Are management graduates meant to be corporate servants or corporate masters? As a responsible member of the student community, what steps would you t

B-school students are trained in all aspects of business; there are various courses on Entrepreneurship and leadership apart from the specialized subjects on Marketing, Finance and Operations. After two years of study, the students could be either a great employee (corporate slave) or a great entrepreneur (corporate master). The distinguishing traits of an entrepreneur would be leadership skills with the ability to guide and influence people, vision with clarity of goals and risk-taking and smart risk-hedging abilities. Some say these skills cannot be acquired. But the broader objective of any B-school is to train students for business in the contemporary world to acquire these skills.
Though an entrepreneur starts off independently, as he grows, he will need the expertise of people to execute various functions of his business such as Marketing, Accounting among others. Any Business cannot have only entrepreneurs or only employees. If it has to run successfully, there has to be a good mix of people who can lead others with ideas and people who can implement those ideas to perfection. Every country needs entrepreneurs like Narayana Murthy who can single-handedly influence its economy and every company needs employees like Jack Welch who has always worked under others but had a tremendous impact on the company they work for.

There are three varieties of students who get into a B-school:
Category 1: Students who have a clear agenda of becoming an Entrepreneur
They are full of energy and enthusiasm and come to a B-school for a structured learning oriented towards their goal of becoming an entrepreneur. They seek opportunities from the B-school to test and hone their skills so that they could start their own venture immediately after they pass out. They are vulnerable as much as they are eager. If the climate in the B-school is unfavourable, if the pedagogy is not entrepreneurial oriented, if the peers show indifference, if the faculty is not motivating enough, then there is a danger of this person slipping to category 2 or sometimes even category 3. There are very less number of people in this category.

Category 2: Students who are flexible; they are open to experiment during the two years and keep the decision pending. A person from this category is the most open minded of the three categories. He is eager to learn about Entrepreneurship and ready to experiment with it. They are ready to be influenced by either category 1 or category 3 people. They should be handled with special care.

Category 3: Person from this category would be risk-averse and believes that he is better off working for someone else rather than trying something on their own. This category is simply not interested in becoming entrepreneurs and are waiting to be hired by a HUL or a McKinsey.

Entrepreneurship is a state of mind not a body. To change the mindsets of people who have never thought about starting something on their own would be a major challenge to any college. Having merely the compulsory courses as a part of the curriculum would not be very effective. To get them really interested and make them think about it seriously is a different ballgame altogether. The B-schools should create an incubation centre within their campus. There must be a mini-entrepreneurial project done by different teams of students in this incubation centre. The constraints such as manpower, money are clearly defined. This would get the students to come out of their comfort zone and think innovatively. Generally, the availability of resources is assumed by the executives who work in high profile companies. This would be an effective way to get the students to learn the basics of grass-root level business.
The above solution could help have an impact on the category 3 people especially. They might not move to category 1 straightaway and the chances of that happening are also less, but they might move to category 3 and would think of starting up their own venture after a few years of work experience. That would still be an achievement on the part of the B-school.

Perhaps, the biggest influence a B-school has on an aspiring Entrepreneur is the collaboration and partnerships that he develops over the two years. Sitting in a class of bright students, the person sitting to his right might get into a VC company and get him his funding in future. Similarly, there might be other people who might be his vendors, suppliers, financers and so on. The ecosystem where such collaboration could happen must be facilitated by the B-school. There must be enough opportunities for the students to work with one another in teams so that they get to know other potential people around them.
Apart from intra-school collaboration, there are untapped synergies that exist among various schools. This must be identified by the management of the schools and should be pursued to create networking among like-minded wannabe entrepreneurs to get together and motivate each other to make a bigger impact.

I would want to share something that has already been put into practice by me in my college. This is a theme-based workshop series. Every month there would be a workshop arranged for the students. The sessions will be start with busting Myths about entrepreneurship and then there would be ideation sessions where real entrepreneurs and VCs discuss the raw ideas by the students and give them feedback. This will initiate a thought process among students. Then there will be a session on B-plan components such as revenue model, marketing strategy, and finance among others. The final session would be on how to sell your idea to a VC or an Angel investor. This will actually take their idea live.

Another initiative called "Start-up jobs" could be taken in B-schools. For those students who want to work under some ohter entrepreneur before taking a plunge on his own, we could get the those start-up companies come to B-schools for placements and hire those interested people who want to know what is it like in a new venture and what it takes to succeed. This is learning for them at the cost of other people's time and dime.