Ms MANSI BARANWAL – Founder IGNITE, Director & Entrepreneur in Residence, BAIN & Co. – shared some great learning experiences in a live webinar session on the topic “AN ENTREPRENEUR’S SKILLSET” with PGDM students & aspirants of Asian Business School (ABS) on Friday, 14th May 2021 from 12:00 pm onwards under its “LEAD Lecture Series 2021: Season 6”. As it evolved, the webinar turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for students and young entrepreneurs to listen and learn from an expert who has contributed tremendously to entrepreneurship development!
Ms Mansi Baranwal is a director and resident entrepreneur based in New Delhi. She leads IGNITE, a Baincubator startup and thriving online program, which trains leaders to deliver results from transformations and change programs. Ms Mansi previously served as a senior manager with Bain & Company. Her seven years of consulting experience have yielded, in particular, a deep understanding of the consumer products industry. She has advised several billion-dollar companies across India, SEA and Africa on growth, customer experience, performance improvement, go-to-market acceleration, and marketing effectiveness.
A certified executive coach, Ms Mansi has also led multiple social sector engagements both in and outside of Bain. She is also a co-founder of the Headstart Network Foundation, one of India’s largest grassroots-level organizations which support entrepreneurship and startups. Before joining Bain, Ms Mansi was a senior software developer at Yahoo. She holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
The webinar was a core initiative of Asian Business School (ABS) – which is a constituent group college of Asian Education Group (AEG) and is ranked as one of the best B-schools in Delhi NCR – for all PGDM/MBA students& aspirants. Since this webinar was a closed session, students were required to register for the same. The webinar was followed by a lively Q&A session with the distinguished guest.
The live session commenced with a welcome note, followed by a brief introduction of the distinguished guest by Ms Garima Malhotra on behalf of the AEG family. Beginning her talk, Ms Mansi Baranwal, first of all, expressed her grateful thanks to Ms. Garima Malhotra for the “long introduction” about her and said, “I am an entrepreneur no doubt, but more than that I am an optimist who believes in making things possible.”
Ms Mansi Baranwal then got on straight to the topic of the day, viz. “AN ENTREPRENEUR’S SKILLSET” and began her talk by way of a PPT presentation that included on-spot polls for the participants. Speaking about the important role of entrepreneurs, she said, “Entrepreneurs continue to change the face of the economies worldwide, but entrepreneurship is not restricted to founders anymore. It is now more inclusive and comprehensive and is guided by digital transformation, innovation and training needs.” Talking specifically about “SKILLSETS”, she stated that “the entrepreneurial skillset is essential to success in any role and it can be bifurcated as ‘Hard Skills’ and ‘Soft Skills’.” She then enumerated ‘Hard Skills’ as consisting of Market analysis, Strategic thinking, Finance basics, Sales & Marketing, Project management/multitasking, Test & learn/agile innovation, and Technology/coding basics. Discussing ‘Soft Skills’, she listed them as Ownership, Getting things done from nothing, People skills (like empathy/listening for consumers, charisma for team and investors, etc.), High bar on quality, Resilience/discipline, and Adaptability/Continuous learning.
Ms Mansi Baranwal then opened the session for questions from the participants. Several questions were put up by the students, most of which were related to the various aspects of entrepreneurship. To each of these questions, the distinguished speaker provided the most convincing answers.
Towards the end of her session, in her message for the ABS students aspiring to fulfil their entrepreneurial ambitions, the distinguished guest Ms Mansi Baranwal said, “Don’t indulge in life seriously. Don’t try things for the sake of trying. Don’t try to over-engineer things. Try doing things and learn from things and one day you will know exactly what you want to do. Take up things that give you joy and learn to live life not so seriously!”
As a token of gratitude, Ms Mansi Baranwal was presented with a glittering “Memento” on behalf of the Asian Education Group, which was most appreciated by the distinguished guest.