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| Anurag Batra |
“Every woman should have four pets in her life. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass who pays for everything.” said Paris Hilton, a celebrity and now an entrepreneur in her own right.
Does Paris Hilton represent the new age woman: individualistic and hedonistic? More importantly, does this new age woman, especially in India, want a fifth pet? Does she want to be an entrepreneur?
I write this column from the annual Cannes Advertising Lions Festival on the French Riviera. I have just come out of IPG’s women leadership network initiative. Having just listened to Martha Stewart, media czarina and the woman behind Martha Stewart Living, I find myself contemplating on the issue of women and their entrepreneurial instincts.
The fundamental question is: are the motivations of a woman to be an entrepreneur very different from those of a man? Do women create enterprises to create a company that they would like to work for or admire, while men create enterprises for the primary aim of making money? Is that too simplistic an assumption in the era where women are powerful and getting as rich as men or more by creating and selling enterprises?
Ask media baronesses Oprah Winfrey and Ariana Huffington, and they will probably tell you that creating an enterprise is about influencing the environment, and they have learnt to accept that being powerful and being a brand while being an entrepreneur is not such a bad thing.
To quote from the blog www.praveenben.com:
“Entrepreneurship is inherent in women. Women are naturally endowed with the qualities required to run an enterprise. A woman undergoes a risk of life to bring life into this world. She does not reject motherhood on the plea of the risk involved. Her maternal instincts overcome the thoughts of risk to life. This is an essential quality for Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is like giving birth to a child. The Woman’s love for her child overcomes the risk to her life. The entrepreneur overcomes the risk of loss with the passion of entrepreneurship. Bringing life by the women is experiencing the inborn creative capacity. When you are creating an enterprise you are experiencing your creative capacity.”
Let me tell you that women want to be like men sometimes when it comes to entrepreneurship. Women want to make money and are driven and focussed like men. Look at women entrepreneurs and leaders in India, such as Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Biocon or Ekta Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms and you know that “what a man can do, a woman can
do better.”
I don’t know if that statement is true but what I do know is that there are women who have risen above their circumstance and taken the entrepreneurial bull by the horn. How were these successful women entrepreneurs able to balance
their act between family obligations and business?
It’s an interesting theme and maybe DARE magazine should devote a special issue to women entrepreneurs and what makes them tick. We will know then.
Meet Anurag Batra
Anurag Batra is real life, first-generation entrepreneur who is Much Below Average (MBA) from the prestigious Management Development Institute, MDI. Anurag is the founder and editor-in-chief of exchange4media group which includes exchange4media.com.
To write to the author, please send an email to dare@cybermedia.co.in with the subject line ‘Anurag Batra’.
The views expressed here are that of the author and do not represent the magazine’s.
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