Two days ago, on 11th January 2017, I was invited by my MBA institute, BIMTECH (Birla Institute of Management Technology) to moderate a panel discussion/debate on the topic, "MBAs are creating Professional Slaves rather than Entrepreneurs". The panelists were divided into 4 teams - 2 for and 2 against the motion - comprising 1 faculty and 1 student each. It was a brilliant debate and I loved listening to and interacting with the young minds as well as experienced professors. Thought I'd share my own views on the same topic, and so here I go...
How many of you have played Monopoly? Which are the most valuable properties? Don’t bother answering it… Mayfair & Park Lane; everyone knows that. Which are the least valued properties? Anybody knows that?
Old Kent Road, followed by Whitechapel Road. At £ 60/- each, both of them cost just 15% of Mayfair. And so, they are properties where you can easily build hotels at a very low cost and start getting more rent than Mayfair without a hotel, at a fraction of the basic cost of Mayfair. I have often beaten people owning both Mayfair and Park Lane with a portfolio boasting of Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road and their likes. There are some safe bets too in Monopoly – the utility companies, the railway stations; but then only my grandmother played for safety in Monopoly. The young turks always ditched safety for a dream to build an empire. And that’s what I love about the game – despite the throw of the dice, you drive your own destiny and fortune definitely favours the brave.
As a player, as a banker, as an uninvolved watcher-on, we all love Monopoly. You know why we all love it? Because it allows us to dream big and become super successful. It indeed reflects entrepreneurship – if you take big risks and are willing to play the slow, waiting game without being too selfish in trying to own everything that you can lay your hands on – Mayfair and Park Lane will make you rich, very rich. If you play it shrewdly, you could sit with Old Kent Road & Whitechapel Road and still emerge fairly successful at the end. However, if you play it safe with Electric Company, Waterworks and Kings Cross Station, you will soon meet your Waterloo.
Unarguably, Monopoly – the game of building a business empire – is the most exciting game ever. And yet, it is probably the most stressful game too. And that is why it is so close to reality of being an entrepreneur. For stress & anxiety are bosom buddies of any half-successful entrepreneur.
Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Opsware and co-founder of the VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was once asked by a reporter, “With such a large business, it must be quite stressful for you. How do you ever go to sleep?”
“Oh! I sleep like a baby.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I wake up every two hours and cry.”
So, should you choose the stressful life of an entrepreneur who has his ups & downs or the safety cocoon of a corporate employee whose career graph is more or less charted out even before the first day in office?
The perks of working at a large corporate are many. An enviable brand name, a sprawling office complex, a big fat salary, a business card with a fancy designation, lots of cool colleagues to hang out and party with every day, office bashes where you get to sample the best whiskies and wines of unpronounceable names & unthinkable prices.
What’s more, for guys like me - who neither deserve nor get a second look from members of the fairer sex - there’s the additional perk of getting to dance with pretty girls. Corporates are indeed where you need to be. Right?
I mean, c’mon… where else will you get the pleasure of bitching about your boss with your colleagues while sucking up to her in private?
And, then there’s always the biggest perk around the corner – the huge possibility of finding a filthy-rich spouse at work!
And now think about entrepreneurship. I mean it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out which loser would choose to slog for 80 hours a week just to avoid working 40 hour weekdays in a corporate? Drink the cheapest, warm beer at 1:00 am at night in the solitude of your small office, if you can at all call your wealthy cousin’s garage or the 3+1 extra servant room in your parent’s 1500 sq. feet apartment your office.
And what are the chances of meeting and dancing with lovely, booze-enthused girls? Well, they’re as bright as finding kangaroos in Kenya. Oh, isn’t entrepreneurship fascinating!
And yet, after spending close to 2 dozen fully fun-filled years enslaved in the corporate world, I chose the latter. Why? Because I was fed up of the charade that all my colleagues – seniors, peers and juniors included – and I carried out every year, or being in a fulfilling job, when the biggest thing on everyone’s mind was occupying the all-powerful corner office, the high 7-figure salary package, and the long limo that would come with it. Anxiously waiting for the next appraisal announcement every year that would enslave me further, eagerly looking forward to the next bigger cell to become my office room, excitedly holding meetings with clients and colleagues who were all present inside those conference rooms just because of their own, self-chosen enslavement terms for getting the promised dole at the end of the month.
Well, those were my beautiful 24 years as a slave. Not that I didn’t enjoy them. I totally loved my life, especially in my last role as the Chief Strategy Officer, APAC of the world’s largest digital marketing company. I was travelling business class, staying at the world’s fanciest 5-star hotels, brushing shoulders with the who’s who of the corporate world globally. And yet, I felt unfulfilled and incomplete.
For, even a 5-star hotel can be quite a bore when you actually check-in at 10:00 pm to either sleep for 6 hours or type your next PowerPoint presentation before leaving sharp at 4:00 am to catch your next flight. And, I mean who – besides a pilot or an air hostess – wants to be on a jet plane every second day? It’s not that I don’t like to fly, but when you’re flying an average of 5,000 miles every week, catching flights mostly at unearthly hours, eating stale airline food from a plastic tray, trying to catch some quick shut-eye on the plane while an infant in the next seat is trying to find his highest vocal notes, it is not exactly a dream world.
But, quite frankly, I loved my job of being a marketing consultant. Who won’t like having the COOs and CEOs of large MNCs like Pepsi, HP, MetLife, Samsung, Microsoft, and their likes sit back with rapt attention and listen to & implement your suggestions to increase their business?
Yet, what my job lacked was the ability to create and nurture something unique for ‘myself’, instead of for others. I had the good fortune of being part of the team leading the strategy for designing, launching and managing the eCommerce portals for HP and Samsung in India. The strategy that we devised won them huge business and us many accolades and awards. And that was the problem – our clients won huge business, while we won only admiration. They earned big fat bonuses for implementing what we proposed, while we just earned a good case study to go out and woo more clients like them.
You know what sucks about awards? They are like medals given to soldiers for having taken bullets in the line of duty. The world sees and admires the medal, but only the wearer knows the pain.
With the phenomenal response that HP and Samsung eCom portals received, another newer business vertical for my organization had spawned. The vertical of building and managing more such websites.
At that juncture, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to continue working for others’ success, and I didn’t want to continue being one of the spokes in the wheel, even if the most important one. And so, I decided to become my own boss. With a dream to do something interesting for MYSELF rather than for the safety of my bank balance. With a desire to address consumer needs based on what consumers want and not based on what a brand wishes to push. With a determination to work alone if it were to be so, in my quest for creating something valued and valuable. And that’s how I launched my own eCommerce portal, DesiFirangi.com. Finally, I stopped being a corporate caterpillar, and entered chrysalis to become a business butterfly.
A caterpillar is one of the most fascinating creatures. It evolves during its lifetime like no other living being. Yet a caterpillar, which only seeks the safety of readily-available food in plant leaves, will never become a butterfly that flies wherever it wishes, to feed on nectar from various flowers. And yet, you can’t become an admired butterfly before leading the life of a humble caterpillar, even if it is in your own organization.
However, I leave it to each one you to judge for yourself which is better – being an entrepreneur or being a corporate executive. For one has seen many talented employees rise up the corporate ladder to become CEOs of large global corporates, and define & drive their destinies. Even if I were to just take Indian names, there are far too many who have risen to the very top of their global organizations, and today wield the power to direct not just their own fate, but the fate of their companies and to an extent the fate of the entire world & its populace.
The likes of Indra Nooyi of Pepsi, Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ajaypal Singh Banga of MasterCard, Rakesh Kapoor of Reckitt Benckiser, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe Systems, Nikesh Arora of SoftBank, Vikram Pandit of Citibank, Sanjay Jha of GlobalFoundaries and earlier of Motorola, who became the highest paid CEO globally in 2014 receiving US$ 66 million as a ‘Golden Parachute’ when Google acquired Motorola. So, finally, the choice is yours.
Somebody once remarked to me that employees are like turtles, seeking the safety of their shells, and entrepreneurs are like cheetahs, running fast to catch their prey. I am not so sure that that analogy is correct. I like cheetahs but I also very much admire turtles. For while a cheetah only hunts to survive, a turtle has the guts to stick his neck out to make any progress in life. And turtles – as we all know – are one of the oldest living and longest living, most evolutionary creatures on Earth. You can choose what you wish to be – an entrepreneur or a corporate executive. Just don’t stop taking risks and don’t stop evolving.
All the best!
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