MBA – The Epilogue

So my course at IIM Lucknow ended.. and this post is just about some jottings on that.

There is very little cynicism in these posts as far as i can see (which means obvly the discerning reader may see a lot more). It is not a case of sour grapes.. i did taste one or two grapes in my tenure and they were sweet. Neither is it about a holier-than-thou thing as i myself am party to a lot of these things and they were all my learnings which clearly shows that it was me who made most mistakes in the first place. Neither is it a Us vs Them thingie .. the Us and Them tend to overlap in most cases.

So i start ..

Learning1: A business is a business. You may sell soap ,you may sell sanitory napkins, you may sell luxury car or toiletries … anything and everything can be a business. There is nothing more noble or less noble about anything. You may find a business dull and boring but there might be hundred other takers for that on campus.

Learning2: Similar thing applies to roles as well. Just because nobody on your campus opts for lets say a HR role doesn’t mean that it is more bad as compared to a Fin or Mktng or Consult role. There are takers elsewhere for the same role and perhaps they may earn a lot more than what you would earn in your less bad role. It all lies in between your ears .. no role is superior and no role is inferior. So no point in carrying a respect-my-authority kind of an image about any goddamn role

Learning3: What are very petty things in the larger scheme of things (called life! :) ) like a pre-placement offer or a membership in a campus or club can change people (and it does!!!). Sample change i noticed in many .. From being a courteous gentlemanly type to being a pompous i-am-the-king-lick-my-foot types overnight. It is a fact of life and you have to live with it. Nothing can be done about bloated egos. Not just here but elsewhere in life too. It is like what Vivekananda said about Untouchability … “Don’t-touchism is a mental disease” . Well yeah .. I agree :)

Learning4: Milton Friedman was right when he said that “the business of business is business”. That is pretty much how things run here.Ethics and CSR are just pep words and it shall remain so in the future as far as i can see it . As long as CSR is the penultimate slide of the pre placement talk presentation i.e., just before the “we work hard and we party hard” slide… i don’t see things changing ;) .

Learning5: B-School is the best celebration of the Adam Smithian doctrine of “Self Interest”. This is the best training ground for the big bad corporate world as it is called ;) .

Learning6: There was a prof here who spoke about “Power Elite” and their influence on societies. One would totally experience it. The power elite exists and it does know how to get things done for itself. The silent majority either serves the power elite indirectly or just remains silent .. true to its name. If they protest .. slowly they would be inducted into the elite and the silence shall remain. What is so special about this then.. isn’t that how the world works?

Learning7: Everyone working in the white colar corporate labour force at whatever level should be exposed to these little nuggets of MBA curriculum. The course does change your world view and makes you understand a lot of things better.

Learning8: Like the now famous “Disadvantages of an elite education” article says .. there are many many pitfalls of an elite education and most people i know of (including me) are party to it. Perhaps some unlearning is in queue next!

Learning9: Like a prof once said in the class .. “Money money money.. brighter than sunshine.. sweeter than honey”. No better place to learn this than a B-school. All ideals in 7 out of 10 cases are shallow. Scratch the surface and somewhere the “M” word shall crop up. Again.. isn’t that how the world runs? Perhaps!

Learning10: You can learn a lot more from the people around you than from some dated academic textbook. Institutions like these are what they are because of the people and i did meet some awesome people and i shall carry those memories for the rest of my life.

The biggest benefit of them all: It offers you immense time to introspect about yourself. My world view has changed in its entireity. My faith on a lot of things has been questioned. Perhaps i understand the rights and wrongs of a lot of things a lot better than what i would have done otherwise before.

With that i end the post.

From now on i am an MBA. What i do with that degree i do not know. Will it really make a “tangible”/”material” difference to my personal and professional life in terms of what they would have been otherwise? .. I do not know.. Yet!

All i am left with now is a sense of emptiness.

PS: Oh yeah! The rider is that … i will be an MBA only if i manage to clear my last term courses! :D