Friday, December 23, 2011

“Most people are sincere”

Customer and dealer centricity in tandem have been key to the success of JK Tyre in the Indian market according to A. S. Mehta

For A. S. Mehta, a career spanning 25 years in JK Tyre has been professionally and personally fulfilling. From starting as a CA, Mehta took up additional roles in the company before becoming Marketing Director in 2007. In this interaction with amir moin, he talks about his personal and professional journey & success mantras:

What is your leadership style? What are the factors that have contributed to your success?
Since the last 25 years, I have always believed that most of the people are sincere and committed. They have the passion to succeed and aspiration to move upward. My efforts have always been to channelise their passion and their competencies to excel in their respective fields. I have followed the inspirational style of leadership rather than the hierarchy-based style. Highest degree of integrity, very focused approach for any assignment, quick decision making, easy access to members of the team, coverage of connection, process driven and systematic style of functioning have been the attributes to whatever I have done for JK Tyre.

What would you regard as the key milestones in your journey to this position?
I must say that success is a journey where the destination is not defined. It is always a moving destination because once you reach one destination you have the next destination in your mind. Hence, there have been many milestones. Keeping the sales force united and motivated was the first milestone and thereafter, there were several milestones like leadership in the truck radial market, introduction of CRM, introduction of fleet management and introduction of dealer relationship management et al.

What are the unique strategies that you have undertaken for the Indian market and what is the outlook at the moment?
We have been a prominent player in the commercial tyres, OTR and car tyres. For commercial tyres, our strategies have been two pronged; one on the customer front and the other one for channel partners. In the Indian market, the dealer is the most influencing factor and we have been very strong in our relationship with channel partners. On the consumer front, our Fleet Management and Customer Relationship Management have been the best initiatives in the tyre industry.

How do you spend your free time? Which is your favourite vacation getaway?
I am very religious person at heart and family man. Whenever I get some free time, I like reading on religion, philosophy and spend time with family and relatives at religious places. I’m also very close to my brothers, their children and even other distant relations. It has been an inner urge to do whatever I can do for them. For vacations, the best place I could think of is Udaipur.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting

IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......

IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS
Planman Technologies

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

“Security threats have grown more complex”

Pradeep Nair, Director, Software Group, IBM India/South Asia discusses the security market, client expectations and ibm’s competitive edge

Security is a big concern for business in today’s time. Which industries are the most concerned about security issues?
When we look at the Indian market, we have BFSI, telco, retail, organisations in the government space; we have a number of sectors which basically are large. Who would be concerned about security? Typically they would be organisations that need to protect their brand & reputation in the market or have a mandatory regulatory compliance requirement. So when I look at it from a prioritisation perspective, I think BFSI is one of the key adopters from a regulatory compliance perspective, or from the perspective of data protection; ensuring there is no risk of data loss, unauthorised entry or unauthorised access into their systems. A lot of organisations have adopted such solutions. The next set of customers is from the telecom base. With the kind of massive inroads into technology, giving access, going ahead and working with clients, having huge amount of customer information are areas that organisations wish to protect. You would have heard in the news about breaches that led to degradation of an organisation’s brand value. The ITeS and BPO sector are also very stringent from a security perspective. Efforts from NASSCOM and the industry have been made to ensure that once companies from outside India outsource their infrastructure and data & applications, it is maintained and operated in the most secure environment. These companies are most concerned and want to adopt the best security infrastructure. We are also working with regular enterprises that could be across manufacturing retail, healthcare and even in the SME space.

Despite innovations, security threats persist in today’s organisations. How are the threats different today, say, with respect to around a decade back?
Firstly when you look at threats, they can be in the form of worms and viruses; unauthorised access into your network infrastructure; access of privileged users to information that they are not supposed to see; when you are looking at a global mobile workforce and you open up your access to infrastructure for productivity, security gets compromised et al. The threats have only gone more complex and with the greater penetration of IT, they are growing. Worms and viruses that harm infrastructure and productivity are there today as before. IBM has a solution called endpoint security that ensures that your patch management and virus updates are in place. For external threats, there are intrusion prevention and protection systems so that the threat is mitigated. Threats haven’t changed, they are only evolving. For instance, seven to eight years back, there was no phishing like, say, sending e-mails posing as banks and asking for your details. I think those are increasing now. Around 2-3 years back, the banking system got vulnerable in the face of these attacks.

There has been a spate of recent attacks on organisations and even government infrastructure. So does that mean organisations are not really as prepared for security breaches as they look?
You are as secure as you think you are. You think you are secure and when there is an attack, you realise that you are not. IBM has brought out a security framework that is a combination of our capability around software, hardware and services – a complete framework. It has three tenets. The first is around security governance – rules and policies that organisations lay down and ensure that they are followed. There should be a security governance leader who ensures that the rules are followed and there is a right monitoring capability in the organisation. The second tenet relates to risk management. What is your approach to managing risk? What is the analysis that you are doing on the risks faced day in day out by the organization? How do you really manage current and future threats? And what is the best way to manage security exposure? For instance, how do you really correlate that the incident that happened was due to a vulnerability in the firewall or was an unauthorised access? The third tenet is compliance. Companies must ensure that the current security infrastructure meets compliance requirements and established guidelines.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting

IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......

IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM RANKED NO.1 in MAIL TODAY B-SCHOOL RANKINGS
Planman Technologies

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

JWT Meet the Icons!

Call it luck, Call it anything, but ‘Vispy’ and ‘Debu’ were destined to meet and create wonder together

One is extremely funny. The other is no less in terms of wit too. We tag them as the most effervescent duo (not literally!) of the Indian ad industry. Meet Vistasp Hodiwala (Vispy), VP & Senior CD and Debu Purkayastha, VP & CD, JWT, who believe that finding the right creative partner is 90% your luck and 10% your partner’s. Here are the iconic Lead India campaign creators!

How did you two pair up as a team?
VH: It was in 2007, when I was looking for a change after a rigorous stint at McCann Erickson. At that time, JWT had just acquired Agnello Dias and was looking for fresh talent to supplement their talented core. Aggie called me and requested me to meet Debu. I didn’t think twice.

DP: Senthil and I were a team. After he left for Bangalore, I was looking for someone to partner me. I met a few, but nothing fructified until I met Vispy. There was an instant connection as he was quite honest and spoke from his heart. Plus, he was bawa and I love bawas!

You two had struggled with your first campaign as a team. How was your experience working on that?
VH: Our first piece of work did not see the light of the day. It was for The Times of India, and it got shelved. It was like hitting the ground running because with TOI you have to be on the ball as soon as the brief is delivered. And then, there’s Aggie’s breathlessly healthy competition to contend with. However, our first proper work together which broke in the media was the incredibly awarded Lead India campaign. Needless to say, it won us the first ever Grand Prix for Indian Advertising and the First Integrated Lion at Cannes.

How was your industry experience before you two paired up successfully?
DP: I started as a Jr. Visualiser in Triton in 1992. A year later, I moved to Bangalore HTA. But soon returned to Bombay and joined Saatchi & Saatchi. Some crazy bug bit me there and I teamed up with a friend to start Digital Nirvana, a digital multimedia design studio way ahead of its time, just to call it quits soon. Then, in short stints, I worked with RK Swamy BBDO, Channel V, STAR TV, Hongkong, till 9/11 happened and I decided to come back to India. I stayed undecided for a few days trying out art direction for TVCs, direct marketing, CRM and web designing. Finally, advertising beckoned again and I walked into JWT.

VH: Materials Management, the subject I specialised in, wasn’t exactly getting my life’s juices flowing smoothly. And one fine day, when yet another corrupt supplier’s charms got too much for me to resist, I wrote out in longhand an application (nah, a plea) to the head of an agency, which was growing at a breathtaking 236%, to hire me as a trainee writer. It was 1994 and I started my advertising carrier in Percept. Then I worked with many mavericks like Murzban Shroff and Mohandas KK. Later I worked with Prasoon Joshi and Agnello Dias; two immensely successful creative directors, who couldn’t be more dissimilar in their approaches.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The true Indian! On camera!

The man shares with Amir Moin & Neha Saraiya his career journey, the past, present and future of Fujifilm India, and why he loves India considerably

Kenichi Tanaka
MD, Fujifilm India

As we step into the plush interiors of Fujifim India’s office in Gurgaon, we contemplate how our delay in reaching this MD’s office – owing to the record rainfall in Delhi NCR – would affect the quality of our discussion. Much expecting to see a miffed Japanese face as we scamper through the corridor leading up to his office, what comes next is much pleasantly surprising. Sitting comfortably in his plush office, Kenichi Tanaka’s face splits into a smile on seeing us. Even before the ceremonial introductions, he confides to us the fact that the vagaries of Delhi’s rain and traffic delays are very well known to him. It hits us then that Kenichi Tanaka, MD of Fujifilm India, is perhaps more accepting of the Indian-way of functioning, than we ourselves. Here was a true blue global citizen! That said, despite being a globetrotter, Tanaka still deeply respects Japanese culture and values; something that keeps him rooted.

Tanaka started his corporate journey in 1978, when he joined Fujifilm. 32 years onwards, and Tanaka is one of the most respected multinational leaders in Fujifilm history. The respect bestowed upon him by his colleagues and peers for expanding Fujifilm in seemingly difficult geographies, is legendary. When Fujifilm decided to set up a wholly owned subsidiary in India 2 years ago, Tanaka was the man of arms that the Fuji top brass chose. The market was replete with top of the mind recall for arch rivals Canon, Sony, Nikon and Olympus. But Tanaka had this great self belief that their products could be targeted at the mid range consumer segment. He excitingly shares, “Sony and Canon are considered as premium while Olympus and Nikon market cameras with value for money. We saw a market in between – the mid range segment – and concluded that our high quality offerings and a reasonable pricing would make for a potent combination to tap this market.”

It was tough going for the first two years. Tanaka confesses that the situation was tough as consumers were not even award of their brand. The first hurdle therefore was to make consumers aware of brand Fujifilm. Dealers and retailers were not willing to budge an inch. However, thanks to extensive investments in training and development of sales force, Fujifilm soon established its own fraternity among the dealers. “We overcame the initial challenge of establishing our products with the retailers and dealers. But still, we have the task of replicating the same with our customers. To make sure this happens, our company is in the process of conducting training sessions round the year wherein, we train our sales force to handle both the customers as well as retailers and dealers,” says Tanaka.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Monday, August 08, 2011

Makings of a great marketing escape!

Vivek Nayer hopped on to M&M after a vast experience in FMCG & consumer durables. And auto has been immensely exciting as well, as he discusses with Pawan Chabra of 4Ps B&M

Vivek Nayer
Executive Senior Vice President – Marketing (Automotive sector), Mahindra & Mahindra

It had been just a few days since the Marketing team of the automotive division at M&M was shifted to the Kandivali office at the Western Express highway from the Worli office when we landed for the interview with Vivek Nayer, Senior Vice President – Marketing (Automotive sector), M&M. However, even on a normal Wednesday afternoon, while the refreshing environment at the lush green facility was not matching with the usual scenario that one finds at the offices in the financial capital, the work was going in full flow.

Prior to this assignment, he was working with Reckitt Benckiser back in the UK, certainly one of the best names in the FMCG business. The decision to relocate to India was because of the India growth story. In fact, Nayer still misses his BMW 5-Series and the kind of Lebanese food he used to relish in London. He didn’t come into the automotive sector by design. The first offer that came to him was from M&M and he joined the company in 2005 to give it a shot for six months but comments, “Here I am five years hence, which clearly means that I am enjoying it a lot.” The kind of portfolio that Mahindra has is quite unique even compared to other players in the industry. However, he feels that the marketing foundations to engage with consumers remain largely the same.

Words like tough, rugged and solid are almost synonymous to the Scorpio, Xylo and Bolero models that Mahindra offers to Indian consumers. And that’s not all. The marketing philosophy that M&M follows in terms of advertising and positioning its brands is very different to what the rest of the industry follows. Be it the recent commercial featuring the ace photographer Atul Kasbekar for Xylo or the earlier campaigns, it has often followed the road less taken. “At Mahindra, we focus on the product and its positioning rather than the brand ambassador; unlike the case where the consumer has a recalls for the brand ambassador but not the products that he endorses,” avers Nayer. In fact, Nayer considers the success of Xylo without any cannibalisation in the Mahindra portfolio as one of the major successes that he has had so far in his M&M stint.

Nayer stepped into the corporate world after finishing his Master in Management Studies from the University of Mumbai back in 1987. After six years at Voltas, Nayer stepped into Reckitt’s premises in 1993 and was there for over a decade handling different brands and divisions. “But I was one of the lucky ones to handle Dettol in Reckitt,” recalls Nayer. He admits, “FMCG is one sector where one gets a clear understanding of marketing and sales concepts. Perhaps that’s why you see people with marketing and sales background in FMCG moving to the other sectors and not the other way round.”

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

May the force be with Indian fashion!

He’s responsible for taking Indian fashion to the global ramp. Sumeet plans to take the Indian fashion fraternity to the next level, as he reveals to Angshuman Paul

Sumeet Nair
MD, Incube Fashion

Sumeet Nair belongs to that extraordinary class of people, who believe in creating a different path and in trying something new. So it’s not surprising that, this alumnus of Stanford University started his corporate endeavor with the furnishing business and later forayed the fashion fraternity. Christened as Black Eye Design, his first venture of furnishing business won him leading global fashion clients like Donna Karen, Calvin Klein and French Connection. But Sumeet’s claim to fame comes from somewhere else – while undertaking his business, Sumeet actively became involved in the setting up of a fashion council, an endeavour that finally gave rise to the iconic Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) which gave India its first Fashion Week.

Framing the concept of the Fashion Week and giving it a global feel was not easy way back in 1997, particularly when the Indian fashion industry was at a nascent stage and very unstructured. The biggest hurdle was to bring all the designers under one roof; and managing creative people was surely not an easy task. But with his never-say-die attitude and instinctive managerial skills, Sumeet accomplished this feat and gave India its unique series of gala fashion events – firstly, the Lakme India Fashion week, and then, the Wills Lifestyle Fashion Week.

Along with changing the landscape of Indian fashion, Sumeet was also credit with making it more financially viable. When FDCI was having a financial deficit, Sumeet was automatically appointed as the ‘doctor’, and more often than not, he would resolve it effectively. After leaving FDCI, Sumeet dabbled in various areas, till he set up Incube Fashion Private Ltd, an endeavour to take the fashion industry into the next level.

Incube Fashion’s basic objective is to generate more business and finance for Indian designers. As of today, Incube Fashion works as a financial consultant, provides licensing, and even assists in getting corporate brands to tie up with the country’s ace designers. Rohit Bal’s recent tie up with the Outlander Signature Collection from Mitsubushi was conceptulaised and finalized by Sumeet’s Incube Fashion. Even the Tarun Tahiliani-Timex agreement is being credited to Sumeet. As this is slated for a pre-Diwali launch, Sumeet refused to divulge any further detail to us. When we meet him now, he explains further, “I want to create a Calvin Klein and a Giorgio Armani from the Indian fashion industry and we at Incube Fashion are doing brand building at those levels.”

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM Links

IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

WILL THE CONCEPT OF MOMICS WORK? (WE SAY “YES”!)

Mobile Comics are back again. The last time they appeared, they slipped back into coma. Will this time be any different or will we witness a repeat?

If the mauling of Romans by Asterix and Obelix fascinates many, the idiosyncratic gestures of Suppandi in Tinkle or the audacious exploration of Tintin make hours on a weekend seem like minutes for the young-minded readers. But call it either a germination from the various Earth-saving movements or an intervention of the technology gods, the paper back craze is now going mobile too! Teenagers today are catching up with their favourite comic characters on their cellphones and sharing it with their friends. Welcome to the world of mobile comics; call them ‘Momics’!


So what’s this latest fad? To put it simply, it’s nothing never heard of before. Historically, Nazara (a gaming portal) first experimented with the Archie momics in 2005. The concept bombed. This time apparently is the second coming for momics, with many telecom operators, content providers, advertisers and of course comic players betting big on this medium.


Opines Rajesh Razdan, Co-founder & Director – Sales and Marketing, mCarbon (a telecom VAS provider, which also develops mobile applications and tools), “Various reports in the media value the comics market anywhere between `100 crore to `400 crore. Approximately 10 million comics are sold every year in the traditional manner. And with the digital/mobile media augmenting the personalisation and outreach in all respects, the comic book market should witness at least a 50% appreciation in market size over the next three or four years.” To this, Gaurav Luthra, Head – Content, Mogaé Digital (a mobile advertising player), adds, “With some innovations, more smartphones and 3G on the horizon, the market for momics is set to increase manifold. The market at present is estimated at about 25% of the current 600 million telecom subscribers. It’s a big audience.” Currently, many experts opine that Mogaé Digital is the largest player in this segment today, with close to over 100 titles across various genres like folklore, mythology, history, fiction et al. Some of its famous momics strips include Tenali Rama, Akbar Birbal and Bal Hanuman.


Typically, the momics category has three entities in its ecosystem:


(a) Content Providers, that range from established print comic book publishers like Diamond comics, Raj comics et al to TV channels like Cartoon Network to independent content providers like Mogae Digital, ZealCity et al. They create the content which then is distributed by the telecom operators directly or through the portals of Mobile VAS players;

(b) Mobile VAS Players/Technology providers (like Rediff, mCarbon et al), that act as aggregators for content. Users access the portals of these VAS players and then subscribe to the content which is delivered through the telecom operators or companies like ZeroSum, which act as application providers to the telecom operators;


(c) Telecom operators (Airtel, Vodafone, Tata DoCoMo et al), who have billing relations with the users. The users can subscribe to momics directly through a telecom operator or through a mobile VAS provider’s portal.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM B-School
Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri
Planman Consulting

IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Monday, June 13, 2011

Shahid Balwa wants to appear before JPC

Shahid Balwa, promoter of Swan Telecom who is in jailed in connection with the 2G case, wants to depose before the Joint Parliamentary Committee probing the spectrum scam. Balwa has written to JPC chairman P C Chacko saying that the parliamentary panel should hear him, according to his counsel Vijay Agarwal.

The response of the JPC chairman will be interesting to watch because of the fallout that Balwa's testimony can have for the government. Balwa, like his co-accused A Raja, has maintained that he did not engage in any illegality and that the licence and spectrum Swan Telecom got from the sacked telecom minister was in keeping with the policy of the government as a whole. In his bail application, he had refuted the allegation of quid pro quo between him and Raja saying that the policy under which he got the licence had PM Manmohan Singh's approval. Congress circles had for long been apprehensive of the possibility of Singh and his principal secretary T K A Nair getting drawn deeper into the spectrum scam quagmire. Party leaders apprehend that Raja will also defend himself by citing the correspondence with the PM, while recognizing that the letters from the PMO leave room to argue that no effort was made to stop the sacked telecom minister.

Conversely, Opposition will be looking forward to any testimony that may implicate the PM and his office, so that it can argue that the spectrum scam could not be blamed on DMK alone.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM B-School
Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri
Planman Consulting

IIPM in sync with the best of the business world.......

IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management

Saturday, January 22, 2011

B-SCHOOL SPECIAL - Where’s that killer instinct?


Without question, public and private organisations have entered an era of socio-economic globalisation. In such a global market, competitive and innovative changes are necessities to survival. the one stop solution for nations is to ensure the growth of entrepreneurship. Are B-Schools listening?


If truth be told on how globalised the Indian economy currently is – almost twenty years post liberalization – one would feel close to being ashamed. The Carnegie Endowment and A. T. Kearney study, The Globalization Index, ranks various countries of the world on a multitude of parameters, finally providing the consolidated Globalization Index (GI) ranking. In the last report that came out around two years back, India is ranked second from last. Algeria, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, Senegal, Vietnam, Morocco, Ukraine, Botswana, Tunisia, Croatia, Panama, Uganda, Chile and others are easily ranked ahead of India. India has had more or less the same rank in the previous years. So where is the mistake India is committing?

In one of our editorial researches, we found out that there was a direct correlation of this with the huge failure in India to encourage entrepreneurship. True, there have been radical leaders like Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, Narayana Murthy and some more. But then, these have only been a handful. And the blame for this failure falls to a large extent on the plethora of Indian B-schools that have existed in India teaching “management education,” yet failing to teach entrepreneurial education. The Columbia GSB report, Role For Entrepreneurship in India, shows that Indian entrepreneurs actually might be “hindering economic development,” while the US entrepreneurship system “has been quite successful” for their economic growth. The report says that entrepreneurs might be playing a “possibly negative” role in India even in Bangalore.

A shocking report of Duke University, America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, proves how wasteful Indian education has been – as Indians prefer starting companies in America than in India. The report shows that Indian immigrants, over the past 8 years in the US, have filed the “second highest” number of patent applications (more than 10,200), have started the highest number of manufacturing and innovation-related service companies (24%), the highest number of bioscience firms (10%), the highest number of software firms (34%) and much more. Compare that to India, where contribution of small and medium enterprises to the GDP is a pathetic 5%.

Evidently, there’s something critically lacking in India’s B-school education, where a majority of students are more focussed on getting jobs than on starting new companies within India. A concrete study held in 2002 at the University of Arizona found that five years after pursuing MBA, the average income of entrepreneurship majors was almost $72,000 higher than students who majored in other subject or were just standard MBAs. Not just this, entrepreneurship graduates were more likely to form new companies which had annual sales of $50 million and employed close to 200 employees.

But then, why don’t Indian B-schools teach entrepreneurship as a separate specialization, course or even as a term subject, given the fact that the more entrepreneurs a country has, the more the employability of masses increases, and the more equitable the income growth becomes (vis a vis the Gini Index)? Can MBA education not play a greater role in providing formal entrepreneurship education in India?

Anuj Guglani, founding CEO of Ace Associates (who has worked for auto majors like Honda and GM after the completion of his MBA course from IIT Delhi), says, “MBA education, particularly entrepreneurship as a subject, is very important for starting or handling a business today. It cultivates a vision and completely changes the way your thought-process operates.” Pramit Samal (an alumnus of IIPM’s programme in Planning and Entrepreneurship), who is the founder Director, Glocal Trading (P) Ltd, comments, “Wide-ranging areas that form an entrepreneurship programme could help individuals beat the odds & grow their business which in turn drives the economy. Being an aspiring entrepreneur myself and having interacted with many more like me, I can confidently say that the subject matters a lot when it comes to the real life.” Paresh Rajde, Founder MD & CEO, Suvidhaa Infoserve provides a deeper analysis, “Entrepreneurship is not just about teaching business and management skills. It involves teaching techniques and approaches for identifying, creating, and evaluating opportunities...”

In fact, Indian B-schools should take a lesson from their global counterparts. Babson College, a B-school based in Massachusetts, has been ranked the best amongst all global B-schools focused on entrepreneurial programmes. The college has been ranked by the Entrepreneur magazine and The Princeton Review as being the best for both its graduate and undergraduate programmes. Their secret? All students majoring in entrepreneurship undergo a trial by fire. Divided into 30 teams, the students are required to launch, run and dissolve a business – all within nine months. Does any Indian B-school have the wherewithal to undertake such an exercise? They possibly cannot, and more because of funding issues. The government has no structured B-school entrepreneurship projects funding mechanism. That leaves B-schools with the option of getting private equity funding for student projects. In one line, India dismally lacks such entrepreneurial funding.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM makes business education truly global
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm - Planman Consulting
Arindam Chaudhuri (IIPM Dean) – ‘Every human being is a diamond’
Arindam Chaudhuri – Everything is not in our hands
Planman Technologies – IT Solutions at your finger tips
Planman Consulting
Arindam Chaudhuri's Portfolio - he is at his candid best by Society Magazine

IIPM ranked No 1 B-School in India
domain-b.com : IIPM ranked ahead of IIMs
IIPM: Management Education India
Prof. Rajita Chaudhuri's Website

IIPM B-School
Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri
Planman Consulting