As per Drucker, ‘Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation and if you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.’
And my Marketing 101 taught me that, “
Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires.”
It was during another one of those mid terms when you feel like doing everything else but not study. I was surfing internet, moving from one article to another, with anxiety that I should study else I might flunk. Soon I stumbled upon a link shared by a colleague. It was from a commencement speech from a Harvard Prof which talked about the mission of an MBA student. I was surprised and amused to know that MBAs do have a common mission. But there he was bang on –
Create Value.
(You can check the
video here for your epiphany.
Thanks Dhruv for giving me an opportunity to witness mine)
And what am I doing here in my MBA class - writing notes and filling PPTs with data that someone else researched on or submitting last minute assignments without even liking some of them, blaming others for the free ride while I am doing the same on my life goals. And then I looked back and thought about the value that I have created till date.
I am one of those lucky people who on other hand have no right to say that they don’t have grounds to test their knowledge and learning. I am an entrepreneur and I should be the one seeing the opportunities in needs of unsatisfied customers and then creating products/services to leverage the same.
It was some kind of awakening moment. Though we all have many of them every fortnight, I thought this one should not go wasted. It actually made me think of the problems that we faced in our venture and how many of them we have solved. Did we add value? Yes, May be. Did we innovate? No, I am not sure. I called up my partners and surprisingly all of us were thinking on the same lines –
Let us Innovate and solve some problems. (One suggestion to everyone: Get Co Founders with complementary skills and resonating ideas.)
I will share the story of that session some other time (only if you buy me a beer) but from that session came the idea of My Dream Store (
http://www.mydreamstore.in ).
I am happy to share with you that we have launched it in beta. Be there to witness the future of Customization in India and I am proud of the fact that we are all poised to create value for the society.
The mantra was:
Quit Early. Quit Often. Create Value. Empathize & Be Humble.
Time to act on other parts.
P.S.: My opinion might be biased due to the Ideal Social Self concept I am trying to project which might be due to transformation of subjective norms or my choice of conforming to specific referents out of many. Request the readers to consider it just like any other human frailty and forgive me.
Also as engineering taught us that there are exceptions in every theory, the people who feel stereotyped can comfortably assume themselves to be the ones.
About writer: Writer is a dreamer studying at IIM Bangalore. For now his identity is anonymous as he doesn't want to be treated as pariah.
