Some Corporates I Encountered

 Worked for Living Media group, the publishers of India Today, in my first job. Before that, Widia who made cutting tools in Bangalore, for my internship.

Marketing Research company, MBA in my second job out of Bangalore and Mumbai. Met Muthu here, and we remain friends to this day.

The Kirloskar group, which founded KIAMS at Harihar. They had many engineering companies like KBL, KOEL and KPCL. We wrote a capstone case on KPCL, and did a BPR consulting project for KOEL.

We recently did MDPs for Whirlpool and the Tata Group (Retail) while I was at IIM Indore. This entailed some research into their operations. Of course, there were other MDP participants from various companies. At IMT Nagpur, we started an MDP for Asian Paints.

Rules of Business and Work

 Work as we know it, consists of a 9 to 5 job in a company or organisation. Unless you are an entrepreneur who works for herself/himself. Then the work hours are undefined. But this is not about work-life balance. It's about the risks involved.

As with everything, there is an upside and a downside to work and to a business. The upside of working is that you have a workplace, and a salary at the end of the month. The downside of course, is that no job is permanent, except a minuscule number of government jobs. So there are chances of getting the sack, for reasons of macroeconomic factors, or mismanagement, or incompetence -yours or somebody else's higher up.

Same goes for businesses. The upside is profits and growth, and so on. The downside risk is that of losses of market share, brand value or just financial losses. No company is permanent. It can transform, get taken over, and so on. 

An intelligent person knows this and moves on to another job, to try his luck. Business owners who are not clingy can also recognise this and sell off (there are many serial entrepreneurs) before the risk gets higher than the potential payoff. Browbeating and blaming does not help (the context is current layoffs in tech including edutech.. no one complained when they were hiring in hordes).