Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Opportunity to learn - lost in ambition for glamour?

This blog post is for the young hospital Management students. Please read the content on the link first, before reading my blog.



If you have read the post on the link above, you must have realized that the above link is not a good example to share with the young management students as I feel Tristan was lucky. 

I sometime feel scared when I see the management students desperately trying to get internships at 'great/renowned' companies/hospitals. They hope that they will learn something there. I see that 'annoyed' look on their faces when they are not assigned a fortis or apollo or a big consulting firm. They feel dejected feeling that the opportunity to learn has suddenly diminished. But the problem dear students: Learning depends on who teaches you and what. Teaching depends on the aptitude to share knowledge. Unfortunately the popular companies are usually too busy and may not be able to impart enough to add value to the students. The other ridiculous problem is that healthcare organisations do not share knowledge too easily. 

Intrestingly, the places where the students will learn the most will be the small setups, startups, setups struggling to grow. These are the avenues where both - the organisation and the student will learn from each other, and there will be immense freedom to do so. Glamour only lasts so much, but experience will last forever.

My mantra for success has been : stay hungry to learn, from anyone.

Regards.
Dr Akash S Rajpal - MD & CEO, EKOHEALTH.

About: Ekohealth is a startup promoted to change the face of the Indian Healthcare Industry. It aims at providing a never envisioned before value to every stake holder of the health industry, be it the patient or the provider. Ekohealth aims at improving the quality of the health provider via nabh/iso/business excellence and aims at increasing the awareness of the patient and bringing him/her at the platform to demand quality healthcare at great value. Ekohealth envisions enrolling one lakh patients within a years time. Ekohealth is looking forward eagerly to work with bright young enterprising management students and other interested individuals and organisations to make ekohealth known in every household in this country.

After thoughts:

In the post on the pasted link above, there is though a very relevant excerpt, which is a must read to be ahead of the rat race and be successful:

"be so enamored with the product that you would work for the company even if they didnt hire you….more importantly find where the needs are within the organization and be willing to do whatever it takes to help them fill the need (work for free even!)…and MOST importantly make sure that youre filling a need that the organization doesnt have the resources to fill on its own. 

If a company is not willing to let a hungry, passionate, smart, unpaid advocate of the product help the organization to fill that need (when it doesnt have the resources to do it itself) then you probably shouldnt be working at the company anyway.