Emerging contours of Business Education

In this short 11 minute interview with McKinsey Quarterly, Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business explains how the Business Education is shaping globally. Highlights: 

• Changing attitudes/interests of students - broadening horizons
• Need for a shift from the inter-disciplinary structure to an inter-scholastic structure
• Industry's need for humble leaders and how to create them
• Emergence of B Schools as truly global, more industry specific and a clear demarcation between the top notch schools and mediocre schools

NITIE - my alma-mater partially at least qualifies as futuristic in terms of having a deeply ingrained structure to develop humble leaders - students run the school in most dimensions and have an amazing exposure to team-work/ leadership while on campus!!

Entrepreneurial Talks - Veena Deepak's story of Vividha

Last week, I had the opportunity to hear Veena Deepak share her story of entrepreneurship at NITIE's Lakshya. Veena Deepak is the founder of Vividha - a store for the entire range of children's needs. Dancer, teacher, chef, cost accountant and a successful business woman - all describe various phases of her journey so far.

She shared with the audience her entrepreneurial life so far and the moderator Manak Singh (Executive Director, TiE Mumbai) helped bring certain insights that were particularly interesting . One important point she stressed on was 'Overcoming the hump of guilt'. Few thoughts could apply to my current disposition than this one. I'll try to present what I could assimilate from her talk.

Being anybody comes with making a few sacrifices and compromises more so when you are an entrepreneur. Much more for a woman entrepreneur. She stressed on the importance of overcoming the guilt that comes with making those sacrifices.An example she mentioned was - the guilt of not having the time to cook and take care of her kids and family.One can't feel guilty in making important choices. It is about building alternate mechanisms that work in your absence.

At the end, Manak and Veena unraveled certain aspects of the market that children in India make. A few insights into the market:

• India adds an Australia in population terms every year!!
• Parental tend to stretch beyond their means to provide for children

Any product/ service of utility to children has an enormous potential in India. Signing off, Veena dwelt on the lack of facilities to promote experiential learning to kids. Perhaps, one could build a successful business of making and running museums for children!

Eight Business Technology trends to watch : McKinsey Report

Business model innovation is as important as Technology innovation in surging ahead of competition. A recent McKinsey study identifies EIGHT Business Technology trends that can potentially transform Businesses. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity:

Managing relationships

• Distributing Co-creation: Decentralizing innovation. Eg: Like LINUX was developed. Such models to extend to the creation of physical goods as well.
• Using consumers as innovators: Eg: Like the knowledge resource Wikipedia. This model to extend to industries as diverse as Fashion and Apparel. Internet, Web 2.0 technologies to play the enablers.
• Tapping into a world of talent: Integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders. Opens up many contracting options for managers of corporate functions. New talent deployment models to emerge.
• Extracting more value from interactions: More efficient tacit interactions. Smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions—that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate.

Managing capital and assets

• Expanding the frontiers of automation: Interlink “islands of automation” and give managers and customers the ability to do new things.
• Unbundling production from delivery: Disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components. Raise utilization rate of capital and therefore RoIC. Offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to be competitive.

Leveraging information in new ways

• Putting more science into management: Getting into the skin of customers. Eg: Google's internal market for ideas. Intel's 'prediction market'. Amazon's CRM abilities.The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall.
• Making businesses from information: 'Information is wealth'. Exploit imperfections in the market forces. Eg: Real Estate market.