BIMTECH organizes 1st B-school Business Literature Festival, prominent authors share words of wisdom with students

Greater Noida, 6th February: BIMTECH today organized a one-day Business Literature Festival (virtually) to celebrate and foster the culture of reading, writing and publishing of business literature.

Prominent authors and business leaders like Arun Maira, Shiv Shivakumar, Ambi Parameswaran and Abhijit Bhaduri participated in the festival and shared the words of wisdom, accumulated from their long and illustrating careers, with the BIMTECH fraternity.

As a part of the festival, BIMTECH hosted several book launches, candid conversations with prominent authors, book review contests and informative masterclasses on a variety of topics such as digital storytelling, podcasting your books.

In her welcome message, Jayashree Mohta, Chairperson, BIMTECH said, “It is rare to see a B-school curate an event that brings together business leaders and their stories of success, failures and transformation.”

“The Birla family has always endorsed creative and responsible sharing of knowledge amongst future generations. It is heartening to know that the vision of the Birla family to inculcate business values through literature is being taken ahead by the business communication area of BIMTECH.”

Introducing the Business Literature Fest during the inaugural session, BIMTECH Director Dr. H. Chaturvedi said, “We have been visiting Jaipur Literary Fest for a long time, as it has become an icon literature fest not only in India but all over the world. For 5 years, our students went there and observed how the authors, scholars and book readers were interacting, it was a grand experience for them. Then we thought to organize the fest ourselves, we have envisioned from 2012 onwards to organize a Business Literature Fest. We searched on the internet and we found that no Business Literature Fest has been organized by an Indian B-school yet.”

The opening remarks by the Chairperson and Director, BIMTECH were followed by a keynote conversation between Arun Maira, former member of Planning Commission of India and Bharat Wakhlu, former Resident Director at TATA on the excerpts from Maira’s book – “The Learning Factory: How the Leaders of Tata Became Nation Builders”.

During the conversation, Maira talked about the importance of learning and curiosity saying, “When you stop being curious about what’s happening outside and inside, you stop learning, and as my mother would say – you stop living.”

“In India, we need to grow more industries that can produce things that are the best in the world, so that Indians would not need to aspire to buy foreign things, they will get things made in India.”

“About 100 years ago we didn’t have the capability to produce complicated engineering goods, and we had to learn how to do it, this is what a child does – learning to do what he doesn’t know how to do then.”

“Industrialization itself is a process of an organization or many organizations learning to do things that they haven’t been able to do before and aspiring to prove to the world that we can do it too.”

Maira also spoke about the purpose of learning, “Learning to become a billionaire or the next unicorn was not Tata’s spirit, learning to create value for the country, to create livelihood and to create pride in the people who worked with us was important. It is for the cause of others that you have to learn to do things you did not know how to do.”

Wakhlu requested Maira to share that particular instance from his book where he dealt with conflicting expectations of different stakeholders and asked for his advice to approach this kind of conflicting situation the right way.

Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Maira said when you have a difficult decision to make, think of the poorest person that you can see or think of, see how your decision will benefit that person. I feel this is always relevant. If you are going to take a tough decision, think through as quickly as you can, as deeply as you can about how this would benefit the poorest person.

Finally, as an advice to the young lot at BIMTECH, Maira said that the stark inequalities in our country have become even starker during the Covid. Instead of being self-centered, try to shape the world to make it better for everyone.

“Whatever you choose to do, the question that you must keep asking yourself is how can I become better at doing something that needs to be done, not to make myself wealthier, but to make the world a better place.”

Towards the end of the inaugural session, two books edited by Dr H. Chaturvedi and Prof. A.K Dey were unveiled – “Challenges of Managing Business, Social and Ecological Systems in post Covid Era” and “Reinventing Professional Life and Familial Bonding in the post Covid-19 Era“

The books are a compilation of research articles on the impact the pandemic will have on business, financial markets, economy, professional and personal lives, ecology and ecosystem, and their respective recovery strategies.

The research articles were submitted by very senior authors, academicians, practitioners from 12 different countries.

Speaking about how the quality of the books was ensured, Dr. Dey said that the authors were urged to have another person as a co-author from another discipline so that a multiple perspective creeps in and enriches the quality of the output. Also there were stringent reviews at multiple stages, around 10 articles were rejected for being out of the scope, and the final articles were reviewed by 2 independent reviewers.

Watch the inaugural session below:

Watch the full event at https://www.facebook.com/BIMTECH/.