Ten MBA Learnings from Best MBA College in Jaipur

What are the key takeaways? What are the things that you learn and would stay with you for years to come after doing an MBA from Best MBA College in Jaipur? An MBA from IPS BUSINESS SCHOOL gives you technical skills and core subject matter knowledge but some lessons stand out. Here is a list which we thought about sharing with you.

The free markets work…mostly
- And when they don't, there is one word that describes that failure – Externalities. Externalities are actions taken by us whose impacts are felt by others. However, the impacts are not taken into account by us while we act. You don't need a business school to tell you that free markets are the most optimal economic mechanism to generate and distribute wealth, but you do need to understand why and when markets fail and what to do about them. If you ever feel that a market based solution is not working, hunt for the externalities.

Marketing is much more than advertising
- Advertising is the face of marketing for many and we cannot think beyond. What you learn in MBA is that for a business marketer, the ad creative is the last thing that should matter. Marketing runs parallel to all your business decisions (as does operations). The key is to think of a customer problem to be resolved, to identify a unique customer segment, to tailor the product to address their problem and then to position it to them. Your job is to own the strategy, the creative is owned by an agency. Never try to modify the creative. Simply reject it if it betrays the product positioning and strategy.
Do not mistake correlation for causality
- A lot of sensational articles you see on the web suffer from this syndrome. The human mind is trained to search for cause/effect relationships everywhere and the first plausible one that we come across tends to get sanctified. Whenever you see a sensational headline or a piece of business research in your field, pause and ask whether it is merely a correlation or an actual causation.

Conditional Probability guides a lot of our value based debates
- Decision Sciences or Probability Studies can explain almost everything in life. Bayes' Theorem or conditional probability is often behind a lot of our policy debates – our views are conditioned by our station in life. If you are wealthy, a redistributive economic policy would not appeal to you while if you belong to an economically weaker strata of society, you would push for such a policy. Our values are dependent on our existing conditions. But ask yourself this – if you could not choose how or where you would be born, and on one end of the probability tree is richness and wealth and on the other end lies deep poverty and deprivation, would you still prefer a world without any safety nets? This is a fascinating perspective, one that you will consider during your MBA and it opens up our thinking to the scope of application of probability concepts.
Doing currency arbitrage is like picking pennies in front of a speeding truck
- Think of International Finance, and at some level we all think we can game the markets. You become sensitive of exchange rates in India and for example the US – always searching for that arbitrage. What MBA teaches you is to forecast currency rates, and unless you are playing with millions of dollars of (ideally) someone else's money, currency arbitrage is likely to burn you. You cannot forecast currency depreciations and interest rate changes and eventually it becomes a zero sum game. The other big learning from MBA – the best way to hedge against currency risk is to produce locally and that currency hedging is a long term marriage.
Fall in love with the problem, not the product
- An often repeated mistake in technology markets is to become obsessed with a product and not the problem. The case of Iridium stands as a landmark tombstone here. A brick heavy phone developed in the 1990s to help solve the problem of being able to communicate when you had no access to landline telephones. The issue was that Iridium was very expensive and could only work when the user was in a clean line of sight with the satellite. Yet Iridium continued to bleed money simply because no one stood up to say that they were too focused on the product and not the customer problem. The cellphone revolution eventually did the talking for them.

There is wisdom in the crowd
- Under the right conditions (a straightforward problem not requiring expertise and the crowd possessing basic knowledge about the problem), a crowd can outperform a team of experts. From whether it is predicting who will become Prime Minister to who gets picked as the #1 player in an IPS draft to what is the time taken by a cheetah in a video to run 100 meters, the crowd can outperform the average prediction of individual experts in all cases. There is a catch though and that is called diversity – the crowd must be sufficiently diverse for its errors to cancel out.
The best strategies get tripped by non-market events
- We now operate in a world where businesses routinely must think, care about and accommodate their external stakeholders. The ability of non-market events to scuttle a business plan is enormous and in MBA from top mba colleges in jaipur, needs to be a core focus area from both national and international perspective. How do businesses form coalitions to guard their interests against changing regulations? How do we manage gatekeepers and regulators? How do we align interests and how do we safeguard investments in emerging markets with uncertain governments and weak judicial systems? Corporations like Walmart have been singed by non-market events all over the world. What came across as lying at the frontier of business decision making is now a more frequent reality and something that can pour water on the best laid plans.
The best way to build culture is through guidelines and not rules
- You will hear many professors speak about value based leadership and how to use values to guide decision making. A lot of organisations take pride on their culture and a lot many try to change theirs. A key learning in MBA is that culture is not a dictum – it is an evolutionary process and hence best left to broad guidelines to govern it rather than strict rules. Rules promote backlash and workarounds whereas guidelines allow sufficient flexibility for implementation. Another critical learning is the use of social norms – people follow the lead of those around them. Put them in relatable situations, tell them what their peers did and affirm positive values to achieve behaviour change.

Never enter into a negotiation without planning
- Always have a BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated solution), prepare and identify your and your counterpart's priorities and find room for give and take by looking at all the issues together. You will be surprised by the extent of scope everyone has to compromise.