Posts from our MBA bloggers
Just over two weeks have passed since TEDxLondonBusinessSchool took place. An initiative of the Marketing Club, this year marked the second installment of what has become a flagship event for the school. A team of students from across the MBA, MiM, and MiF programs worked together for nearly eight months to organize a full day of engaging talks and presentations.
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The theme of the conference was Regenerate with each presentation tackling this concept in a slightly different way. The opening session of the day focused on Regenerating Engagement. Among the highlights was a conversation between host Sean Phelan and 16-year old entrepreneur Nick D’Aloissio, who has invented a new technique for summarizing information. A review of developments in the online finance world by LBS alum and venture capitalist Nadeem Shaikh also got people talking.
In the second session of the day, speakers explored the concept of Regenerating Communities, including a talk on how genomic research will impact our lives, and a discussion of the London riots last year. After a lively lunch break where participants were free to mingle and network over tasty food, the focus was on Regenerating Business. Goldman-Sachs-trader-turned-leftwing-economist Lydia Prieg spoke about the need to regenerate capitalism while CEO of the British Banking Association Angela Knight offered her take on the fallout from the financial crisis the path going forward.
The last session of the day featured a series of talks on Regenerating Culture. One highlight was a charming exploration of Bharatanatyam dance by LBS student Pancham Gajjar, and another was a presentation and live painting by American artist Alexa Meade.
Our venue for the event, the Bloomberg Auditorium on Finsbury Square, was bursting at the seems with a capacity crowd of 300 people. Tickets sold out in just three days with the audience made up of business leaders from a wide range of industries including advertising and PR, consulting, finance, FMCG, energy, and the non-profit sector, as well as current and former LBS students and faculty.
The TED movement was founded in 1984 in California as a platform for sharing ideas related to Technology, Education and Design. Since then it has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon with several major TED events each year and hundreds of TEDx events around the world. Staying true to the original concept of “Ideas Worth Spreading,” the TED philosophy is all about short, engaging, and compelling presentations designed to get the audience thinking. With TEDx conferences, like the one hosted by LBS, the x means it is an independently organized event but follows strict TED guidelines.
Plans are already underway for the 2013 edition of TEDxLondonBusinessSchool including a bigger venue to accommodate the increased demand. Stay tuned for more info and get in touch if you’re interested in being involved!
Ira Dubinsky (MBA2013) was a member of the organising committee for this year’s TEDx and has been named Chair of the event for 2013.
One of the things I’m pretty certain every LBS student puts on their application is that they will participate in organising one of the many conferences we host each year. There is, afterall, a conference for every taste. It sounds like such a great idea at the time and it’s an easy thing to put on an application. Especially when you can point to similar events you’ve organised in the past.
And then school starts. You do decide to follow through with that statement in your application. Albeit, for a conference in a completely different industry. At first you have grand plans for where it will be and who will attend. Do my notes deceive me? Was I really thinking we would be hosting Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Rupert Murdoch at the Royal Albert Hall? Well, someone did say you should aim for the stars…
And it was with these grand aspirations that we embarked on preparing the LBS Technology & Media Summit. This planning stage was perhaps the most fun – dreaming up the format, the location, the people we wanted. And it’s probably no surprise that it did not take long for us to get a reality check. Or rather, a series of continuous slap downs like some sort of Stonecutters initiation ceremony.
Over the following months you are greeted by what seems to be more setbacks than steps forward. When you think you’ve found that perfect venue, you realise it’s not available on the date you want, or it’s outside of your budget. And then the same applies for backup options 2 through 10 on your list. You wonder if it’s too late to pull out as organiser. And then when you do have your venue, you realise that you’re now only a couple of months away from hosting it and you must now scramble to find speakers.
The aspirational targets quickly fall away, but you realise if you scratch the surface just a little to get below the rockstars, there is an amazing array of talent right on London’s doorstep. At first it’s like a smorgasband of who to choose from. Where to begin? They all look so good! Inevitably, though some say no, others take an age to respond. And then other suggestions arise later down the road. You do wonder if it’s worth all this effort as the initiation slaps turn into a more of a long grind. But slowly and surely you build up your panels and lock in your keynote speakers.
And then you take a moment to breathe. You look at what you have achieved so far. An excellent venue, an amazing lineup of speakers. You are confident that this will be an exceptional event. There is but one thing missing: the attendees.
With a lineup like this, it should sell itself. There is an early flurry from students. But then it slows. You blitz alumni and students with emails; that helps, but you know you can do better. You become inventive; who else can we target, how can we reach them? It’s like an applied class mashing together strategy and marketing concepts. And strangely enough, after all your hardwork, they do come. And from all walks of life; they fly in from Spain specifically for it, they come from other MBA schools, their visit happens to coincide with their London visit from San Fran, they come from companies I have not heard of.
And you take another moment to breathe. By this stage you have taken the Boy Scout’s motto to heart: Be Prepared. You run through the event in your mind at all hours of the day; sometimes even in your sleep. You wonder what could go wrong, how you would recover. The conference day arrives; it goes by in a blur. You are half aware of what the speakers are saying; you’re furiously trying to tweet their insights (afterall, again, this is a technology and media event). You wait for something to falter; it doesn’t happen.
And it becomes a natural high.
Those times you wondered if it was worth the hours, the stress, the lost hair; you realise that it is. For so many reasons: the knowledge that you’re contributing back to the LBS community; the positive feedback and compliments that you receive from attendees; the opportunity to listen and learn, and sometimes hear heated debate; the fact that perseverance has paid off; the chance to work with your amazing and talented classmates; the ability to push yourself and grow (and potentially fail too).
In decades to come, people will look back on this time in history and they will ask where you were in the heyday of the internet. You might say something like Silicon Roundabout or Silicon Alley, but those names, that use of Silicon in the title is misleading at best – traitorous at worst; Silicon Valley is the heart where the action lies. Like the days of the goldrush, there is only one true place to be, to be amongst the revolution, in the middle of the action, and that place is San Francisco (or just down the road in the Valley).
And that is where the intrepid travellers of the LBS Tech Trek headed for Spring Break. We set off with our pickaxes and pans, or rather, our iPads and styluses to visit the companies setting the trends for the interweb. Who did we visit you ask? A rock star list of: Google, Twitter, Linkedin, Zynga, Dropbox, Kleiner Perkins, Tesla, 500 Startups, and more.
It was an interesting and eye-opening experience visiting these companies. It is not until you enter the Valley that you start to understand the vibe that reverberates up and down State Highway 101 and around the offices, shops, cafes and homes in the Valley. Conversations in every coffee shop, every restaurant, every street corner mention something about coding, user experience, venture funding or some variant thereof. As it was explained to us more than once, the Valley is a hotbed of innovation that does not so much move through cycles, as it does leap and bound through them. Companies can bounce ideas around, fail, and pivot to new ideas and business models faster than anywhere else possible.
And there lies the second common message shared with us: the acceptability of failure. It is acceptable, nay, it is almost a rite of passage to have failed; risks must be taken to discover what is achievable. Can Silicon Valley be replicated in other parts of the world? We received mix perspectives on this, but it was universally agreed that a prerequisite is that the culture of failure was a necessary building block that would have to be copied. Will it happen? It takes quite a heroic effort to change one’s mindset from risk-averseness to investing in inherently risky ideas. We shall see.
It is a remarkable place and an incredible experience.
A quick nod to the company offices themselves, afterall, the perks received at these companies are legendary. And sure enough, they did not disappoint: Google has a beach volleyball court taking center stage at their offices. But that was only the initial taster we saw; across the companies we visited there were company bikes to ride between office buildings, scooters to glide between office rooms, meeting rooms stacked high with lego, band rooms filled with guitars and drums, m&m dispensers, a coke machines that poured over 100 flavours, and of course the obligatory ping pong table.
Ten students from across London Business School’s degree programmes were selected to attend the student-led trek, with a view to helping them understand the sector better, build connections in the Indian Private Equity (PE) space and explore future career opportunities. The trek was conceptualized and led by Manita Shinh, MBA2013, and was sponsored by the Private Equity and Venture Capital Club, the India Business Forum and Career Services. I was one of the trek members, and thought I’d quickly give you a download of what it was like to be a part of professional treks such as this.
The participants met with country managing partners and other senior professionals at KKR, Blackstone, Apax, Carlyle, Bain Capital, TPG, TA Associates, General Atlantic, Actis, 3i, Advent International, Warburg Pincus, Fidelity Growth Partners and Abraaj. Apart from the global majors, the participants also met with India focused funds such as Tano Capital, ICICI Ventures, Multiples and Faering Capital.
The trek was an opportunity to learn about the distinct investing styles of each of these funds both globally and in India. Practitioners shared their views of the macroeconomic environment, implications of the recently announced budget on the PE sector, their past and current focus investment areas, current trends and unique challenges and opportunities they were seeing in the space.
India is a growth equity market characterized by minority stakes, and it was interesting to hear from big buyout funds on their India strategy, as well as from those that had managed to close control based transactions in the market. Each fund took the time to explain their method of selecting investments and adding value, and many shared details of past investments to illustrate the same.
The Mumbai LBS Alumni Club scheduled Sundowners to coincide with the trek, and Thursday evening saw students mingle with alumni at Wink at the Taj. The event was made even more enjoyable with an exclusive wine-tasting conducted by the founder of Sula Vineyards. Apart from meeting alumni, the students also got the chance to interact with senior professionals from funds such as Tata Capital, Matrix Partners, Mumbai Angels and Kea Capital, who also attended the Sundowners.
Despite the hectic schedule that spanned meetings with 19 funds in five days, the participants had the chance to catch their breath, and a few drinks, at the famous Air bar at the Four Seasons, and enjoy some of the local cuisine between meetings.
Given my interest in both business and social issues, I have been exploring the varying definitions of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship.
Antonio Meloto, the founder of Philippines-based NGO Gawad Kalinga, recently spoke to a group of students at London Business School and discussed some social enterprise success stories his organization has helped create. For Gawad Kalinga, social enterprise means fostering businesses that are socially and environmentally responsible, as well as profitable. Meloto spoke about how companies should seek optimal profit as opposed to maximum profit. He put forward a vision of business where the primary purpose is the common good. No doubt this vision will be compelling for many people, and it’s great that Meloto and his team have been able to recruit and train a large number of young entrepreneurs that share such a vision; the impact on the Philippines has clearly been very positive.
But I’m left questioning whether this vision of a more caring form of capitalism – one that aims for broad societal welfare as much as it does shareholder profits – is realistic. Is this approach really sustainable in the big, bad world of business? Is it scalable beyond a micro level? I worry that social enterprise is being heralded as a panacea for economic, social and environmental problems when in reality it only works in some very specific cases. These sorts of questions have also been floated in a core MBA class I’m taking this term called Business, Government, and Society. As we examine topics such as competition, regulation, and corporate responsibility, we are struggling to square the circle that results when you combine unbridled capitalism with a genuine desire to do good.
There is another meaning of social enterprise that I find a bit more troubling. Much of the commentary that lauds social entrepreneurship seems resigned to the fact that governments can no longer afford to administer programs. Social enterprise is presented as an alternative way to deliver programs and solve societal challenges such as homelessness, a lack of healthcare, or environmental disaster. This approach posits that private-sector entities can use their entrepreneurial spirit to do more good than government can. I worry about social enterprise, sustainable business, and corporate philanthropy supplanting the role of the state. In my opinion, this is a dangerous path for two reasons.
First, this approach ignores the democratic benefits of governments and civil society. I’m the first to admit the public sector and civil society could benefit form a little private sector thinking. Many government bureaucracies and most NGOs are bloated, inefficient, and have failed to adopt some of the improvements in management practice that the private sector has benefited from over the last 50 years. But injecting a little business efficiency into government is not the same as replacing government with business when it comes to administering services. Governments are elected and accountable to the public and civil society organisations are governed by their membership; both are open to all but the same cannot be said about corporations.
Second, and more importantly, resolutely concluding that governments can no longer afford to administer the services we expect of them means accepting that existing taxation policy cannot be changed and that the unbelievable disparity between rich and poor is here to stay. The truth is that the state’s ability to build affordable housing, fund healthcare services, take care of an ageing population, or regulate environmental law relies on public policy decisions we make collectively. Rather than throw our hands up and turn to business to solve the problems we’ve created, why not sit down and see if it still might be possible to do it ourselves, together?
