(Photo credit: Alexandre Normand)
Guess who’s the latest to jump onto the b-school bandwagon? None else but St Stephen’s, that super-exclusive college in Delhi University known for its arts and science degrees and the canteen. The St Stephens Institute for Management Excellence (SSIME) is not starting an MBA degree yet, but what sounds like an executive program for mid-career professionals. Reports the Hindustan Times,
“SSIMEs first offering the Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) for mid-career professionalsis likely to start in October this year with Sanjay Saigal, an alumnus and business education entrepreneur, as its director. The institute will also offer training and research in business management.”
This week, the Forbes magazine revealed that which has for long been withheld from all of us: The ten biggest lies of B-school. No seriously, I did find the following two lies quite, uh, true.
“4. If youve made it this far (to B-School), youre destined to succeed. In my B-School, there were always amazingly talented executives coming in to give talks on business and life. Theyd always compliment us on what a great school we attended and why we had our future by the tail. It made us all feel invincible destined to succeed once we set out on our various career paths. It doesnt work that way. I know B-School classmates whove failed miserably, under-achieved, gotten divorced, gotten severely depressed, etc. B-School is a great educational opportunity in life, but you still have to go out there and succeed. Nothing is given to you as a birthright.
8. You are going to be more creative and entrepreneurial after Business School than before. In my experience, B-School makes you less creative, the longer youre in it. They teach courses on entrepreneurship but its kind of an oxymoron the idea of the analysis paralysis B-School Students being entrepreneurial. You will learn a lot of tools and frameworks in B-School, but you wont learn how to start a company. You just need to start a company.”
Since it was a slow news week at b-schools and we have inadvertently stumbled upon everybody’s favorite subject (entrepreneurship), I find that it would amount to grave obstruction of knowledge on my part if I didn’t nudge you lovely folks towards a very highly voted-up answer on Quora.com to the question, “I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?”. The answer goes,
“This question gets asked a lot on Quora, but this one strikes me due to the phrasing. As someone who asked this question myself at one point, and someone who started one of the many websites specifically to address this issue, please pardon me and allow me to be blunt by translating this into engineer-speak.
“I am a creative guy with a startup idea.”
=> I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. However, I do spend a lot of time daydreaming.
“Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?”
=> Where can I find someone to do my work for me for free for a year of their life? Someone who is egotistical enough to call themselves a rockstar, yet humble enough not to want 99% of the equity?
This person does not exist.
You need to prove not only that your idea has merit, but that you can execute on the idea beyond just thinking of it.
Until you have proven both of those things to some degree, there is no place to find this person. This is not to say you should give up. It is to say, “get to work.””
We’ll get you reactions from b-schools about the effect of the latest US economic crisis on the post-MBA job market soon. But those of you who are still struggling to understand what all this debt ceiling business is about, this badly produced but highly blunt comic series might help.
Many of you have hyperventilated about SMS and Email spam from private b-schools against your consent. To avoid getting your regularly used email accounts and mobile numbers from reaching the evil hands of these schools, make it a point to register for entrance exams using a special email ID created for the purpose. If your means allow it, get a separate lifetime prepaid mobile number for exam purposes and enter that number in various forms. After the admission season is over, you can simply ignore these accounts and move on without infesting your regularly used methods of communicating with unwanted private b-school spam. There is hope on this planet.
The CAT 2011 vouchers start selling this week, starting August 17. Faking News has released a guide to cracking the CAT 2011, do read.
Happy Independence Day to everyone!