Slowly I started understanding and appreciating the culture of the organisation I had joined. MBA (Marketing & Business Associates) was started by the quartet of CK Sharma, Mathew Paul, Shyam Sundar and Thomas Olapally. Thomas subsequently left the partnership and DD Karopady then joined the partnership.
CK and MP used to teach at IIMB, and set up the agency MBA Ltd. to provide what they thought was a sharper, more business orientated alternative to the industry heavyweight of those days - IMRB. And since they were teachers, they brought along with them a GENUINE academy culture - complete with impromptu class room sessions and R&D projects taken up just for the heck of it . For a brief period of time in the late seventies and early eighties, IMRB and MBA were the 2 large MR agencies in India vying for supremacy. Mode - the other independent agency which made a name for itself - was set up much later.
MBA Ltd. those days had an enviable work ethic - very entrepreneurial but at the same time highly intellectual/ academy oriented. In today's world, these 2 values seem to be "conflicting" values - I remember we used to take on loss making projects just because it posed an intellectual challenge. For a time the founders of MBA could actually grow the agency with these seemingly contradictory values, and developed a terrific reputation among clients for honesty and intellectual rigor. It attracted the best of talent, and even now there are lots of individuals scattered across clients and agencies who owe everything to what they imbibed from their days in MBA Ltd.
But alas those golden days for MBA Ltd. were not destined to last long.
Firstly, the dominance of the "academy" values over everything else among the founders meant weak bottom-lines. And secondly, like any organisation structured in a proprietorial manner, the fortunes of MBA were dependent on a few individual employees who handled some of the key client accounts. When the DNA of the organisation did not provide for aggressive individual growth, conflicts were bound to arise. Sometime in the mid 80's, a fairly large team of senior executives walked out of MBA and started their own agency.
MBA never quite recovered from this blow. It took the Directors of MBA a few years to come out of the feeling of having been betrayed. Although they put together a plan for revival in the late 80's, it was by then too late and the momentum had already slipped away. MBA was fast slipping into a "has been", and was being over-taken by new start-ups.
Finally MBA was sold off - very reluctantly - to Gallup in the late Nineties. It marked the end of a glorious end of the entrepreneurial age in Indian MR, when home grown alternatives actually posed a challenge to the large MNCs. Sadly for the founders of MBA (and for many of us), this was not the way the dreams were supposed to have ended.
CK and MP used to teach at IIMB, and set up the agency MBA Ltd. to provide what they thought was a sharper, more business orientated alternative to the industry heavyweight of those days - IMRB. And since they were teachers, they brought along with them a GENUINE academy culture - complete with impromptu class room sessions and R&D projects taken up just for the heck of it . For a brief period of time in the late seventies and early eighties, IMRB and MBA were the 2 large MR agencies in India vying for supremacy. Mode - the other independent agency which made a name for itself - was set up much later.
MBA Ltd. those days had an enviable work ethic - very entrepreneurial but at the same time highly intellectual/ academy oriented. In today's world, these 2 values seem to be "conflicting" values - I remember we used to take on loss making projects just because it posed an intellectual challenge. For a time the founders of MBA could actually grow the agency with these seemingly contradictory values, and developed a terrific reputation among clients for honesty and intellectual rigor. It attracted the best of talent, and even now there are lots of individuals scattered across clients and agencies who owe everything to what they imbibed from their days in MBA Ltd.
But alas those golden days for MBA Ltd. were not destined to last long.
Firstly, the dominance of the "academy" values over everything else among the founders meant weak bottom-lines. And secondly, like any organisation structured in a proprietorial manner, the fortunes of MBA were dependent on a few individual employees who handled some of the key client accounts. When the DNA of the organisation did not provide for aggressive individual growth, conflicts were bound to arise. Sometime in the mid 80's, a fairly large team of senior executives walked out of MBA and started their own agency.
MBA never quite recovered from this blow. It took the Directors of MBA a few years to come out of the feeling of having been betrayed. Although they put together a plan for revival in the late 80's, it was by then too late and the momentum had already slipped away. MBA was fast slipping into a "has been", and was being over-taken by new start-ups.
Finally MBA was sold off - very reluctantly - to Gallup in the late Nineties. It marked the end of a glorious end of the entrepreneurial age in Indian MR, when home grown alternatives actually posed a challenge to the large MNCs. Sadly for the founders of MBA (and for many of us), this was not the way the dreams were supposed to have ended.
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