Anita Dongre says she had to be her own B-school, feels it would have been easier if she did an MBA

Anita Dongre has been in the fashion business for the past 25 years. And while the fashion designer has dressed big names like Kate Middleton, Hillary Clinton, Queen Mathilde of Belgium and Sophie Trudeau, and has built a multi-crore company, she has one regret.

“My biggest regret is that I never did an MBA,” said Dongre, who founded House of Anita Dongre Ltd (formerly known as And Designs India Ltd) with her three siblings in 1995.

“If I had gone to a good MBA school like Harvard, I’d have probably run my business more efficiently and not stumbled,” the designer said at a recent entrepreneurship conclave in Mumbai.


Learning from others
“A lot of people tell me that that’s not true and that people should come to me to learn how to run a business. But there were a lot of problems I faced where I felt that if I had qualified myself with a degree, I’d have been better equipped to deal with the situation,” said Dongre, who got her fashion designing degree from SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai. “I’d maybe have done things differently.”

One of the perks of doing an MBA, Dongre believes, is the ability to learn from other companies. “I read a lot of articles from Harvard and from management institutes and they teach you how to solve problems. They share issues that other companies face and when you have those as examples, maybe you can solve problems better. But I just had to learn how to do that in my own way. I had to be my own management school.”

Asked if not having an MBA made her more creative when it came to solving problems, Dongre smiled and said, “Maybe it’s good that I didn’t do the MBA, in retrospect.”

The Harvard dream
Ironically, Dongre was destined for Harvard in one way or another. Although she never got her MBA, she was invited to speak at the Harvard India Conference in 2016. She opened her talk with, “All my life, I had one burning desire and that was to do an MBA from Harvard. Never got around to doing it but here I am, 30 years later.”