Harmony at Work

This collection of career advice for young people was gathered from our recent interviews with business leaders.

Rashmi Bansal

From Rashmi Bansal, author Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, and Founder/Editor, JAM Magazine:

I think the biggest issue I see with young people today is that they have taken this whole thing of “I’ll get into the right college” as the end of their ambition. They try very hard, and they struggle, and they get into the college of their dreams like an IIT or IIM or whatever. Or, on the other hand, they don’t get into the college of their dreams. Either way, they don’t see that that’s just the first point. That’s the steppingstone for their whole life.

Even if I get into the best college, I still have to find the way forward. I have to find something where I really am able to give my best, where I am able to achieve what I am meant to achieve in my life. Not only achieve in terms of reaching a certain designation or salary or whatever, but to really wake up every day in the morning and feel charged up to go and do what I’m doing—to feel I’m making a difference. I’m not saying all of them have to become entrepreneurs. But to really be alive, to be looking to learn and grow continuously—that, I feel, is not happening as much as it should.

If you graduate today, you have to first go through the grind. The first 3-5 years is always going to be a learning experience. Just because you are from a good college, you can’t insulate yourself from the world. If you are in marketing, you will have to go on the street and be a salesman—which is a way many companies in the past trained you. If you join Hindustan Lever, you actually go to the villages to be an assistant salesman.

Be an entrepreneur if it’s really your kick, but get 2 years of experience in the field where you want to join. Start your enterprise, or go work with a smaller company. We have IIM students who are working with small companies where they get the responsibility of becoming a CEO. Do something like that where you get overall experience.

If you are in a job then also give it your best. Don’t just go out like a robot everyday and do your bit and come back. Do more than your bit. Take the initiative, have the energy, know that you can make changes happen. Not immediately, not today, but over time, yes, there are many ways in which you can influence your company, your team, and your boss. Don’t just accept that “this is the way the world is, and this is the way it’s going to remain; I just have to take my salary cheque and go home”. Then you are not going to be happy.

When you wake up in the morning, don’t you know what you’re going to wear? Don’t you know what you’re going to eat? Haven’t you chosen someone to marry? You’ve chosen, right? You’ve made a choice. So why is it so difficult here to make a choice? You can make a choice.

You do have a feeling about what you like and what you don’t like. Sometimes you’re just not listening. You have to be able to listen to yourself. When you find your mind is focused, your energy is high, and you’re feeling interested, alive, and excited—that’s what you should be doing. It could be whatever. It could be the industry or the function. It could be the kind of company you work in, the environment you work in, anything.

You just look within yourself. You stop bothering about what other people say and the things you “should” be doing. Because it’s your life. Everybody else is a well-wisher—your parents, your friends, your teachers—but they are not going to be living that profession or doing that work for the next 30-40 years of their lives. If you have to go against them, you go against them. I think they gradually come around. Because if you’re doing something you love and you’re passionate about, you will make a success of it. And then they’ll say, “yes, we all knew that you had the potential.”

Lloyd Mathias

From Lloyd Mathias, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata Teleservices:

In the first 4-5 years I think the focus has to be on soaking in and learning. I think people should take something that gives them the opportunity to travel, to go into the interiors, to actually spend a lot of consumer face time. Everything else that you build up over your career has to be about really interacting with the front end, with the consumers, with the feet on street, the sales people who are actually in touch with the retailers, and the times you spend with the retailers and distributors. No matter what function you come from—even if you want to make a long time career in consulting—I still think that getting a sense of what the real issues are always helps. Then hopefully all of your 30’s and thereafter can build off real scenarios.

Also, I think the first 4-5 years should focus on learning to run even the smallest element of the business firsthand—whether you are managing a small sales territory or one single account. How do you understand the business literally from your consumer out? See it his way. That gives you a much better understanding of the business, as opposed to getting into a lot of office space stuff, which is what early job seekers—myself included—strive for. Try to get something in a brand, in a product role, and realize that opportunity will come. But the better your grounding in the real world in your first 4-5 years, the better for you.

Sandeep Bhushan

From Sandeep Bhushan, Chief Operating Officer, Mint:

I think there is consensus now that the worst is behind us. I think recruitment is back—not to previously planned levels—but there is opportunity. So, the picture is not gloomy.

In India the supply of good quality students was way lower than the demand. Now the demand has cooled off just a bit, and the supply has increased over the last 4-5 years with lots of structures to get out more and more professionally qualified kids. So, I think there’s been a little bit more of a sensible equilibrium that has come to the market.

So, for somebody graduating now: Life will be much better next year than if you graduated in the last 9 months, because companies are going to come back. However, now there are far greater rational expectations from both sides on what the roles and expectations are. I think in the short term some people may not be able to find the perfect jobs because of the situation.

For example, there was a young lady who had graduated in the worst phase last mid-year. She wanted to do marketing for consumer goods. There were absolutely no openings in consumer goods. There were many companies that had taken this opportunity to just clean out. Whether it affected the bottom-line or not, they just said, “this is a good opportunity to get rational” – and I think that’s a good thing. We should just be rational about cost structures. So when her choice was to work with an NGO , my advice to the lady was go and work with an NGO. I said, “choose the NGO which exposes you to consumers in any way.”

About 70-80% of consumer goods in India are bought by people with salary levels you and I don’t even know or don’t meet. So, I said, use that experience to work with these groups of people to understand what they’re really doing—whether you work in a self-help group or in a rural organization that’s working with people in education or health. For consumer goods industries, understanding rural and bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers is a critical differentiation going forward. So when you come back to consumer goods, you have spent your time learning that skill. You have not learned the functional skills of the consumer goods company: how to create a great brand or how to create a great sales strategy. But you have learned this. And that’s a complementarity they will absorb you with.

Suppose you’re an MBA and you want to work in finance. The finance industry is not in the best ever shape. But there are a million companies having small treasury operations, because every small company handles cash. So you could be the big guy in a small company working with just a 2-member team but actually dealing with sellers of cash-management products. So you’ll be pitching, “hey Citibank, hey HSBC, hey State Bank, come and tell us what you can do for us.” You are building that learning. Remember that in a small company you are at the edge, meaning you’re actually having a customer/vendor interface, which is where you learn really—not on the inside. Make those skills. Three years later when again in India supply will be lower than demand, you’ll be alright.

So, it’s just about realigning your expectations of short-term rewards but not your expectations of short-term learning. In India all of us want to find jobs by age 21 because we don’t want to take breaks. But in a 30+ yearlong career, you’ll be okay.

            What are these?

Tags: business, career advice, graduation, IIM-A, introspection, mba

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under career, interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.