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December 19, 2005
The MBAs and the IIMs I met in my life – Part 1!
I always had high regards for the MBAs from normal Business schools and also from God’s own institutions like that of IIMs A, B, C, & D until I met few of them during my Corporate life. There are both pluses and minuses in them. The pluses are – they are damn good at dressing up (usually would wear branded clothes and shoes), they carry themselves really well (with an attitude that is), they have excellent communication skills (you will never know when you are taken for a ride), they are impressive at promising huge targets (which are never met logically), they don’t have stage fears (they lie the way they want) and they are very good at presentation skills (Microsoft power point to be precise). And the minuses are, rather I would say they have only one minus point – most of them have huge butts as they carry their brains there!
Three IIMites quit their high paying job from Procter & Gamble to try their luck as entrepreneurs. They had VC funding in place and also an idea during the dot com boom. The idea was not original, but was inspired as Anu Malik always says after lifting music notes from the Western script as it is. They wanted to create a community of people who would comment on various services and products they have used in their lives. (The original site is http://www.epinions.com , which still exists). And they wanted me to join them as an Editor. The interview went off well, the pay pack was decided, and the offer was made.
One evening in a casual meeting one of the guys asked me, “Kennedi, tell me one thing honestly. Where do you think our site will be in the next 1 year.” And I honestly replied, “nowhere. It will be closed in one year.” (Remember this was told even before the dot com had started the boom) He was completely upset with my answer, and later took all the possible steps to block me joining his new dream project – and he succeeded. I never joined them, and neither did the dot com survive for a year. (Not only this, most dot coms went for a bust during that period in spite of Most Management Gurus taking up the VC funding. This was for a simple reason that all of them lacked one basic thing known as Common Sense, which Philip Kotler forgot to provide with his book).
I knew three MBAs who joined Indian Express Online Media (http://www.expressindia.com) to bring revenues to the enterprise. The very first step towards profitability was a loss. The salaries they took home were much more than the amount the company could hope in the next couple of years as profits. These three used up all the money they were allocated in Express, went to the US, got another VC and started off with their own company called India.com (even this didn’t survive for more than a year). One of them moved to Yahoo India, made losses there and then moved on to another company…God knows where he is now. (Investing someone else’s crores of rupees and taking out profits in lakhs is not a sign of a good manager. A person who knows to generate money and to multiply it is the real manager, and I am sure 2 years of theories doesn’t teach you that. MBA degrees make you more of a ‘damager’ than a ‘manager’).
To be continued…..
Posted by Kenni at December 19, 2005 08:46 AM