Entrepreneurship as an outbound activity

Hello all, today i wanted to share my views on entrepreneurship. Iam currently teaching entrepreneurship at a few business schools. While iam confident about teaching the conceptual aspects of entrepreneurship the same is not the case with the practical aspects. Entrepreneurship, according to me , is a very eccentric course. Its something like this, lets say you want to become a tiger trainer. You can train yourself to be so using a dummy tiger.Other options are to train yourself with a domesticated tiger in a zoo or a real tiger in the forest. Iam not sure what your chances would be with the latter approach!! Similar is the case with entrepreneurship. A "dummy tiger" kind of course in the classroom is no match to the majestic animal in the woods!

So why this analogy? Does that mean any entrepreneurship course wouldnt work? Not so ! One needs the right environment to learn entrepreneurship. An environment that is hostile, where you have to earn your respect using your street smartness rather than your academic skills. Let me give you an example . Almost all schools mandate that students purchase books for compulsory reading before class. This infact works against entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a practice in out-of-the-box thinking, multi-tasking ,negotiating and risk-taking. Its about working with limited resources and limitless constraints. For such an environment books need to be shared and students must learn to negotiate time frames for book reading.

One of the most critical aspects of Entrepreneurship is risk. Irrespective of what you learn in entrepreneurship, if you are not a risk taker no course can help you. Moreover, risk is not a concept, its an experience that has to be accrued. I want to talk a little about why i think this is so important. In 1999 i took my GMAT in the United States and decided to apply to a few top 10 MBA programs. I had scored 680 and finally received an admission letter from the Stern School of business NYU in the fall of 2000. I decided to go ahead with the MBA (fully funding myself) inspite of several of my friends warning me that the IT sector was in a period of bust and i could lose my job anytime. I was also warned that a part-time MBA will not boost my career in any way. But i was very clear what i wanted and how an MBA would help me and went ahead with it for which i have no regrets today. During my 2 years of studies there were many occassions when i had to manage with just 200 dollars while the rest of my salary went towards tuition fees. Lets now talk about real risks ! My 6 years on my H1B were approaching ( i hadnt applied for a green card as i wasnt interested staying in the US) and i risked deportation from overstaying . I had initially planned to complete my MBA by fall 2002 knowing well that my visa would expire in Dec 2002. Unfortunately my plans backfired and i had to negotiate with my company to apply for a GC so i could continue beyong 2003 and finish my MBA. A lot of things happened in the nick of time and i just made it !!

This exercise in risk was such a valuable lesson that no course in the world could have taught me, not even a top 10 B-school!!! Nor can i teach this to anyone. However what could be offered is an entrepreneurship course in the wild! . As far as iam concerned risk taking, negotiation, multi-tasking and out-of-the-box thinking can ever be taught. But if this course can be organized in a place where all of these skills can be practised while learning , it will be an experience that will be of immense potential. To be specific, lets look at negotiation. There are many courses that teach negotiation. Can these courses teach you how to negotiate with an auto rickshaw driver or an agent in a tourist place. I dont think so ! These guys have acquired negotiation skills through practice and the only way one can beat them is by practising, not in a school environment but by dealing with them in the real world. This has to be done and can be done. Its something like a budding tiger trainer learning to train using techniques on a domesticated tiger. And then slowly starting to deal with real tigers that come into the zoo.

The key is to teach entrepreneurship as an outbound activity in the wild where exercises could be organized for risk taking in the wild, real negotiation with village natives and multi-tasking to carry out day to day activities such as cooking, logistics and reading. How does this help you might ask? Because nature is the biggest challenger. It is as unpredictable as a tiger or the stock market and forces you to think out of the box. If the entrepreneurial concepts that you learn in this outbound course can be applied successfully in such an environment you know you have won half the game ! If you can deal with it you can deal with any kind of uncertainity in the world. This gives you the confidence that you have taken risks before, you have stayed in the wild and evaluated how good you are . You will begin to ask yourself, 'whats the worst that could happen if i leave my job? I wouldnt get a monthly salary, right?' The other half of the game would be won if you dare to take the risk to be an entrepreneur. Thats all it takes to be an entrepreneur !


shyam krishnamurthy