today. So in short, there is quite some reworking and rejigging to be done in the vast majority of courses, which are theory heavy and have a project/ practice element which is more of a checklist item.
What I would advise young MBAs to read
A wide range of stuff — fiction and non fiction — and not just stick to books on business, management and money. More you are exposed to new learnings and live in a spirit of enquiry, the more you keep your mind alive and open to new possibilities