“Commitment And Desire Are Important For Learning”

Runam Mehta has more than 15 years of experience in the Indian healthcare industry. She spent over seven years at Portea Medical, India's largest home health care company, before assuming her role as the CEO of HealthCube. She also ran a successful venture, Work Ergonomics.

Working with Portea Medical, Mehta was advised to pursue an MBAfor further career growth. She applied to IIM Bangalore’s executive general management programme (EGMP). Falling short of the eligibility criteria of eight years of work experience by six months, she still made it on the strength of the work she had done. 

The management programme provided her with the opportunity to apply their immediate knowledge in real business scenarios, allowing her to connect the dots between theory and application. The MBA provided a structure, a sense of belonging and the opportunity to learn from knowledgeable professors and peers. The group work was also an opportunity to learn from different industries, allowing the trained physiotherapist to apply her knowledge into her own organisation. 

A Recipe For Success

The importance of an executive management programme is to address gaps in knowledge and become a better professional, believes Mehta. MBA programmes do not provide expertise but information, knowledge, and a recipe for success. However, becoming an expert in a domain requires one to have a great amount of experience and understanding, she says.

The course was very practical-oriented and entailed a lot of case studies. “The pace was very fast as much ground had to be covered in a very limited timeframe. And that's why the experience is also critical because someone who does not have enough experience may not be able to keep up with the pace,” says Mehta.

Given the rigour of the programme, commitment is extremely important. “You have to cut down on a lot of other things in your life and commit to excel. During the one year of the programme, I rarely went out for a dinner or movie. And very often I would catch on actual work. It was literally like having two full-time jobs,” she cautions. 

The benefits of the programme were commensurate with the efforts that she had to put in. “My one-year course gave me maybe four- or five- years’ worth of jump in career, which you can witness from the promotions I got, the responsibilities I got, and from the fact that I became a professional CEO a few years after finishing my management programme.

She is also impressed with the spirit of entrepreneurship that isfostered at the B-school. “IIMs, and IIM-B specifically, are doing a lot to nurture innovation or entrepreneurship. There are accelerators, there is mentorship, and interactions that happen with people who have built companies within the ecosystem. They are absolutely at the forefront,” she proudly states.