Custom made for teenagers

[1]

By Subroto Bagchi [2]

Rs 199

After tasting success with three business books targeted at 20-45 year olds, author Subroto Bagchi, who is the chairman and co-founder of IT services firm MindTree Ltd, decided it was time to demystify the world of business for teenagers.

Halfway through writing his book, MBA at 16: A Teenager’s Guide to the World of Business, he realised that he was shooting in the dark — writing for teenagers when his last interaction with a teenager happened when his daughter left home for higher studies, way back in 2001.
Bagchi systematically went about deciphering the minds of today’s 16-year-olds over a programme called “Business with Bagchi”. He spent four weekends in January 2011 with a hand-picked group of 31 boys and girls from Bengaluru’s National Public School and the International School. As a result of finding out first-hand what exactly these teenagers knew and wanted to know about the world of business, Bagchi trashed his half-done manuscript and began writing a book whose content, style and narrative was largely determined by the teenagers themselves.
MBA at 16 is an attempt to reach out to teenagers who are far removed from the esoteric world of business. The book aims to make them aware that business has an impact on their lives from the time they wake up in the morning to when they retire at night. Interestingly, most of the students Bagchi interacted with appear as characters in the book. The author weaves in stories of entrepreneurs who created huge businesses, like Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), V.G. Siddhartha (Café Coffee Day) and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Biocon), through every day situations in the lives of teenagers. The book introduces teenagers to the world of venture capitalists, outsourcing, angel investors, supply chain management, marketing and branding, total quality management, micro-finance etc, in a language that is easy to understand and each placed neatly in situations that teenagers can relate to.
“The idea is not to teach business concepts to teenagers, but to let them know that 24x7 a business is touching you. The mattress you are sleeping on came from a series of business enterprises, the cornflakes you eat came from corn grown a thousand miles away, the overhead fan came from a separate business and the power that made it work was a service from a utility provider,” says Bagchi. “So the book is a way of telling them that they are impacted in many ways by the world of business, whether they like it or not. It aims to open their eyes and urge them to explore this world on their own terms, so that they are well-informed and not positively or negatively biased”, he says.
Asked whether he would write for women or senior citizens in future, Bagchi said, “It is better to salute the rising sun than the setting sun. I want to reach out to our young teenagers because we, in the world of business, have done very little to create interest in the youth beyond swooping down on them in droves during recruitment time and then forgetting them for the rest of the year. Why should we wait to engage young people in a discussion on business when they are in college; why not when they are ready to leave school, when the impressions that get etched in their minds guide them throughout their adult lives? Practising authors like me are creating intellectual infrastructure for the country.”