Career perspectives...

This was the topic of an open forum at ISB today - with 5 esteemed speakers giving us advice and their perspectives on career building and MBA. I guess this is the first forum in which I have stayed wide awake thru out for 2.5hrs!! The session was just amazing and very informative. I won't disclose the profiles of the speakers here , but they were people who held posts like VP, COO, CEO's etc - very successful entrepreneurs and each one had a wealth of experience in their bags.

One of the speakers was explaining the importance of "brands" in today's world. He gave a very nice example...
Speaker : What is Kingfisher?
Students: (Immediate answers) ..Beer, Airlines, etc etc
Speaker: It is a bird :)
This shows that we remember Kingfisher first as a product and not a bird...It speaks volumes about what branding is all about today!! Any thoughts?

Some of the key take aways and learnings I have from this session .....

- Intuition is very important. MBA makes u dependant on the left side of the brain. Try to go by your gut feel too.
- Never let ego come in way of self-interest
- There is only so much u can plan. Be open for various opportunities that knock your door. One cannot have a definite plan in life, but have a general direction. Being at the right place at the right time really matters.
- Be careful of what you measure in life. Check how much happiness u are able to derive. Are you happy with what u are?
- Life is an optimization of compromises. It is full of trade-offs.
- Management is not science. You cannot replicate the learnings (like experiments) and get the same results everytime. Take the learnings with a pinch of salt.
- 3 important aspects in your job : Role, Superior, Colleagues - Even if one of them is a turn down there is no point in pursuing that job...
- Sticking to one company is a better idea than shifting bases often - Rolling stones gather no momentum.
- Networking is the most important aspect in a B-school education.
- Continuous learning is critical