Do you know what Narayana Murthy has studied?

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BANGALORE, INDIA: When Azim Premji took over the reins of Wipro in 1966 at 21, he was considered unqualified for the job, not because he dropped out of Stanford university, but because he was regarded inexperienced for the huge responsibility that was laid before him. Today, the company built by the same young man is worth $15.9 bn and he is the third wealthiest Indian.

Above all this, he doesn't figure in the elite list of dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as he diligently went back to Stanford and completed his BE in 1999. Unarguably, education paves the way, but what follows as success is the right blend of career choice and timely decision in the world of huge possibilities.

If most of the successful Indian IT honchos have either been MBAs or BEs, others are great learners, often to the point where they are way ahead of the formal education. Corporate leaders come from various disciplines, backgrounds and formal qualifications, but what matters ultimately is the experience to cash in on the available opportunities at that moment.

Apart from being successful, rich and famous, if there is one commonality between NR Narayana Murthy, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Subroto Bagchi or Vineet Nayyar, it is their unbeatable desire to excel and pursue what they truly loved and believed in.

For example Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, graduated in 1976 from Punjab University, Chandigarh, with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

He was all of 18 that year and he started his first business with a capital investment of Rs. 20,000 borrowed from his father. He began making crankshifts for bicycle manufacturers and today, he is the CEO of one of India's top telecom companies. Between crankshifts and Airtel, the only common thread was his clear orientation towards business.

"Being successful as an entrepreneur depends on many factors like access to finance, business acumen, having the right idea and the timing of the idea, luck etc," says Navin Kumar, CEO and Founder of iPrimed Education Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

If educational qualification was the only measure for success, Dhirubhai Ambani wouldn't have quite made it to the list. Soon after his matriculation exam, he was called to take over the family business, though he wanted to study for a bachelor's degree.

Perhaps his vision for investing in future business prompted him to send his son Mukesh Ambani for a course in chemical engineering at University of Bombay. When someone asked Mukesh why he chose chemical engineering, he snapped: "There is a great future in plastic."

Dhirubhai pulled Mukesh out of Stanford where he was studying for his MBA. Nevertheless, Mukesh is a billionaire now heading the multi-billion company, Reliance Industries.

Dinesh Ganesarajah, UK-based entrepreneur, says: "Generally, admission into a top US business school means that you are book smart, have some discipline and that your referees and admissions essays you've accomplished something with your life to date. To often, recruiters use big business school brand names on resumes as a short-cut for doing the comprehensive due diligence necessary for hiring good candidates."

Not everyone is born with a silver spoon, but some like Subroto Bagchi have turned that spoon into silver. Though he aspired to go to Jawaharlal Nehru University to pursue study of International relations at New Delhi, he was forced to give up because of financial crisis. He had to be contended with graduation in political science from Bhubaneshwar and began his career as a lower division clerk in 1976 and when he joined the HCL in 1981, he knew nothing about computers and selling.

As Navin Kumar says: "It is well known that education serves as a lever for social and upward mobility. With the Indian economy swinging more towards services/knowledge world ( like most of the developed nations), the role of holistic education, which focuses on both “knowledge” and “skill”, has become even more important."

Once, Tata group chairman Ratan Tata, whose rise in Tata Group has been rapid, said: "I don't believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and then make them right."

Beyond righting the wrong decisions, the prerequisite for a business is bolstering competencies. That has been the forte of HCL CEO Vineet Nayar, who has studied in India throughout. At a time when foreign degrees were a craze in India, he once created an uproar by commenting that American tech graduates are unemployable. "American technology graduates inferior to grads from countries like India and China, because they are not as disciplined as their counterparts in these countries."

"A foreign degree is not a must for success — what is important is the learning content and the environment that you are exposed to. For e.g. if you study in an ivy league school,  it may help you build connects with the alumni of that institution which can help you open doors as an entrepreneur," says Navin.

Whether it is foreign or Indian, degrees can help provide a student with analytical skills and theoretical perfection essential to a business career, but becoming a successful leader requires readiness and acumen. And there is no particular degree programme for that.