CEOs come calling!!!

Last Sunday was the Most Valuable Day of our evolving PGPX experience, when we were treated to a rare buffet of corporate wisdom by a star studded line up of IIMA alumni, many of who are entrepreneurs spanning wide ranging industries like options trading to company research to retail. Here is a sample of the all star line-up that we had:

1. Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Naukri.com)
2. R. Subramanian (Subhiksha)
3. Rahul Bhasin (Barrings Private Equity)
4. Sachit Jain (Vardhman Threads)

Here is what Basab wrote in his blog about this event.
http://6ampacific.com/2007/07/04/trip-to-iim-ahmedabad/#more-123

We also got good coverage from the media.
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=243775

http://www.business-standard.com/strategist/storypage.php?leftnm=6&subLeft=8&chklogin=N&autono=289696&tab=r

The morning session was driven by Basab where he participated with the class in a role play that involved two of my class mates getting ‘mock interviewed’ by Basab as part of our management communications session. This was all about giving us pointers in getting hired at senior management roles and Basab used this opportunity to distill his decades of corporate experience to hand us pearls of wisdom as takeaways.

As this session was going on, we had a ‘walk-in’ by some of the other CEOs, who popped in a little early for our after noon sessions. And surprisingly they sat along with us in the class and were also magnanimous enough to give tough competition to our own ‘class- participation’ masters, in the ensuing discussions. I am sure it must have brought back a lot of their own IIMA memories for them. And needless to say we also had a lot of learnings from them.

In the afternoon there was a panel discussion where each of the CEOs shared their experience in building their ‘own companies’, the whys, the whats and the hows. What was readily apparent was that each one of them had their own inimitable personal style, but what was unmistaken was the amount of passion they put into their act. It was clear that this was the same source of unbridled energy that shaped their entrepreneurial careers as well and made them so phenomenally successful.

The capstone of the evening was a guest lecture by Rahul Bhasin, who took us through one of his real life private equity experiences of taking over and turning around a struggling software company. It was exciting to say the least and he took extra care to compartmentalize the discussions into various concepts and also make the discussions objective and interactive in nature.

When the evening drew to a close we left with the feeling that it is events like these that compliment the class learnings in the right proportions, so that once we become alumni ourselves, we are armed with the right mix of talent, skills and experience, to keep up our learning curve steep and climbing...