The TEDxDuke event focused on "A Shrinking World."

The event itself was fast paced with about a dozen different talks. There were breaks in between to allow interaction with the speakers and for refreshments. I specifically mention refreshments because MBA students have a reputation for liking events with food. And it’s not entirely untrue!

This year’s event focused on the theme, “A Shrinking World.” While it certainly seems like a fairly obvious notion, the opportunity to hear a lot of different perspectives on it was truly enlightening. The event also included student speakers, and I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of their talks.

While it’s difficult to list all talks and even more difficult to pick a few, I do want to highlight some speakers that I really enjoyed:

1. Mike Schoenfeld: As Vice President of Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, Mike is the chief spokesperson of the university and he opened the conference. He introduced the idea that the world’s shrinking is a by-product of its expansion — expansion of human understanding of complex subjects including science and technology. He cited One Day at Duke as an example of the shrinking-expanding contradiction. Very fascinating!
2. Brian OliverSmith: Brian is the founder of an education tech start-up called Urban Planet and spoke about what it takes to succeed in an inter-dependent world. He encouraged the audience to focus not on connections but on relationships (an important distinction in the LinkedIn age), to find courage to make things happen, and to expand their vision to make impact. If you have read my earlier posts, you would recall that one of the reasons I chose Fuqua was its focus on relationships. As you would expect, this talk resonated with me and was one of the factors that led me to spend my summer working with Urban Planet and Brian (more on that in a later post).
3. Jia Jiang: Jia gained fame for his 100 Days of Rejection Therapy project/blog. Although it’s quite a popular project and made news almost everywhere, I had not heard about it before. Jia talked about how the entire world was part of his journey, getting inspired by him, and also holding him accountable because he chose to record his actions and experiences through a social network. Jia is actually a 2009 Daytime MBA grad, and the story of his meeting with Jackie at Krispy Kreme is way beyond awesome!
4. Rachel Lichte: You know you are in good company when someone from your class is invited to speak at an event like this. Rachel, a student speaker, is a dual degree MEM/MBA candidate at Duke. She is a proud Section Fiver at Fuqua (just so you know, section five is hands-down the best section at Fuqua). Rachel spoke about the Clarity Project, a social enterprise she co-founded that works to ensure ethical supply of diamonds from Africa to the developed world (think of it as a solution to Blood Diamond).

I really learned some things at the event and gained some new perspectives. One of the good things that happens when you come back to school is that it broadens your horizons. You meet a lot of people who have amazing accomplishments and they share their perspectives — similar and dissimilar — with you. The even better thing about coming to business school is that the process of learning more (especially outside of class) is not restricted to a few days or a few weeks, but it’s a long journey. If you are up for it, there will always be more than adequate resources to facilitate the process.

The audience seemed very engaged during the India Business Forum.

The India Business Forum, a.k.a. IBF, is an annual fixture that puts a face to the oft-discussed India growth story. This year’s event, Building Organizations for a Billion People, brought together four accomplished business figures to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing mangers doing business in/with India.

The talks at the event offered many insights and lessons. Below are some of my key takeaways:

Think Long Term

India is not a market for the short term. As Satyen Patel, a seasoned executive who led at Pepsi and Nike, pointed out, the risks and challenges of operating in India are very real. However, as Patel found out through his many ventures in India, organizations that commit to the country and take a long-term view of the market tend to make good returns.

The Value of Being Local

It isn’t surprising that investors want to be in India to invest in the up and coming companies. However, the start-up ecosystem in India is not nearly as evolved as in the U.S. That creates interesting opportunities and challenges for PE and VC outfits in India. Dimple Sahni, a Fund Principal at Hattery, spoke about how she mitigated this challenge by spending time in India to understand the local culture of doing business in the region.

Social Mission Drives Good Business

Putting social good at the center of a business model is great for starting new businesses that make a huge impact. Manoj Sinha, a co-founder of Husk Power, spoke about starting and growing a company with the vision to setup power plants in remote areas that have never had electricity. While Sinha and his team continue to tweak the operations and strategy, the vision has resonated globally and kept them focused on the organization’s true calling.

Organizations Need to Learn to Manage India

India is not one market but highly heterogeneous — there are 58 distinct socio-cultural and economic regions in the country. Organizations that recognize and address this tend to do well. Swami Raote, Managing Director of Johnson & Johnson India and ASEAN, spoke about the challenges J&J faced in India despite the company’s 50+ years of history in India. However, the recent focus on segments, challenges faced by consumers, and staying true to J&J’s credo have guided the company to become a billion dollar business in India.

There is a lot one gains from events like the IBF. It is not often that you get to listen to and speak with high profile executives who have tremendous experience and insight into roles and markets that business school students aspire to be a part of. What makes the experience even more rewarding is organizing the event to bring together great speakers and aspiring leaders, while learning a great deal in the process.

Personally, my 20 academic weeks at Fuqua have been among the most intense of my life (including the 259 weeks of my professional life that were no picnic either). So, what’s a day like at Fuqua? There is no simple answer, but I want to recount a particularly busy day for me. This is exactly how the day transpired:

6:30 A.M. — I woke up, prepared my agenda for the day, got ready for school, and off I went.

8:00 A.M. — Team meeting at school. We spent the morning debating a case on how a pharmaceutical company should price a new life-saving drug. Pricing is tricky — companies want to fend off competition, offer value to customers, and maximize shareholder return.

10:30 A.M. — Marketing class, and the moment of truth for our earlier meeting. We spent the class discussing what we thought was the optimal price for the drug and the key issues we considered. These in-class discussions are enlightening and frequently bring up points my team and I have not thought about. These classes typically end with how the actual business decision was made and what its impact was. As a result of this teaching methodology, we develop a problem-solving toolkit that is invaluable.

Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist Shiv Nadar with Dean Bill Boulding.

1:00 P.M. — I had a working lunch meeting with the leadership of the South Asian Business Club, INDUS. We went over the final details for an event being hosted by the club, featuring Indian billionaire entrepreneur turned philanthropist Mr. Shiv Nadar. This is one of the standout features of being at Fuqua — there are so many opportunities to listen to leaders of consequence from different walks of life.

2:30 P.M. – Enter Mr. Shiv Nadar. We spent the next hour listening intently to his journey, which made his company one of the leading forces in the global IT industry and him an acclaimed philanthropist. His talk brought up several thought-provoking issues — the business and social opportunities in Indian healthcare, the role the Indian IT industry is playing in providing opportunities to women, and the need for business leaders to be not just relentless, but also restless and paranoid.

4:00 P.M. — After the very impactful talk, it was time to head back to class and appreciate the strategic decisions that organizations must make at inflection points. Our professor of Strategy, John Joseph, had invited a Partner from Bain & Co., Mr. Pratap Mukherji, to share his experience from a real business case to drive home the point about how firms must diversify into adjacent markets and capabilities when they stagnate in their existing markets. I intend to pursue a concentration in Strategy and this was an incredibly useful class — apart from this guest lecture, in this course, we also played a virtual strategy game, discussed a dozen cases, and analyzed the strategy options facing an industry and a company.

6:30 P.M. — With classes over, I headed to the Fox Center to meet one of the second–year students to speak about his approach to recruiting. Business school really opens up a whole lot of job opportunities to students, and interacting with second-years is a great avenue to explore career options.

7:30 P.M. — I met up with some friends for dinner. Dinners (or drinks and any other meals) are a good way to unwind on busy days. Aside from having animated discussions, it is an excellent opportunity to learn about your friends’ days — they are just as busy, but perhaps completely different. The overwhelming feeling emerging from the knowledge of the plethora of activities happening on a typical business school day is easily combatted by dessert (thank God for chocolate!).

9:30 P.M. — I spent the next couple hours completing my readings for the next day. It is pertinent to stay on top of your course work to maximize the learning from the classes.

11:30 P.M. — Finally, it was time to hit the bed and get enough sleep before my 8:00 AM class the next morning.

Prospective students often wonder what a typical day is like at business school. It is not a difficult question to answer, but it is certainly one that has a complex answer –it depends. There are a lot of opportunities available at the school at any time, and your participation is only limited by the fact that a day has only 24 hours. However, there is certainly one underlying theme — every day is different and every day teaches you more than you bargained for. So, come with an open mind, know what you want out of your experience, and be ready to effectively manage and plan your time.

When I realized that I wanted to return to school, I knew it was not going to be easy to choose a B-school. The world is full of great schools, each with unique strengths and culture. I gave myself about 6 weeks to come up with the criteria that were important to me in assessing different schools. I think a lot of people underappreciate the importance of this step. While the end goal of this journey is to successfully be admitted to one or more great schools, the process itself provides a great opportunity to become significantly more self-aware, and I think that is important in choosing the ‘right’ school.

At the end of my own introspection, I realized that I attribute a lot of importance to the following criteria:

1. Relationships
2. Research
3. Diversity

Once I identified the criteria that resonated with me, it became very easy to identify a program that offered the best fit. Additionally, I think that in being honest with myself during this step, it was easy for me to tell a convincing story to the admissions team about my motivations to join the program.

A little bit more about my criteria:

Relationships

If I was going to commit to spending two years at a school, I wanted to make sure I was in an environment where I got along with people incredibly well. I had my first conversation with a Fuqua student at an airport, long before I decided to come to business school — it was a random encounter with a complete stranger, and we ended up chatting for over 30 minutes. He was awesome! In retrospect, he probably made the first impression in my mind about Fuqua.

Flash-forward two years — during my admissions process, I met an admissions director, spoke to current students, and met some alumni. Incredibly, though they were all of different nationalities and professional backgrounds, they were very similar in that they were great people to know and to have conversations with. Everyone I met was friendly, helpful, and incredibly smart, and made me feel like I would be welcomed into the Fuqua community.

Research

I worked in the business research industry before school, and really loved my job. So one of the things that drew me to Fuqua was the faculty — they work on really interesting research all the time, and I wanted to be a part of it. Whether it’s Professor Mohan Venkatachalam (affectionately known as “Dr. V”) and his research on the power of vocal cues in inferring company performance, or Professor Ken Wilbur’s unique perspective on TV advertising, I have not been disappointed. In addition to the case and lecture teaching methods, the professors add a lot more color and context to our learning by discussing their personal research. I am not sure if I would have had the same experience if I were at a less research-intense school.

Diversity

While growing up, studying, and working, I had the opportunity to live in a lot of different places (India, Nigeria, and Chile), and I discovered that being around people from different places is important to me. When it came to business school, I wanted to make sure that I’d continue to be exposed to different cultures and ideas. Fuqua has an incredibly diverse community for a school its size, and I knew it would offer multiple opportunities for me to benefit from such interactions. My experience has far exceeded my expectations: my leadership team alone is very diverse both geographically (together we have experiences from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas) and functionally (finance, marketing, operations, public sector, consulting). In the short period of time I have been here, I’ve learned a lot from my teammates, and just learning how to work together has been a great experience.

The admissions process is not only rewarding in that it gets you into a business school, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to reflect on your choices, and think about your future path. One of the most crucial pieces of advice I received during my admission process was to be myself, and not be what I thought the school wanted me to be. So take the time to think about what’s really important to you, and who you are. Then, your story will tell itself. I know mine did.