Everyone needs to know what he or she wants to achieve - everyone must have a vision for himself or herself. I know all of you have got jobs already, what is called “Placement” in the IIM parlance. I know the success of placement depends on the level of salary one gets. So telling you how to choose your job is not useful to you. I don’t know how you choose the companies that you want to work in. When we go to a shop and want to buy a shoe or a dress or toothpaste, we look at the price, perhaps at the brand and take a decision. We don’t ask the question whether the company that produced the product is a socially responsible corporation, whether it has good corporate governance practices.

There is more and more realisation coming into the world that corporate social responsibility is a fundamental purpose of an organisation - something that we in the Tata Group and in Tata Steel have practised for hundred years. We often use metrics such as market cap, profits and monetary terms to measure or judge individual corporations. The real metric is Total Returns to the Society and if we use this metric, you will, perhaps, use a different yardstick to choose your jobs.

  
As you go through your life, you will have some success and many disappointments and failures. Failure and disappointment teach us much more than successes. In fact, when I sit down to select a person for a key job I give preference to the ways a person has handled failures than merely go by how one handles successes.

Excerpts from the Convocation Address by
Mr B Muthuraman at IIM, Kolkata on April 1, 2006.