Stay Hungry Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal; IIM-A publication; Price: Rs.125; 325 pp
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With the great global economic meltdown which has pushed 5 million Americans and over 500,000 — and counting — Indians into the ranks of the unemployed, the two-decades’ festival of high-flying masters of the universe (best-selling novelist Tom Wolfe’s description of investment bankers and finance managers of Wall Street) is over. Ditto the boom times of the oracles of Dalal Street, Mumbai. All of them must be wondering hard whether it would have been better to have chosen the entrepreneurial alternative over remaining salary slaves for life. Had they chosen the entrepreneur’s path, they wouldn’t have had to pay for the mistakes of others and live in perpetual fear of the pink slip. In hard times like these, the start-up option becomes particularly attractive. And the thing about starting your own venture is — as this engrossing book makes clear — that though initially hard, the journey becomes more interesting and the taste of success is much sweeter.
“Stay hungry, stay foolish” is the advice in favour of entrepreneurship which Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple Industries founder and serial innovator, gave to the Stanford B-school graduating class of 2005. In this compendium of case histories, Mumbai-based journalist and editor of Just Another Magazine Rashmi Bansal has documented the case studies of 25 alumnae of the show-piece Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (estb. 1961), who forsook the easy option of campus placements despite being offered attractive remuneration packages, in favour of the grinding entrepreneurial path.
To put it in Bansal’s words, “The book is for all those people who seized their moment. So that they would not wake up one day with regrets. Of course they saw markets and opportunities and need-gaps. But more importantly, they stood in front of the mirror and saw their true selves. That self told them that it was meaningless to sell soap (sic) just because you are paid well to do so. That being a corporate slave was the easy option, but not the one that felt right. That there was something bigger and better to do with their talents.”
The book is a series of interviews of IIM-A graduates such as Sanjeev Bikchandani who promoted the popular personnel recruitment web portal naukri.com; Shantanu Prakash, who set up Educomp Solutions to provide digital content to schools across India; Narendra Murkumbi whose company Shree Renuka Sugars has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of sugarcane farmers; Deep Kalra who started a portal (makemytrip.com) to make travel easier; Nirmal Jain who has turned his company India Infoline into one of the biggest online trading platforms, and Shivraman Dugal (ICRI) who pioneered the concept of clinical research education in India, among others. The common factor influencing Bansal’s choice of entrepreneurs for inclusion in this book is that they are all — as indeed is the author — from IIM-A. Little wonder it was commissioned by the institute’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) which arranged funding from the Wadhwani Foundation which also supports the National Entrepreneurship Network.
Yet while Stay Hungry Stay Foolish is undoubtedly innovative and inspirational in that it creates awareness within the risk-averse educated Indian middle class that the entrepreneurial path may be more fulfilling eventually, it is long on quotations and short on analysis. Intent on highlighting the marketplace success of the select 25 IIM-A entrepreneurs, the author makes it sound all too easy. There’s no awareness or explanation that (according to a World Bank study of 2006) it takes over 35 days to start a business in contemporary India as against six days in Singapore, five in the US and two in Australia. And it would have been useful to learn how these chosen entrepreneurs negotiated the regulatory hurdles and insolence of office which businessmen in still-socialist India are heir to.
Nevertheless, Bansal’s book challenges the notion of the conventional career trajectory, and is a compelling read for gen next given to multi-tasking, prone to attention deficit disorder, and impatient with deep analysis and detail. Written in hip language and peppered with Hindi colloquialisms (aisa kyun, bindass etc), it may well inspire other beneficiaries of subsidised IIM education to walk the entrepreneurial path, and thus make a pay-back to society.
Huned Contractor