Corporate Masters or Corporate Servants

B-Schools in India confer a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM). What exactly are the students trying to gain through these programmes and what is the objective of a student in taking up such courses?

Business Schools are the centres of excellence where the leaders of tomorrow are trained. One trend which is however common amongst students is that most of them come to Business Schools looking at the jobs they will get. It’s all about placement for this set of people. Upon interacting and talking to many students (including those who came to do an MBA only to get a good job) it is evident that there is an entrepreneurial streak and interest in many.

Given the right motivation and direction many of us would prefer to be Corporate Masters than Corporate servants. Managers (Servants) or Entrepreneurs (Masters) has been a debate which has been on for a long time. The arguments in favour of being corporate masters are:

1. Why do you want to use your brains for someone else?
2. Build your brand. If you build someone else’s brand you might get disassociated at any time and all you would be left with is years of slogging.
3. Each one has one spark in them one opportunity to do something satisfying, something exciting and we should not kill that by settling down for jobs.
4. Top Business School students are meant to be leaders of the future. What leadership and impact would you be creating as analysis’s or associates or as branch managers? Make a difference, create an organisation, and create an employment opportunity for others.
5. An entrepreneurial role enables us to put to use all the facets of our learning in a Business school.
6. Be a master of yourself and don’t enslave yourself for the rest of your life.
   All right we have asked the first question and the answer, though cryptic, is that students are interested in entrepreneurship. Then why do we see so few people getting into their own ventures from business schools?
   

There has been an increasing trend of students signing out of placements and setting up their own ventures. Historically this trend has been more prominent amongst the students in IIM Ahmadabad vis-a-vis other business schools in India. However IIM Bangalore is said to have one of the finest incubators for budding entrepreneurs and is not far behind. Entrepreneurial cells have sprung up at various B Schools to create awareness and encourage entrepreneurship.

Let us evaluate some the problems/doubts that people have in mind with respect to entrepreneurship:

1. Do I have a specific killer idea? Is my idea big enough to be successful?
2. How will I get funding for the venture?
3. What if i am not successful? I don’t have any financial backing how will I sustain?

How do we address these? There is no one stop solution, else there would be a lot of entrepreneurs by now. Primarily i believe that each person has to find that courage within them to take the first step. It’s all about the first step. However, an institute and the students therein can do a lot of things to facilitate or motivate the first step.

Let’s address each of the doubts one by one:

1) No idea is big or small. One of the biggest misconceptions is that the idea we come up with for entrepreneurship must be a big one. And that it must directly lead to multi million rupees of revenue and profits. Many successful entrepreneurs say that it’s always best to start with a small scale and then scale up. As they say, little drops of water make the mighty ocean.

What can an institute do? Have entrepreneurial courses as part of their curriculum. Remove the fear from the students through motivational lectures and by making them more open to the whole idea. An incubation cell can also help in this regard as it would help people test their ideas and develop on the same through supported research. At our institute we introduced a course on Entrepreneurship and also had a LEM Workshop by the well acclaimed Professor Sunil Handa (IIM Ahmadabad).

Another step toward dispelling the fear is to make the students familiar with start ups, their functioning mechanism, get them to interact with entrepreneurs. This is what we did at IIM Kozhikode through a start up fair where a lot of budding start up’s were invited to showcase their businesses and interact with the students. Such fairs can be taken up at various business schools and this would also increase the visibility for the start ups and provide interested students an opportunity to maybe join these ventures and take up their reins from there on.

2) The first thought that comes to budding entrepreneurs with respect to funding is venture capitalists. However, is it practical to expect and rely on VCs? The probable solution to this problem is to start small and then scale up.

This is where an association with Entrepreneurial groups would help students. An association and collaboration with organisations such as TIE, NIRMA LABS, etc. and setting up of incubation cells such as the one in IIM Bangalore could lead to arrangements of seed funding for budding entrepreneurs. The institutes can also contribute to the process. With crores and crores of spending on infrastructure and related aspects by the administrations, a segment may be set aside for funding of good project proposals through interest free loans.

3) There are some theories which suggest that the first venture of most entrepreneurs would not be a success. Entrepreneurs evolve over a period of time. Hence the fear of failure and the lack of financial support therein always crops up. This is where the support of the institute can again play a major role. Schemes such as placement holiday would play a pivotal role in giving the students a moral support.

The placement holiday system gives the student at back up of placements after a few years if the venture is not very successful. In fact the placement holiday rule introduced at IIM C enabling students to take a break from the programme at any time during the course and come back to complete the same along with placements if necessary is a path breaking initiative in this direction.

Taking the argument a bit further, being students from top business schools in the country do we need this kind of moral support? My belief is that we can get a good job at any time and hence there should be no fear of back up.

Another opportunity which can be facilitated is having organisations like TIE or NIRMA evaluate the business plans and provide counselling and advice on the approach and process. This however will only be a guidance mechanism since each entrepreneur has a different functioning model depending on their strengths and weaknesses.