At the onset, i must say I am a voracious reader and I enjoy most books.....most!Now I have done very few book reviews and this is the first one that I'm doing online. So here goes...
To start with, I liked the title of the book, I believe it instantly connects you with what you are expecting the book to be..a gritty, candid collection of success stories of passouts from one of India's best educational institutes. It wud be unfair not to admit I wasn't impressed. Ms. Bansal gives the book a great start with a typical MBA touch..classifying the entire group of entrepreneurs into three categories!! Nostalgia, anyone?? Anyway, first few pages dealt with Mr.Bhikchandani from naukri.com who I believe must be getting a lot of business from the MBA comunity itself,given that campus placements have taken a toss. So i found the treatise quite engaging.
But the more I kept delving through the pages, three things kept disturbing me.On finishing the book, which took only half a night, I realised that the three points that kept disturbing me were in fact recurrent in every story that Ms.Bansal had to tell.
First of all, each and every entrepreneur had the same backup plan for themselves...the IIMA tag. They believed that if all else fails,they could always go back and join an MNC and rake in the moolah necessary for not just survival but also their seed capital. My point is, of the approx 2 lac students who appear for CAT every year, only a handful make it to IIMA. Does that mean the rest of us carry a bigger risk of not getting through a gr8 company even if our venture fails only because we do not carry that tag with us?
Secondly, even for those entrepreneurs whose chose to stick with their ventures, most of their emergency capital funding came from VCs who were either IIMA alumni or knew someone from the insti..either a Prof or a batchmate. So what lessons does this hold for me as an MBA from some other insti?? Also where is the entrepreneurial spirit if all you do is call up ur ppl u kno are goin to give you the funding necessary for ur venture.
Thirdly, almost all the entrepreneurs have talked about the years of struggle being the most crucial and important years of their lives. That is when they discovered their metaphorical "entrepreneurial spirit"My point is.. Is it always a crisis that makes one realise what one is capable of? Is it when you are thrown off a buliding that you may realise you can fly?? Also, one of the key elements of entrepreneurship is the constant need for innovation within your venture as the times change. But in this case, most of the changes seem reactive rather than proactive. Is this the case of the boiling frog syndrome in its crudest form?? These are some of the questions that have rattled me since I've read this book.
Don't get me wrong, it is an amazing treatise for those who will and have faced simliar situations as the ones mentioned in the book.I believe this book will be a great boost for an insti that churns out dozens of potential business leaders but very few entrepreneurs. I have the highest regard for ppl like Sharath Babu and Gaurav who chose to take their own path and are probably happier than their batchmates in the investment banking sector today.
But all said and done, the book glorifies the insti though in a very subtle manner. And for the millions of young entrepreneurs out there I believe this book could de-motivate them from starting out on their own. I quote one of my friends who after reading the book remarked, " The best result that you could possibly hope for from the book is to see fewer IIMA grads taking up jobs in MNCs and concentrating on buliding their own ventures." I sincerely hope the book does what it claims it can do and makes a difference to the lives of all IIM grads who are stuck in the wrong job.
Peace
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