René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Yesterday I had the honour of being invited by INSEAD, a business school, as a guest speaker and member of a panel for around 20 Danish executives within a curriculum focused entirely on globalization. Organized by the Singapore Campus of the school, the approach was very smart: Fly the participants for one week to India where you blend top-level teaching with meetings of companies and entrepreneurs “on the ground”.

It was about two months back that Aparna Dogra from INSEAD told me about the project and asked me if I was interested to speak about my experience. Of course I was. So I joined for lunch at the venue, the Taj Landsend hotel in Mumbai (Bombay), to meet also the two professors responsible for the teaching part: Christoph Zott and Jonathan Story, absolutely amazing fellow where I had to realize what difference they made to the kind of professors I used to have in Augsburg during my own studies. To say that there are super-smart is obvious and certainly that kind of prerequisite you need teach at INSEAD, but beyond that, they were at the latest state of research, cross-disciplined, very curious in constantly asking questions and completely service-oriented taking the feedback from their students extremely serious. And what I liked most, they were absolutely approachable, easy to talk to and fun. Quite some difference to the distant behavior, sometimes even to the extent of arrogance, that I remember.

What was the session about? All together, there were three people on the panel, with Rohan Vaziralli, Head of India of Estée Lauder, Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm and Passionfund and myself. Each of us had around 20 minutes to share his experience on the following topics which Christoph aka Prof. Zott had suggested:

a. What made you become interested and involved in business-building with(in) India?
b. How is business-building in India different from business-building in other countries?
c. What are the similarities, i.e., what lessons from other contexts could you apply in India?
d. What lessons about building a business in India did you learn?
e. What are the three (or more) things that you wish somebody would have told you before?

After three years in India, I indeed had to sit down around one hour the day before to condense the many, many stories out that I could tell easily over a whole day into 20 minutes and at the same time bring some meaningful economic and entrepreneurial framework to it. And I came well within the time. During the next part, the students were asked to present some business ideas where India would play a major role, either for example as a sourcing destination, as a target market for export or even a concept targeted entirely for the Indian domestic market. And us three from the panel were providing constructive feedback and getting into very good discussions with the participants and professors.

It was an amazing and also rewarding experience to see that without really having gotten aware of it, I had gathered really quite some comprehensive experience on this great country and the way to make your way through. What is more, I found the event very much fun so that I decided that I will talk more often publicly on India.

Today, day off, although still a bit of work on the computer. As I was talking to some friends in Munich on the phone who told me that it had started to snow, here my seasons’ greetings from my outsourced workstation today :-)