Art of survival: An institute for entrepreneurs, anyone?

By Alok Kejriwal

I argue that if we have Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), then why not Indian Institutes of Entrepreneurship (IIEs)? Isn’t entrepreneurship a deep, important and complex subject that needs studying?

Now, let me set your expectations right. I am an ‘M.Com pass’ guy who began working since he was 16 years old. So, I don’t have a degree to boast about and neither am I putting forth this argument based on academic experience. Instead, my tukka (shot) is based on entrepreneurial invitational visits to the IITs or IIMs and by juxtaposing the degree of ‘real life experience’ that I have earned over the years.

The Case for IIEs

Entrepreneurs create entrepreneurs

In regular colleges, teachers teach and students learn. Only a few students go on to become teachers. Most of them embrace professional careers and submit themselves to the big, bad corporate world. In the case of entrepreneurship, I firmly believe that only entrepreneurs can teach entrepreneurs. Not teachers.

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[caption id=“attachment_813215” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Imagine entering the IIEs and then deciding on the subjects that you would like to major in. Reuters[/caption]

You may ask ‘why’? Well, the reason is simple. There is a distance greater than the distance between the earth and the moon when it comes to academia understanding what entrepreneurship means. There are no theories, models or diktats to follow in entrepreneurship. Newton’s laws will probably never change and just need to be learnt; in entrepreneurship there are no laws and the ones that exist need to be changed! Only entrepreneurs have the experience to make other aspiring entrepreneurs ‘get it’ and this can best happen in a formalized institution.

Teaching what’s taboo

Imagine entering the IIEs and then deciding on the subjects that you would like to major in. I would expect the curriculum to include courses such as ‘Failure’, ‘Bankruptcy’, ‘Venture Capital’, ‘Terror Tactics’, ‘Nervous & Financial Breakdowns’, ‘Firing Yourself’, ‘How to Become Redundant’, etc.

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If you think this sounds like a Bollywood comedy with college as a theme, you are wrong. These are real subjects that all entrepreneurs have to practically learn and there is no place on earth that teaches it.

I recently spoke to a close friend and first-round entrepreneur who is facing mutiny (by his co-founders) in the company he worked so hard to build.

He is emotionally destroyed and could not think of anyone to call but me, since I had gone through the same issues in my previous company. This strengthens my belief that certain topics that are ’taboo’ are actually Ph.D subject material for the IIEs.

Learning the Art of Unlearning

Think of the IIEs as underground bunkers, training business commandos. A place where students don’t wear shirts or skirts or blazers to look formal on special days. These are men and women who don’t care what they wear or how they look because they are only interested in learning the art of survival. The IIEs could be a place where a textbook is burnt every evening in a bonfire, just to drive home the point that to be an entrepreneur, you must learn the Art of Unlearning. Take for instance the case of Zara and its suppliers or Facebook and Zynga when they started up. I have read that these companies did not sign contracts but just began to work with each other on faith, in order to get started without wasting any time. Which formal institute in India would teach you that? Only an IIE!

Changing the direction of the ladder

If you have seen a documentary or a movie based on mountain climbing (watch Into Thin Air), you would have noticed that a ladder is used in two situations. Usually it’s used by the mountaineers to climb up the mountain rock walls wherever possible, but more often than that, it is also used sideways to walk across chasms and crevices that appear on mountainous plateaus.

The typical Indian Institute is all about teaching you to climb the ladder pointing UP. It’s structured to make you fight for each rung of the ladder and beat the other guy while getting to the top. The IIE will actually be about teaching you how to use the ladder sideways. The premise of entrepreneurship is that you have to successfully get a bunch of people across with you over many business hurdles, chasms and crevices. Only a specialist institute that does not focus on ‘climbing up’ can achieve this.

Making gladiators out of pussycats

I routinely visit many IITs and IIMs each year, either as a guest speaker, jury member to judge business competitions or as part of a panel on entrepreneurship. In over 50-plus such interactions over the years, I have never faced a severe argument, intense debate or a plain, “I think you are wrong”, view being tossed at me. All the students appear as pussycats, simply agreeing (or pretending to agree) with the invited speakers! This is stupidity. In fact, the big bad world is very punishing for startups, where customers routinely poke fun, insult and completely dismiss new business ideas being pitched to them. For instance, after I started a company called contests2win.com in 1998, in one phone call to an MNC (a Fortune 500 brand), the lady I had called just kept making fun of my company’s name. I still remember her even covering the mouthpiece and telling her colleagues, “I can’t believe the stupidity of some people. This guy on the phone actually has a company called contests2win!” Real life cases like this one take a lot of thick skin and bravado to handle. It’s very easy to get discouraged and very difficult to keep the faith. At the IIE, one would ‘simulate’ the harshness of the world in the institute itself and try and make gladiators out of our pussycat students. I can visualize a large presentation hall, shaped like a coliseum, in which the entrepreneur pitches her business, standing in the center, while ‘disbelievers’ and ’naysayers’ call her names and ridicule her business while sitting in the stands. And yes, if you missed the fine point, I believe that business gladiators should be women as well as men.

The end goal

Most top-level learning institutions of the world are very expensive and encourage their students to finance their course fees with loans and borrowings that can only be paid over a long-term period. This almost traps the students into signing up for ‘jobs that pay the best’ and nothing else. A job seeker typically becomes a job doer for the rest of his life. My belief is that the IIE would be financed liberally by successful entrepreneurs and would not charge a curriculum fee. That’s right-it will be free and the selection process will not be DRACONIAN, but based on the INTENT of the applicant to become an entrepreneur.

Most entrepreneurs like me would gladly donate generous amounts by way of grants to IIEs if they sounded legit. This would mean that there would be no burden on the graduating entrepreneurs to pay back anything to anyone. The end goal of the IIEs would be to encourage its students to go out there and CREATE value via enterprises and not earn some opportunistic money for themselves. The focus would be to shift the center of gravity from earning to value creating.

In addition to the examples above, if I had unlimited space, I could go on forever. But if you ask me, the most powerful reason to create the IIEs is this: In the near future, jobs and careers are not going to be the ones that you FIND, but instead the ones that you MAKE for yourself. And no one other than an entrepreneur can do that.