IIMC and Tata Chemicals were adjudged the winners from campus and internal track, respectively, for the 7th Tata Business Leadership Awards (TBLA) while the team of IIM Calcutta comprising Arnav Sinha and Vijay Anand Menon emerged as the winners in The ETCiti Grandmasters held in Mumbai on January 30.
At the Tata Business Leadership Awards, the winners were handed over the trophy and cash prize of Rs 1 lakh by Ratan Tata, chairman, Tata Sons. The IIM-C team consisted of Puneet Jain, Amit Mehta, Puneet Gandhi and Ritesh Saxena.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr Tata said, "It's wonderful to see an organisation of this size reacting to the call for greater innovation. The Tata Group, in the years to come, will look back and find many new areas, which we have entered, or many new processes or products that we have undertaken or enterprises that we have nurtured, have in fact, had the foundation in an exercise such as TBLA."
The participants were invited to present ideas on the theme of 'Globalization — identifying global growth opportunities for the Tata Group'. The teams were given the challenge to present a business case on the opportunity for the Tata Group to grow globally, which could be organic or inorganic.
TBLA has been successfully conducted for students from the country's top seven business schools in India for the past six years. This year, TBLA was also extended to the employees of the Tata Group companies across geographies in which the group operates.
At another important contest ET CITI Grandmasters, the team of IIM Calcutta comprising Arnav Sinha and Vijay Anand Menon emerged as the winners. The ETCiti Grandmasters were held in Mumbai on January 30.
According to IIM-C, of the five finalists, IIM-C was the clear leader with 118 points until the seventh round. In the final (eighth) round, however, IMT Ghaziabad gave jitters to the winners as they made 30 points, finishing as runners-up with a score of 117.
Winners were awarded a Zen Estilo each and Acer laptops and also job offers from Citi. The runners-up received 42 & 32-inch LCD TV sets from Philips.
Ian Gore Citigroup, South Asia HR head, said the grandmasters were a good way of looking at solutions in a different way. Unlike regular quizzes, the grandmasters had rounds that made participants think rather than just recall. In the sixth round called 'stalemate', teams had to come up with a one-minute strategy on developing an idea. Also the quiz, with the theme of chess, made B-school students think beyond Drucker and Ogilvy and feel the real pulse of India.
