The pursuit of passion

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU AT B-SCHOOL

Maneesh Konkar

B-schools fail to instil enthusiasm for the jobs graduates go on to do.

Great minds think alike. Or should it be, fools seldom differ? How do young enthusiastic B-school students feel the day they graduate? Take a cross section of opinions and you will hear "" "CEO in five years" or "principal consultant in a global consultancy firm"; there may even be the odd realist who is likely to say "business head of a multinational company in seven years".

Fast forward five years to the dinner hosted by the alumni association, where everybody turns up with a spouse, one or two children, a wider waistline and less hair. And what else is common? Everyone has a minimum two-hour commute to work; they're all putting in 12 to 14 hours a day; nobody sees their home in the daylight; and all of them are seeing their children grow horizontally (while they are sleeping).

What went wrong? Why are the finished goods from some of India's most successful MBA colleges still working so hard, still playing slave to an economic system that they thought they would rule over? The old saw goes that the more successful you become, the less you need to work.

But that's not what is happening. A significant number of people aren't enjoying their 12-hour-long working days and even though everybody is making more money, in many cases, obscene amounts are being siphoned off by credit card payments and EMIs.

When my batch passed out from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, we all landed good jobs. And we all had dreams. But after almost 10 years, if I could go back in time, I would ask for two things that were sorely missing from my two-year stint at IIM.

One is a solid foundation in money matters and two, a better understanding of the importance and means of finding passion in the job.

Author Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad Poor Dad, has defined an asset as something that puts money in our pockets, and a liability as something that takes the money out of our pockets.

In my corporate training sessions on goal setting, what comes out repeatedly is these two things:

1. Most of us have bought only liabilities with our money and have been planning to do so in the future also. Remember that cars, self-occupied houses, mobiles, jewellery and so on are all liabilities.
2. Most of us are completely dependent on our jobs with almost zilch financial planning.

Why does this happen? How do people with degrees in management "" with all its obligatory courses in finance and accountancy "" manage to earn huge sums of money and then fritter it away on expensive items that only increase our fixed costs? If there was one lesson that I would have expected my college to teach me, it was to guard against this.

There should have been a series of sessions on "personal financial planning". We were taught well about subjects like organisational planning in areas of marketing, finance, strategic planning and human resources, but sadly, nothing on how one should set goals for personal finance.

Another thing that I have noticed time and again among the hundreds that I have trained as a consultant is the complete lack of enthusiasm for their jobs. The monotony, the long working hours, the fear of being fired, the drudgery of salaam-ing someone who is probably only half as intelligent, shows up in a "yes sir" mentality that diminishes passion and, sooner or later, leads to a loss in productivity.

Compared to the B- or C-rung B-schools, there is little classroom learning in the IIMs. As a result, IIM graduates pass out with knowledge that is often sketchy. Yet the pressure is tremendous. So it's probably understandable if people aren't enthused about their jobs "" their education has failed to instil in them a passion for their work. That's why it is critical that you don't stop learning. Continue the learning process on your own throughout your career.

Still, I did pick up some key learnings from my time at IIM as well. For instance, analytical skills that I can use now to size up a situation, how to analyse business problems in minutes. I took considerably longer than that (about four years) before I finally discovered what my passion was "" giving direction to others.

And that, my dear friend, is what I would put down as my key to getting productive "" "discover your passion". Or, as someone said, "Figure out what you enjoy doing and find plenty of people who will pay you to do it".

(Maneesh Konkar is the founder of Konkar Consulting. He graduated from IIM Bangalore in 1995)