IIM
Indore organized its second industry-academia meet. The event,
attended by more than 16 members of the industry, was a platform for
industry experts, the academia and the students to interact and
share their thoughts and insights on issues concerning the world of
business as it exists today.
The
director of IIM Indore, Dr. N. Ravichandran, emphasised the need for
management schools to produce managers who would become policy
formulators and play an active role in bringing about a positive
change in the socio-political and regional environment. The event
was intended to be an effort in this direction.
The meet
commenced with a presentation on ‘Corporate Sustainability’ by the
honorable chief guest, Mr. Virendra S. Gupte, corporate head-
Corporate Sustainability and Chief Ethics Counsellor at Tata
International Limited (TIL). He spoke about the need for CSR
activity in the industry, underlining its impact on economic,
environmental and social development. He talked about the three
pillars at TIL – people, planet and profits – which ensure total
accountability to stakeholders and long-term sustainability for the
business. Giving an example of the Tata Group itself, he described
how, over the years, the conglomerate has followed these ideals to
develop into one of the most revered enterprises in the country. A
short-film on the TIL plant in Dewas was also shown, depicting how
the facility has improved the lives of its employees.
Prof.
Prashant Salwan of IIM Indore continued the proceedings with a
presentation on the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’. Mr Salwan opined that the
companies could maximize their profits by increasing the ‘Consumer
Value Proposition’ and maintaining cost leadership. This could be
attained by venturing into an uncontested market space - the Blue
Ocean strategy. He attributed the success of sectors like Telecom
and Aviation to this strategy and went on to claim that there could
be many such unknown sectors today, which hold potential for the
future.
A group
of 10 students were selected from the current batch of PGP-2 to make
presentations on their stints with their respective companies during
summer internships. The students shared their experiences working in
diverse sectors like banking, insurance, sales and marketing among
others. Their responsibilities ranged from a mandate to discover new
distribution channels for selling insurance products, to developing
a strategy for capturing the wholesale business for a well-known
beverage maker.
The event
was culminated by a presentation on the book ‘Simply Fly’ written by
Capt. Gopinath. Dr. N. Ravichandran, reviewing the book, gave a
glimpse of the journey of Capt. Gopinath – from his humble
beginnings to his stint with the army, moving on to the business of
organic farming and then to politics, to Air Deccan and finally its
sale to Vijay Mallya. Capt. Gopinath considered himself a “lucky�
person and maintained that “enterprises might fail, but
entrepreneurs don’t�.
