MBA hummmmm....

Signing off..

2006-04-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my last post here. ISB journey is done with. Soon our laptops will be formatted. So, for a (pleasant) change, will not be connected for a few days.

Great experiences, some awesome memories, some managerial tools & techniques, a body of theoretical knowledge, a few friends & some useful acquaintances and a job to look forward to - is what I take away from this place. Will definitely miss ISB after leaving it. To quote one of our profs, this is one of the few real temples of India.

The year's been both mindblowing & disappointing at times. This blog was register my states of mind as I do my MBA. I hope this also contributed in some way in defining the 'ISB experience'. Bharani, Vijay & others have done a much better job of writing about ISB life.

All the best to Class of '07. Fasten your seat belts. This one year will be transformational in many ways. Dont let others color your thoughts. Work hard & create your own canvas. ISB will give you all the colors you want.

As someone said - MBA is one great intellectual winetasting session. I can safely say that ISB is a near perfect host.

So long.

Go to market & Take charge..

2006-03-30T11:55:00.000-08:00

That was Prof. Nirmal Gupta's parting message to us. Taking two of his courses has been a great experience. A coupla pics we shot after the class.

So, time to wind up...

2006-03-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

Time to think about packers & movers, to calculate & recalculate EMI options, to start exchanging messenger id's, to prepare for probably the last exam I'll write. Last 11 & a half months have just flown by. In just more than a week, we'll be handed over that piece of paper signed by deans of ISB, Wharton & Kellogg. Paper which is supposed to be a testimonial of transformation what we've undergone, adorably called as 'Trauma Transformation' in ISB lingo.

Tomorrow morning is my last class. A few parties this weekend & next week maybe. A coupla dinner appointments with professors this term. & then, another MBA will pass through the gates of ISB. Am feeling more nervous than excited. Will I make a difference finally? Time will tell.

Life will be hectic right after ISB. Getting married to my sweetheart on 22nd of same month. Then will spend some time at home & then fly off to enjoy the Phuket beaches.
Job, joining dates, bosses, rat races, clients ... ahh I hope I can avoid em for some more time.

Elective professor of the year - Nirmal Gupta

2006-03-24T23:24:00.000-08:00

Its official - Prof. Nirmal Gupta has been voted by ISB Class of '06 as Elective Professor of the year. 35% of the class (normalising for class strength) thinks so. For me, he is by far the best professor (both core/electives combined).

The 2 courses he takes - Marketing Implementation (term V) & Managing Markets (term VIII) are just AWESOME. In fact, by not taking his courses, you miss out on something special ISB has to offer. Immaterial whether it takes 1000 or 2000 points in Term V bidding - anyone with interest in Marketing (& btw how can any MBA not have?) HAS to take these courses. His rating for the two courses for class of '05 were 6.85 & 6.9 out of 7. Sometimes, the amount of takeaways from his single classes were more than some of the other entire courses.

Class of '07 would be lucky to receive a special pre-term session on 'How to prepare Case studies?'. He took a similar session for us in term V. We requested him to advance that to the start of ISB MBA so that subsequent batches could take maximum benefit from that session.
Class of '07 - Not everything which he will say in that session will make sense since you wouldnt have grappled with actual case studies then. Just make notes of what he says & try to follow it however much you can.

You can read his profile at : http://www.isb.edu/faculty/faculty_teaching.asp?FID=72

A separate post later on why he rocks.

When Ford Prefect becomes a consultant..

2006-03-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Wonder what if Ford Prefect were to become a hot shot consultant. Well, this is what his blog could look like....

http://www.gettingdrunkinfirstclass.com/

PS: Got this blog link today in a fwd & couldnt help comparing that with Ford's inimitable writing style.

Almost Alums..

2006-03-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

Thats how the mail from admin regarding Graduation ceremony schedule addresses us. The counter on Bharani's blog shows 36 days left for graduation. Have gotten so used to this lifestyle. No work pressures. Some self inflicted pressure of academics. More self inflicted pressure of placements. Actually, some have also inflicted upon themselves the pressure of utilising the facilities at ISB after they are done with placements. I am told that gymnasium, swimming pool & squash court are being swarmed by all those who gained signs of prosperity in the last one yr.

Anyways.. lots been happening. Most of the batch is placed. Some are playing tough & still fishing around for jobs to match their specifications. Georgie is paying a visit tommorrow. The campus looks like a high security zone. With all the national & intl media, this one will def be a great PR event for ISB too.

btw, the last term started. My fav prof - Nirmal Gupta is back. Hez taking the Managing Markets course (wiz a continuation of his Marketing Implemetation course in term V). His is the course in which I feel like putting in a lot of effort on preparing for cases up for discussion next class. One of these days I will blog about the marketing courses at ISB & my views on them. Marketing Strategy is another course I've taken this term. Its being taught by Prof George Day (Wharton). Sounds pretty interesting. & the hot favourite course on campus this term is 'Leadership Insights from World Literature' by Rajeshwar. Continuation of LDP stuff. Its a treat to listen from such a well read guy. Heard that hez gonna discuss Bhagwad Gita & Odessey today. Just going to his class & doing nothing but listening is enriching in itself.

ding ding ding ... tringgggg

2006-02-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Got my first offer. With Analytics firm- Inductis. Decent offer. Am happy with it.
Placement Season looks good. Lets hope we break the records set by previous batches.
More later.

D day...

2006-02-16T14:09:00.000-08:00

Finally its come. Mckinsey, BCG & Microsoft kick off the placements proceedings today. Am interviewing with M$ only. Lots of other firms lined up for next 7 days. Here's wishing myself & everyone at ISB very good luck for the placements. Hope I would have something to look upto the next time I write here. Till then.

2 very imp virtues..

2006-02-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

Are Brevity & Simplicity.

& It requires so much practice, discipline & clarity of thought to appear concise & simple in your communication. Essential to cut through the clutter of messages which a consumer faces.

& Most certainly relevant to the battles that lie near.

Grademongers on prowl at the campus...

2006-02-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

McK & BCG are the first ones to come out with their shortlists. 30 odd people in each list. Both lists look almost similar except the fact that McK is sorted on surnames & BCG one on first names. Hope a lot of (& different set of) people make the final cut. This time around, serious consulting aspirants have done good prep. & Anyways, not many people would like to compete with the deanlisters for other non-grade intensive jobs. btw, MC companies are awesome when it comes to marketing their companies & careers. Everything about their PPTs is so well executed. No wonder they end up inviting the most number of applications for their openings. Exception to the rule was this one of the top tier firms (many wouldnt say so actually). The presentation was totally pedestrian & principals sounded arrogant. Total turnoff. Many midtier IT firms did a much better job than them. But then again, they are an exception. Prolly, will fall off the prestigious list of MC firms soon.

Just about 2 weeks to go & lots of work to do. This is the last lap of the marathon. Many many runners are close enough. Lets see what happens.

Real time performance measure.

2006-01-23T04:23:00.000-08:00

Here at ISB, after every course is over, the students are asked to fill up a satisfaction survey ( asking to rate the course & the instructor on a semantic scale of 1-7 on various parameters). Supposedly, these ratings are used by the academic office to decide whether the student population likes a particular professor & the course or not. This data is then used for tweaking the course structure for next batch. Previous year ratings for some of the elective term profs are made available to the batch while bidding for course electives. (So that you can pump in more points if a Prof has a star rating or can skip a course if that is rated high on workload, etc).

However, like most market research techniques, there is a high chance of biases/counfounding creeping in people's judgements when they are asked to do so based on their memory. I would like to think that most people (who fill up the survey diligently) do that on a general basis of 'feel good' about the course or the prof. & that is also highly influenced by the last few classes. If a prof didnt really evoke a lot of interest in last 3 sessions but did a rocking job in first 7 of them, he is more likely to suffer in his ratings. & Other such data collection issues.

Been thinking about a better way of judging how a prof/course is doing. One could be to ... Just obeserve the number of people with open laptops in the class. This could be observed over say more than (say) 3 classes to remove special effects of events like ongoing cricket match (whose score needs to be tracked ball by ball on cricinfo.com) or an impending shortlist of a company due in the day (which requires F9 pressing every 30 sec). Think most people would agree that we dont need to pass time on a laptop when the prof is rocking or when the course itself is interesting.

A large number of students in the class having laptops open is akin to a person presenting in front of a disinterested audience. I wonder why dont some of the profs take this sign as a real time measure of their performance in class.

Branding.

2006-01-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

So, you can say ...

Companies like Coca Cola, Microsoft, GE, Intel, etc come to recruit at ISB for various management positions.

Or you can say ...

Top 6 out of global top 10 brands trust ISB graduates to lead them to a position of global dominance in the ever changing business environment.

No no. Am not writing a brand line for ISB or anybody. Not qualified enough to do that.

Essence is that in this season of ppt's, job postings, resumes & job talk everywhere - you better package your seemingly commonplace skills as earth shaking capabilities ... just exactly fitting as what was being required of that job posting.

I need to brush my consumer behaviour lessons to make sure that I make the absolutely right impact in the first nanosecond a recruiter sees me or my resume.

Cause & Effect, Front Loaded, Action & Impact are some of the buzzwords in use.

They say that recruitment is a selling process. You are the salesman & your resume is your product. There are some excellent salesmen around carrying great products. These are the sureshot day zero sharks. Real fun is in the tussle between great salesmen with duds & poor salesmen with super products. Who shall win?

Hummm

2006-01-14T01:22:00.000-08:00

Stumbled upon this article in Gladwell's website. We've seen this before in the MO course. Good read, esp in the interviewing season :-)

So, it began...

2006-01-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

The real thing. Thats what we came here for. Thats what everyone's been slogging a$$ for. Placements. No not the official season. Thats still a month away. But an MNC came & interviewed ppl for US positions. Seems some offers will be made but cant be officially communicated until the actual week starts (else biggies will get pissed). Lots of excitement. Ppl moving around in suits. Shortlists pe shortlists. Lots of rumors. Lots of iff & buts. Lots of smiling faces. Lots of congratulations. Lots of expletives. Lots of gyaan. Lots of philosophy. Lots of frustration. Lots of resume reviews.
In short, this place is teeming with life now. & Its just the PPT time & a sporadic incident of companies coming before the season.
It sure gonna be one helluva ride. Hope most people do get their desired jobs. Although, imo, the placement week format, in a place like ISB, does forebode a number of misfit placements & later quick attrition. But thats part of the story.

btw, Term VII started. Taking 3 courses. Nothing really to talk about them.

IT.. Marketing ...

2006-01-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

No no... this post aint about placements or my grand(!) career plans. Was browsing through the archives of a marketing gyaan related site when stumbled upon this article. Has some thoughts on how Marketing & IT functions in an org can cohabit & (maybe) co-operate.
Could prove to be useful blabber in interviews incase one is coming from a tech background & pitching for marketing roles.

btw, another useful read here. Funda on something called as 'Sales Learning Curve' - analogous to Learning Curve effects in manufacturing.

Welcome 2006.

2006-01-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to everyone.
Term VI end term exams tomm. Lots of stuff to study. With these, three quarters of our ISB education would be complete. & would be officially entering the placements game, which is an entirely different game from the struggles of past 6 terms. Important to play this game well. 1 term of preparation & then 1 week of climax.

'05 was a great year. Here's hoping that '06 is much better in all respects than that.

What do you want to do?

2005-12-30T13:19:00.000-08:00

Saw this movie - 'Good Will Hunting' an hr back on TV. The protagonist - Will Hunting is a prodigal dude having troubled past. I picked up from the scene where he was solving some complex mathematical problem while doing his janitorial duties. Goes on to assist the celebrated Mathematics prof at the same univ (think that was MIT) & stuns everyone there with his sheer brilliance. He solves problems, which others take years, in hours. The celebrated prof likens him to Einstein. He is equally sharp at history or business or politics or any damn thing. But he doesnt think thats these qualities are important. He has had a troubled past & he doesnt want to trust anybody, love anybody.. because he fears the rejection or betrayal that might come later. He is too defensive in all his relations. Even turns his back to the woman he loves truly.

I thought the movie ran at 2 planes -
First was Will's psychological problems. His inability to enter into a relationship because of his past. & the process by which he overcomes this problem. The shrink (played by Robin Williams) plays an important part in that. One scene where Will breaks down on Robin's shoulder is very powerful. Very very well shot. Made me believe that psychologists can really screw your mind. (Well if they could do it to Will, they could do it to anybody :-) )

The other dimension according to me was about choices Will made (or rather didnt make) in his life thus far. He is gifted & will succeed at anything he tries. But he is not sure of where his heart lies. Another great scene is where shrink Robin Williams praises him for his abilities & then asks him - What do you want to do? The most talented man has no answer.

Finally, in the climax, Robin does help him find his true calling. He leaves for California where his loved one live. Kind of mushy ending but I think message was that he cared a 2 hoots about what other people or society felt he should do with his life or his abilities. He tried & found where his true calling lie. & He gave it all up for that.
Pretty much in line with this amazing excerpt from Po Brosnon's book - What should I do with my life?

A must see movie & a must read article. Perhaps book too.

iPod Shuffle.

2005-12-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

Turned 27 y'day. iPod Shuffle 1 GB was my b'day present. Thanks D. >:D< Amazing design. Even opening the packaging leaves a great experience for the customer. Minimalistic, sleek & looks cool. As thin as about 3rd of an inch. Great to have category gadget. Above's how it looks ...
btw, iPod range has revived fortunes for Apple. Got interested in knowing how design was done for this range of products, here is a good link
http://www.designchain.com/coverstory.asp?issue=summer02

Pricing Viagra

2005-12-20T14:35:00.000-08:00

Pfizer introduced Viagra y'day in Indian markets at Rs 594 (for a 100 mg) & Rs 463 (for a 50 mg). How would one price Viagra in India? Lets try to force-apply some concepts learnt recently.

Always Safest bet: Value based pricing or the EVC animal- 'Economic Value to the Customer'

Not sure if the value here is economic in nature. Premise here could be that since Viagra is positioned as bringing charm back in relationships, customers should be willing to pay a premium for such emotional benefits. But isnt EVC more relevant in case of products which are used repeatedly not a one shot use like a pill?

My bet: Psychological pricing

No doubt that psychology plays a major part in this whole ED stuff. So, why not exploit the same in pricing a cure for it. Price as an indicator of quality here. Maybe what company is assuming is that only people will get this drug prescribed would be the ones who are able & willing to pay the premium. Maybe company is trying to exploit the already near 100% brand awareness & not willing to educate/develop the market in India initially.

Price skimming
Get the 'early adopters' (i.e. those who are in dire need in this case) to pay a premium & later on reduce the price. btw, generics are already available in the market @ Rs20,etc. but Pfizer still plans to garner 10-15% of the Rs 100 cr ED drug market in India in next 1 year. Would be interesting to see how a drug priced at 25x a substitute can garner 10-15% market share in an year. Call this marketing.

Cost Plus?
Read that product for Indian market would be imported from France & would be available in some special packaging. Wonder that could have a bearing on costs. But a marketing savvy company like Pfizer cant be using the worst strategy of em all.

Anyways, whatever maybe the strategy, it appears that it is definitely not the 'penetration pricing' strategy. No pun intended.

Now, lemme think of some alternative pricing schemes for such a product ...

Segmentation pricing
Can one segment the market for such a product on the basis of 'criticality of need' & then price accordingly?

Bundling possible?
With complimentary products from Durex, etc to reduce the price of the overall bundle?

Have exhausted my jargon.

False sense of self-confidence .. eh

2005-12-15T03:40:00.000-08:00

Investing in Private Equity course prof - Vinay Nair - a young dude, in his last session today had a few words of advise for the class. He said that we need to wear a little more of confidence, even if its false. Need to be a little more arrogant about our newly acquired hot skills. He said that was the main difference he saw between the students of Ivy league in the US & here at ISB. He is an assistant prof of finance at Wharton. He might have been kidding but I better take that advise to heart. :-)
So, from now on, lots of sophisticated MBA bullshittin. What better place to start than your own blog.

Alum gyaan, my first A grade & placements preps fever...

2005-12-11T14:48:00.000-08:00

Now, unlike in the past, the title of this post looks like a proper one.
So, this weekend was Solistice - The annual Alumni reunion festival at ISB. Kicked off with an Arabian theme party in the SV I rock garden on Saturday evening. The ambience is pretty cool. Wide open lawn with big rocks in the background. Temperature was also just about apt for the flavoured hukkahs & booze to factor in. All in all a good evening. Quite a few alums from batches of 03,04 & esp 05 had turned in.

Gyaan sessions by alums to the current batch happened today morning. I attended the IT one. Alums from Cognizant, MS, IBM, Lehman, Evalueserve spoke about their jobs, placements do's & don'ts and lots of general gyaan as one would expect. Alum contacts in the industry, although small in number now, is one thing, which apparently we dont use that well. I guess we need to talk to alums personally in our target companies before placements start.

Another perceptible shift in the mood at campus is in focus from acads, extra cirriculars, etc to placements related activities. Case interviews are the fad of the day & not having a resume which has undergone atleast 10-15 iterations by now is looked down upon. Unfortunately, yours truly falls in the latter category. Need to get my lazy ass moving on that front. But the change in mood is welcome. Consulting club deserves some credit for instilling this urgency in our batch. There is no third way to crack placements except being prepared well on the target company or being a born aggresive, sharp stud.
btw, I too grouped up with a couple of brilliant guys who, anyhow, write less than brilliant blogs.
With culmination of festivities in Poseidon coming weekend, junta is expected to become more involved in placements thereon.

btw, in other significant news, 8 grueling months, 5 terms, 17 courses at ISB hence ... I got my first ever Goddamn A grade!
In the course I absolutely loved - Marketing Implementation. From the prof who was an absolulte treat to listen to. Am surely gonna take away fond memories of this one course. :-)

Statistical surveys...

2005-12-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

Time for some value appropriation. Need to put the following stuff up on my blog to be able to upgrade my trial license with question pro to a student research one. Here goes...

QuestionPro Online Survey Software employs an easy to use Wizard interface to author and deploy Web Based and Email Surveys. No knowledge of HTML or programming is required. A comprehensive suite of analysis tools, ranging from Simple Frequency to TURF to Conjoint, are also provided for data analysis. In addition, QuestionPro Web Survey Software provides seamless integration with SPSS and Microsoft Office products.

QuestionPro Online Surveys also licenses its software free to Students and Researchers in the academic community. The projects have to be strictly academic in nature and should not be part of any other funded research or consulting.

Additional Links:

Some pics of campus..

2005-12-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

Was sifting through some of the old pics. Thought would be a good idea to put some of em on the blog. FP & KG wont find that very imaginative but hopefully thats more creative than my prose. here go....

Atrium ...

Beautiful ...

Symmetry

SV3 in the night...

Uphill ...

Manas & Dada ...

Pool

Fiery..

Hummmm... How much is your Blog worth?

2005-11-30T12:41:00.000-08:00

My blog is worth $3,951.78.
How much is your blog worth?

A rather insipid (or useless) statistic. Mine is around $ 4K. Bharani dude, will catch you soon. Anyhow, my turn to poke fun at faffy models used for valuations in finance. Who said (only) Marketing was all faff.

Btw, for the numerically inclined, here is the actual valuation exercise of weblogs inc. (a collection of blogs bought by AOL). Look at the page & you can immediately realise that row/column drag functionality in excel has been used in abundance here. Here is the small html piece in case you also want to brag your virtual wealth. Courtesy smartmobs.com

btw, life is quite quite hectic again. Poseidon is near & am handling an event in that. Got 3 classes tomm & havent read a word for any of them. Not even touched an assignment due tomm eve. Been trying to turn in a couple of case analysis in some events myself. Problem is that partners I chose - SC, KG, AK & maybe SM too are complete free riders. Havent been able to learn to handle skilled free riders as yet in my MBA.

In other news, was left kicking myself when I did'nt get much vaunted Marketing Metrics course. This is one course which I should have taken but due to pathetic lack of common sense on my part, lost out in bidding. The prof - David Reibstein is a treat. He teaches at Wharton school & is an ex-professor at Harvard & Stanford. Hez Been the director of Marketing Science Institute at Cambridge for 2 year. Quite a character too. Viagra case in his first class was real fun.

One of real big shots to come to teach us. & I couldnt get into his class. Life sucks bigtime sometimes.

The 'Takeaways' vs 'Work reqd' equation...

2005-11-27T07:53:00.000-08:00

Making choices is a prerogative most ISBites (& most MBA students I believe) face many times on a daily basis. Was thinking about the way people make choices about the electives here. Methinks that, within bounds of things like long term career planning, focus on a particular area, etc., most rational, reasonable, well-intentioned MBA students select electives based on the 'Takeaways vs Work reqd' optimisation. Any sane person would like to get the course which maximises 'takeaways' while minimising the 'work reqd'(given the opportunity cost of time at a 1 yr prog like ISB is high). Is this really the right approach? Talking about Choice, a program like Chicago GSB MBA offers choice of areas at another level. One can select all but 1 (yes 'One') course to graduate. Now that is real choice. But this necessiates a different level of maturity & focus from students.

As I browse through the readings for the first class of Term VI starting tomm, I cant help but recall the past V terms. Did I acquire the 'cross functional skills' which I wanted to (atleast according to my application essays)? Can I atleast talk as intelligibly with an Operations Manager of BPO as with a Equity Research Analyst as with a Brand Manager in a Biscuits company? Have I become the jack of all trades that I set out to? Do I remember the adverse selection concept in Economics or the FCFE calculation in Investments or the theory of persuation in HR? Agreed, neither Economics nor Finance nor OB is my focus of concentration but then why spend time & effort studying them? Does it make me a well rounded MBA? Isnt there a fine line between 'well rounded' & 'half baked'. Sure knowing about all the core aspects of business help one in a General Mgmt position or a Consulting kind of job. How many amongst us will be fortunate enough to work in multiple domains within the same or a diff organization? I guess these learning will somewhere come handy directly or indirectly. I certainly hope so. For I have invested a lot in acquiring them.
Words of Manish Sabharwal, a Wharton grad, echo in my head - MBA is one great intellectual winetasting session. Enjoy till it lasts. 6th round of tasting session starts tommorrow at 8:30 AM. :-)

The better part about ISB till now has been people whom I have worked with in various teams. Statistics may not reveal the real picture of diversity (with 70% plus engineers & 40-50% having a background in IT & very few Int'l students). The work ex factor brings about the difference. Having worked with teams in the industry, the contributions people bring to the teams are more often construcive than otherwise. I have found atleast a couple of unique & significant things to learn from everybody whom I have worked with till now at ISB. That I think is the real payoff in the long term. Not economics or marketing.

Consumer Behavior, Google's Desktop Search & other things.

2005-11-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

No no. Am not thinking of how Google's search technology has changed consumer's behavior. This is about today (technically y'day's) Consumer Behavior end term paper experience.

This is how the paper starts...

Instructions.. blah blah blah

Page 1 .. message by Prof:

All good things must come to an end & so is Consumer Behavior course. It will end in a few hours (few minutes for well prepared) except for people who slept in the class or browsed incessantly. I mean you, you & that gal over there. This is an open book, open notes, open laptop, open mind exam. You can even use a calculator! Maybe page 159 of the book would help or slide # 39 in the Persuation set theory presentation. See, I tried to help. Best of luck.

Was entertained as well as confused at this point. Anyways, neither did I pay attention to any of the classes of COBE in the entire term (as if I would have been able to understand anything given the express rambling of our prof), nor did I have the motivation to study COBE over Marketing Research on the weekend.

Page 2 .. the real stuff
Seeing the paper, I felt that I might be in a soup. It contained some seemingly complex 25-30 questions. Started off with MCQs. If I remember correctly, my sequence of solving went something like this (actual figures & choices have been disguised purposefully)...

Q: Sun 'Ita (yes there was humor in questions too :-) ) went to a shop intending to buy a camera. 2 models were available - First at 25$ for 18X zoom, Second at 35$ for 24X zoom. She leaves the store & goes on to another store where she evaluates another model at 45$ for 39X zoom. She comes back to first store & buys the one for 35$. Which one of the following theories is at play here:
a) Classical Conditioning Theory
b) Adaptation Theory
c) Compromise Effect
d) Disjunctive
e) Information Integration Model of decision making.

Me Thinks: Hummm. Dont know a thing about these theories. What to do? Realized that I have actually brought my laptop containing all those presentations. Open it up & fire Google's Desktop Search. Type in 'Classical Conditioning Theory' & voila!
First result thrown is pointing to one of the course ppt's. Open it. Search for the string. Read the slides. Understand the concept. Decide whether its applicable in the context of situation given in the question. Redo these steps for choices (b) till (e). Arrive at an answer by elimination. Phew.
Go to next MCQ. Repeat.

By the end of 3 hours, I realise that I have learnt a bit on keyword based searches of ppt's, pdf's, text files, chat files, emails on my desktop. The results Desktop search throws up for a particular keyword search (say 'persuasion') are different in different points in time. Probably pointing towards continuous updation of indexes. Quite a paper!

btw, before I forget, must mention that although I had a tough time, I did enjoy the paper a lot. Was refreshing to see the pattern & types of questions. Prof had definitely put in a lot of effort in setting the paper. Wish he could spend some of that in slowing down the pace at which he speaks in the classes. j/k.

Earlier in the day, had marketing research paper. Was pretty straightforward. Almost boring. Would have preferred a more challenging set. Anyways.

Have Marketing Implementation paper today. This course was a treat. So many concrete takeaways from each & every class. Feel like didnt know marketing even a bit before taking this course.

In other things, read up an article in Forbes on Google. Its effort on trying to think small. Said that although the organization is 5000+ now, it has lots & lots of small teams going after different ideas. In the words of a senior Googler, its like food throwing spree. Throw a lot & see what sticks. Like the philosophy of 'fail fast & fail cheap'. Sounds familiar.

Diary Nov 14th...

2005-11-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Nights are getting a little chilly.
Workload has been excruciating in last few days.
Attended 2 sessions of Business Law workshop over the weekend. Was a decent introduction for a novice to some basics of law.
Confusion reigns as usual - Its bidding time for 6th term courses.
blah blah...

Worst news of recent times. A friend of mine from college, roomie for first 2 years, passed away in a car accident. Had spent lot of time with him. Long conversations, long walks, were ragged together... Cant believe that he isnt there anymore. May God give peace to his soul.

Poseidon 2005 website inagurated.

2005-11-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.isb.edu/poseidon

Website inagurated tonight. Lots of stuff to be added. Cant believe that we have come so far in the program that Poseidon is round the corner. Wish ISB MBA were for more than a year.

btw, think that somebody should blog for Poseidon. Though Bharani's blog will mirror that pretty closely but an exclusive blog would do better.

hummmmm....

2005-11-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

Cant help but reading atleast 3-4 articles per day on Google. Its business model, its plans to conquer the world, moves from MS to win back the web, blah blah. Its hype has got me clued on.
This article in NY times is a good summary of what Google can potentially do to many other industries :

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/technology/06google.html

back at campus, a senior guy & his team from Trilogy was here y'day. Interesting talk that. Most ppl know of Trilogy as a high end coding shop but these guys are trying to reposition themselves as a company having the ability to solve tough business problems. Their concept of 'Business Value Garunteed' is like - client pays them only if their solution makes money for the client.
btw, the guy said they are not competing in the commoditized business of outsourcing.He had a quotable quote too - Outsourcing is ' your mess for less' :-)

22 hr workdays, Ito's (di) lemma & other things...

2005-11-05T07:43:00.000-08:00

With Options & Futures midterm round the corner, life was expected to be bad in last couple of days. Exam, however was easier than expected. But prepping (or whatever that was) did shave off a lot of hours of sleep. Anyhow.

Lots of other things to do. ELP is moving into last phases. Client is pretty satisfied till now but we've been finding it tough to get their time & attention offlate. I took this project up mainly on the chance of making a lot of impact on the organisation we would be working with because we directly interacting with the top mgmt at their India office. The Experential Learning Project is good in some aspects even though people here have lots of work ex & they dont necessarily need all the experience it provides. So, it is a bit inefficient in that aspect but otherwise a lot of things to learn for anybody. This is a kind of substitute for normal internship in a 2 year MBA program. Am sure this kind of project offers a lot of value for both companies & students. But as with all the new concepts, industry will take some time to understand the model completely.

Had a 3 hour long discussion today over the business plan that we are making as a part of PaEV course. A '04 alum & 2 other guys had come down to discuss the same. It was a good discussion. We have made some progress on the plan & hopefully that team will take it forward from where we leave. Again, the course PaEV had lots n lots of avoidable overheads, but it forced us to look at a market in the way we normally dont do in stand alone courses.

On other fronts, am enjoying the full course meal in Marketing in having taken 3 electives this term. Lots of solid learning esp in the Marketing Implementation class. The prof - Nirmal Gupta is a stud. From the detailed implementation level issues of FMCG sales to the conceptual details of Marketing to legendary marketing stories of Indian Pharma industry to fundas in physics; you get it all in his class. People say that he is one of the best Marketing teachers in the country. A definite yes for anybody remotely interested in Marketing. So, practically, for every MBA student. :-)

The B School festival circuit is also fully active now. Having been spurred by the recent successes of batchmates, yours truly is also trying hard to get a foothold in one of the major ones. Call it peer pressure :-)

Btw, if you are still wondering what is Ito's lemma, this is what it is :

dC = [(δC/δt) + (δC/δS)µS + ½(δ2C /δS2)q2S2]dt + (δC/δS)qSdz

On coming across such equations, only (di)lemma I face is - Why on earth did I take this elective? I dont have way too much time like my friend Ford Prefect.

Happy Diwali

2005-10-31T19:52:00.000-08:00

Its Diwali time !

Lifez been pretty good these days. Lots of activities on campus too. Its B school competition season & ISB is doing pretty well. 2 teams from ISB shortlisted in top 10 from 350+ teams, 1500 participants worldwide in the Thunderbird Innovation Challenge. It is first time in the history of competition that 2 teams from one B School have qualified. http://www.innovationchallenge.com/ChallengeResults.htm

All the best guys. Make us proud.

Google's juggernaut...

2005-10-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

'Juggernaut' is a word one usually attaches to companies like Microsoft & IBM in the tech. industry. Not any more I guess.
Roy Gilbert - Director of Google India was at ISB yesterday to deliver a talk on Google.
He mainly extolled the 'coolness' virtue of Google's products. Emphasized that honesty is one of their company's main virtue. Talk was ok, nothing spectacularly insightful considering that Google is already so read about, written about & discussed about company. There isn't a mainstream media house which hasn't featured Google's impending domination of the web & then the tech world & then, perhaps the world. Those stories got a shot in the arm when Google's 3Q results came out y'day. In analysts' words, they crushed all expectations. EPS of 1.51 $ against a consensus of 1.36$. Earnings were up more than 7 times qoq. There are still more than 4 hours for US stock markets to close & Google's stock is up friggin 12.43% to an all time high. This is one company everyone's so damn tightly clued on.

In other news, viz not as exciting however, flurry of visitors continue here at ISB. This week VP of Oracle came to give some gyaan, MD of Levi's India came down to share some gyaan on Marketing. Couldn't attend both those talks. However, one which I did attend was the 'Demystifying the recruitment process' by BCG. Gyaan on CV building & Consulting Interview preps. 5 guys, 2 of them pretty senior flew down to share this gyaan. Was pretty useful. But for the fact that viewing some of the resumes of BCG consultants made a lot of us feel pretty bad about ourselves. Anyhow.

The elective season has started rolling. Am doing 3 in marketing & 1 in finance. Marketing Implementation prof seems to be a class apart. Will definitely write more about learning from his class.

edited to add: For those who are interested, Larry Page's & Sergey Brin's original thesis (called Backrub) on web search submitted at Stan is listed here. Interesting read.

Coming back to life .. at ISB.

2005-10-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Landed at ISB in the evening today. Coming from a refreshing trip back home although it was punctuated by a few working days in between for ELP Client's office visit. The 9 day long break from studies did seem like an actual break. Unfortunately, this was perhaps the longest possible here. Anyhow. Was relaxing to not see & think of ISB & related stuff for a few days. Now back to the grind.

Spent some of my time at Client's office. 3 & a half days to be precise. That part went fine. We made a presentation to the senior mgmt y'day. Work seems to be on course. Drove quite a bit in Delhi. Was much more pleasureable with weather having improved.

Met up with a couple of ISB alums. Got some gyaan from them. Some insights on the companies/industries they are working in. Beginning to realise that as passouts of ISB, a strong & widely spread ISB network is one thing we would definitely like to have but miss. Lot needs to be done on this front. Anyhow.

Reading a classic ' A Random walk down the Wall St. ' by Burton Malkiel these days. Pretty lucidly written & informative. Tears apart the tall claims of technical & fundamental stock analysts of Wall Street. Says that stocks selected by dart throws of a blindfolded champanzee at the Wall Street Journal newspaper page would provide atleast the same returns as stocks selected carefully by highly paid investments professioals at the Wall St. . Lots of witticisms. Takes a dig at the technicians & the fundamental analysts and the psychological aspects of investing in the world of finance. Very good read as a follow up to the investments course last term.

Term V - the first of the electives' starts tomm (technically today). Got to bid for a couple of subjects I missed out in the first round of bidding. Time to linger back to ISB lifestyle.

What do MBAs do at a Software Product Firm like M$

2005-10-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece of article by a M$ manager in his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/09/28/475021.aspx

Welcome break...

2005-10-07T23:26:00.000-07:00

Term break ahoy. Technically, we have 9 days of break. Though most will be busy still working on ELPs & other stuff. But a welcome break anyways. Time to credit all the sleep payables, Get the house in order, Rejunivate for the rest half of the year.

btw, the investments paper y'day, as expected, was a epic one. 3 hours, 10 questions, loads of calculations in some, application of multiple fundas in almost every question. Was like one of those JEE maths papers. Anyways, it was kinda good to feel really challenged in this respect after long time.

Last big 'un of the core terms.

2005-10-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

Investments paper this morning. Will be a tough nut surely. It has kept most of the batch up through the night solving problems. The scope of this course has been too vast for non-finance background people to digest in 10 classes or under 5 weeks. A bit of fixed income, derivatives, CAPM, portfolio theory, equity valuation & even a bit of Efficient Market Hypothesis. So much so that this is the only course as yet in which 2 double sided A4 sized cheat sheets are allowed. Wish we had more time to do this course.

Term IV ends today & with it I would have done half my MBA. Tough to realise. The second half is sure to fly even faster than the first.

Lemme catch a coupla hrs of sleep to let things sink in.

The riskmaster on the loose @ ISB

2005-10-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

How does it sound when a billionare, father VC of companies like Skype/Hotmail/Baidu & many many others & yes btw, a HBS MBA + Stanford BS .. says that his idea of innovation in future is ..
~ Wireless Power transmission
~ You say 'Food' & food should appear in front of you.
~ 3D highways
~ Automatic thought transmission
~ Competitive governance
~ Complete video history
.
.
.

Tim Draper of DFJ was here a couple of hours ago. Gave a rivetting talk on what Draper Fisher Juvertson - a VC company does, its plans for India & its philosophy of investing. But it was mainly about his vision of how future could look like. In the beginning, it sounded like our childhood fantasies. One of those imaginations which get ignited on seeing the latest sci-fi movie.
Had it been coming from someone else, probably most of us wouldnt even have sat through the talk completely. But when it comes from one of the most high profile VCs in the valley, it makes me wonder whether have we become a little too cynical to appreciate that some of those ideas may actually be true in future. Atleast I have. Maybe this is the flipside of reading more & thinking less.

btw, he even sang & danced on his own composition 'the riskmaster'.
Evening before term exams, when I have not yet even touched subjects for tomm., it was a refreshing talk.

Almost Halfway through...

2005-10-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Had the last core term class today. Befitting that it was Tina Dacin's. 2 days without classes & then exams for Term IV on Thurs-Fri.

Had lots of phots shoots, SecB slogan shouting & kinda emotional brouhaha. In a huge batch of 350 students, section assumes greater importance because these are the people whom you identify with more. Section rivalry culture is taking strong roots here at ISB. This post by Bharani shows that every section wants its share of pie in ISB's sky. That Sec B is always the pioneer is another thing. :-) . Ramki has created a wonderful collage. Here is the link.

This term got over in a flash. I hardly have any memories of what I did during this term. Surely did spend considerable effort in my ELP project. Remember the wisecracks of Subra in his IA classes or defending my PaEV plan. 3 of the 4 subjects were pretty soft. Bidding for electives in Term V was another hotly debated activity last week. Not all have got the courses they wanted for different reasons. Let me reserve my judgement on the system until the results of post sampling drops are out. Measure of reliability of any such system has to be %age of people it is able to grant their desired electives. Processes are still evolving here. So hope that these chinks will be ironed out.

The focus is now slowly but definitely shifting towards placements. We had a talk by Novartis a few days back. Novartis is one company which gives the best roles & salaries at ISB. & they recruit in all areas - Finance, marketing, IT. Scheinider Electric was also at campus a few days back. Another celeb coming to ISB campus on Wednesday is Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. This is what his 'about' looks like:

Timothy C. DraperFounder, Managing Director
Timothy C. Draper is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mr. Draper serves on the boards of Skype, SocialText, Project Y, MailFrontier and Chroma Graphics. His original suggestion to use "viral marketing" in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique to hundreds of businesses. He was an original venture capital investor in Parametric Technology (PMTC), Tumbleweed Communications (TMWD), Overture.com (OVER), Digidesign (AVID), Preview Travel (TVLY), Four11 (YHOO), Combinet (CSCO), and Redgate (AOL). Mr. Draper launched the Draper Affiliate Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in 26 cities around the globe. He founded or co-founded Wasatch Ventures (Salt Lake City), Zone Ventures (LA), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC) and DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara). As an advocate for entrepreneurs and free markets, Mr. Draper is regularly featured as a keynote speaker in entrepreneurial conferences throughout the world, has been recognized as a leader in his field through numerous awards and honors, and has frequent TV radio, and headline appearances. Mr. Draper is also the course creator and Chairman of BizWorld, a 501c3 organization built around simulated teaching of entrepreneurship and business to children. He served on the California State Board of Education. In November of 2000, Mr. Draper launched a statewide cyber-initiative on school choice for the California General Election. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Btw, almost all clubs are having their placements focussed meetings. Placom has been constituted. Idea is to increase good quality placements from existing recruiters plus keep adding some more every year. There were discussions of there is a huge gap between the reality on job & what is projected at the time of placements by companies. It is a natural outcome of placements process but given the work ex heavy profile of ISB batch, this should be minimised. A lotttt of effort has to be put in this direction.

Weekend from hell.

2005-09-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

This one was truely a weekend from hell. Rarely have I felt streched so much. Thankfully, it has ended.

Predictive ability of collective wisdom.

2005-09-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post here I spoke about a company called intrade.com. This is a trading exchange for political, weather, current events, Financial indicators & other unique future contracts.

Something similar, I think, was started inside Google by its employees. See this post.
This system also tries to predict the probability of occurence of an event based on collective wisdom of a lot of people. This is interesting;
Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market

Difference a prof can make..

2005-09-22T15:20:00.000-07:00

Need to give credit where its due. Most of us have been awed by core term profs in 'hard' subjects like Macro, Mkting, Accounting, DMO, etc.
'Managing Organisations' is a pure 'soft' subject this term. HR or OB or whatever you may call it but this is one field towards which majority of batch doesn't look forward to with hope. Kinda 'need to get this out of my way to graduate' types subject.
So, the first 5 out of total 10 lectures of this subject are taken by one prof. Now, imo & in opinion of most of the batch, those classes sucked BIG time. Having to listen to such a monologue for 2 hrs. did give terrible doses of frustration to many. The course pack is again well designed. Apt examples. If one actually reads it, given the fact that most junta here have a lot of work ex, make a lot of sense. But the teaching pedagogy (which he probably perfected at his 13 yr teaching stint at a well known mgmt insti in WI) killed all but any interest in the subject.

Cut to class 6. New professor for the second half of the course. Tina Diacin - prof of strategy & OB from Queen's, Canada. & yeah, she has been way more refreshing, engaging & intelligent in her lectures. The way she captures interest of the class in an arguably dry topic deserves credit. Nothing outrageously spectacular just good application of psychology she talks about. The start contrast in the 2 halves of this course clearly brings out the difference a prof can make to learning of students.

The talk of onus of learning being on students, the talk of self learning, etc etc are fine but nothing acts as a better catalyst to learning than a GOOD prof. We, here at ISB, have been fortunate to witness a few of them. Hope the privilege continues.

Hummmmm...

2005-09-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Some famous guy once said that there are 2 types of market(stock) pundits.

First are those who dont know where the markets are headed.
Second are those who dont know that they dont know where the markets are headed.

Pretty true in general also. Managing one's ignorance is very imp.

Life is bad.

2005-09-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

Term IV started on a bad note. Toooooo many assignments, pre reads, ELP & other stuff. Feel like a zombie. Its getting near limits.

Term III done with..

2005-08-31T03:24:00.000-07:00

Another one gone ! 3 out of 8 over!
Somehow I have a sense of deja vu. S'thing similar used to happen during engg days. Everybody would just wait for sem exams to get over & then heave a biggggg sigh of relief. Difference here being that a term is 1/4 the duration of a semester in engg college & workload is 4x times. But frankly, the end term exams just gone by made me feel very frustrated. 4 exams of 3 hrs each in 2 days. 3 days of holidays prior to the exams so that people could mug up the subjects & regurgigate in the papers. Thats what is bound to happen when there is a 'supposed' premium on grades & end terms carry upto 60-65% of weightage in some subjects. I think this kind of exam schedule screws the entire thing. Our terms are now beginning to be punctuated by mid terms & end terms rather than more meaningful activities. In hindsight, now I think what Prof Bubna did in term I with regular assessments in form of quizzes & assignments is a much better way of evaluation rather than the one we witnessed in term III. Note that I am not cribbing about this because I feel thats not my way of learning. In fact, like most engineers, I am also a last minute slogger. But thats not the idea here at MBA. I conciously try to learn something with the hope that some part of it will stick after I passout. & neither is this a vent against current stars. Good people will perform well under any evaluation method. I am talking about the learning experience of the batch at an average. Surely, slogging in your room for 3 days, cutoff from the world & praying that this ordeal get over asap doesnt help much. I think this system of evaluation is because in place because its easier for profs/TAs. More evaluation points mean more work for them. But, what the heck. The system is supposed to maximise the learning of students.

Anyways, time flies here. This term gone past was excruciating. Yes thats the word. But if there is any recurrent theme for last term (for me), its got to be leadership. Not because we had LDP. Mainly because we saw leadership from so many angles. LDP provided the theoritical inputs. Entrepreneurship cases also shed some light on it. PaEV guest speakers (who find mention in my earlier posts) also shared their leadership ideas. Vijay summarises some of the key takeaways here, here & here. Great posts all these. He has a very concise way of writing.

Looking back, Corporate Finance was bit of a disappointment for me this term. Had built up a lot of expectations from first finance core but somehow, something was missing. I do now know a coupla basic concepts but I feel my interest was never aroused enough in this. Not upto the level I was expecting. Maybe things would improve in Investments core in term IV.

The Ops & Manac courses were well designed & very aptly put in the same term. I screwed up in both of their end terms but I liked their content very much. Esp things like Toyota's famed production system, inventory management & cost accounting methods. Very tangible knowledge sets to takeaway.

One thing which deserves mention is the course design here at ISB. The core courses, course packs, content, cases, relevant articles, recommended readings are, imo, very thoughtfully done. We hardly need to refer to the so-called-bibles like Kotler or Brealey Myers. Everyone has them but class notes & cases serve the purpose much better I believe.

Anyhow, the grind continues. Yesterday, after coming out from exam (Entrepreneurship exam that too ! phew), our ELP team had a longish meeting to decide upon the project plan. The ELP also seems like another energy sapper. Expectations are pretty high & we better deliver.

Beware..

2005-08-26T01:43:00.000-07:00

Beware of what you want, for you will actually get it... a wise man once said.

Diary 18th Aug ...

2005-08-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

Been more than a week since I blogged. & its been busy as hell. Probably the busiest term thus far here. Mid terms, which happened last friday, now seem a distant memory. CorpFin was scrapped. Ops went okayish for me. The ops core this term is very well designed. I like the content. Transition from Prof Chopra in first 5 lectures to Prof Deshmukh in last 5 has also been seamless. But I dont feel the same in case of CorpFin. Some discontinuity there. Anyways.

Lot has happened, been done in past week - 10 days. Dunno how much has been achieved (by me) though :-).
Should never mistake motion for action.

Everybody in the batch submitted their indicative bids for Elective courses in terms 5-8. These will be used by Academics office to design the terms according to market demand. Pretty good system this. I plan to major in Marketing. Not sure about second concentration area. Plan to take good courses from all other areas. Maybe I will end up managing the second concentration as well. As of now, odds are split. Been talking to many people about their choice of electives/concentration areas. Various sorts of gyaan points have emerged. Some are:
# Take elective courses according to your background fit v/s No point in learning the stuff you did in your job again
# Specialise, take most courses in your concentration area v/s MBA is a place to get generalist knowledge, get a high level view of everything, take more strategy courses
# See ratings of Profs for electives given by earlier batches v/s Prof doesnt matter, course content does.

& more like these. Am not sure which is the correct way. Time will tell. (obviously!)

Along with indicative biddings, there was lot of other stuff to do. Submitting ELP applications. I have submitted a single app. Am particularly interested in one company so applied for its project. Lets see how it pans out. They say taking an ELP alongwith PaEV (another elective) could prove to be pretty tough.

Apart from all the usual jingles, this term is rocking with guest speakers. Last Tuesday, Manish Sabharwal of TeamLease came down to talk about Entrepreneurship. One of the best presenters I have heard. Such distilled gyaan. In a hard hitting fashion. His anecdotes were great too. See this post by Bharani to read some of em. Some which he hasnt mentioned but I remember:
Anyone who know exactly where they are going is incapable of going too far...
The easier a change is to make, the less it usually matters...
You are ready to do something when you can visualize yourself doing it clearly...
Hang out with smart people who dream big...
Life is not a fixed income security but a call option. Maximise value by increasing volatility Same pain whether you fall from 50th floor or the 100th floor...

These random, unconnected sentences may not convey the impact of his talk but he really did set people thinking. Excellent talk overall. He was the first in series of guest speakers who will be called for the PaEV course. Arjun Malhotra was also on campus yesterday to give a talk to students on similar issues. He spoke about his experiences in setting up HCL & Techspan. Spoke about issues in M&A as well.

PaEV stands for Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture. An offbeat sorta course which will be spread over 3 terms. We get into teams of 2 or 3 & work on an idea to come out with a business plan at the end. Promises to be interesting. Lets see how it goes.

Brooks Entwistle, MD - Goldman Sachs was also on campus last wednesday. He spoke about emerging markets, private equity & a bit about life at Goldman.

Weekend was usurped by a 2 day workshop on Business presentation skills. The usual stuff - get gyaan, give presentations, see video recordings, get feedback, iterate, improve. First day was kinda useful but second day was an anti climax. The instructor, for reasons known to him, chose to become very cynical. I personally feel that he was mocking at people, not giving constructive feedback. Came out with a bad taste. That was not the way one handles a bunch of 12 matured people & that too when session is supposed to be enhancing your 'leadership' skills. Wasnt worth 2 days time. One of the very few occasions, something has disappointed me out here. We did give proper feedback to the academic services.

The president of Northwestern Univ - Prof Henry Bienen & dean of Kellogg - Prof Dipak Jain were here last weekend. Prof Dipak Jain gave a session on 'The future of marketing'. People who attended told that he is an awesome guy. One who has risen from humble backgrounds in India to be the dean of Kellogg. He is extreeeeemly down-to-earth. Very passionate guy. He was supposed to be our first dean but for Kellogg. He is so attached to this college that he used to come down every month when ISB was being built. I hope he comes back to ISB as the dean someday. That will be some coup!

But damn, I missed his session. That presentations workshop was the culprit - again!

Elsewhere, the spouse & family assoc (SFA) organised a 'Sawan Mela' this tuesday. Catch its pics here from Ram's blog.

This term has made most of us numb. People these days sound pretty comfortable with a 16-18 hr work schedule. I guess the idea - 'Am here for the learning not grades' as kicked in big time.

Read somewhere - Grades are nominal, knowledge is real. Quite profound :-)

The coming 3 days are packed as well.

Folks from Lehman Bros will be on campus on Friday to talk about work culture there, what do they expect in prospective employees, etc.

Further in the evening, ex strategy head of a fashion consulting house - who has been behind brands like DKNY, CK, etc is gonna talk about his experiences. Sounds interesting.

Still further in the evening, Boston Consulting Group guys will be present for a workshop on Consulting skills. Some alum is coming down for this.

On Sunday, Pramath Sinha, Prinicipal, Mckinsey & former dean of ISB and a few other consultants from Mckinsey will be on campus to talk about consulting.

Sounds like a promising weekend. But for as many assignments.

PS: Hey anonymous (who asked me for more pics of campus), I have taken a few pics clicked by others & uploaded em on yahoo. Mainly architecture. Not many people in them.
You can see them here - http://photos.yahoo.com/capreal26

Markets as a source of information.

2005-08-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

A well functioning market does a great job of extraction information about prices, likelihood of events occuring in the future, etc. Predictions of future commodity prices is based on crude futures directly. Most traders (of assets) value predictions about financial numbers (like Fed funds rate, wholesale inventory levels or monthly retail sales,etc). However, other information such as who will be next Fed chairman is also valuable to the financial community in some way. But there are no future contracts which could be bought in favour of one candidate over the other.
Enter intrade.com/tradesports.com.
Intrade is an interesting company. It allows indviduals to trade contracts for politics, current events, financial indicators, weather & even entertainment. Price of a contract is directly related to the probability of occurance an unambiguous event in future. For example, it had bets on outcome of the american presidential elections, bets on whether or not NYSE (ex-) chief Grasso will be ousted or when will Saddam Hussien be captured. I dont exactly know how dissimilar is this from a betting operation (which is legal in many countries) but if there is enough liquidity in such a marketplace (in terms of number of buyers & sellers of contracts), pretty useful info can be culled out. Maybe that info can be used for hedging. Infact, mercantile exchanges like Chicago's do offer weather futures which, say, an insurance company can buy to hedge.

Interesting aside: the intrade market places a price of 12.6 on a contract future of 'Osama being captured by dec 31, 2005'. i.e. this market feels that there is only a 12.6% prob of this event happening. Lets wait & watch how efficient the market is in churning out such information.

A few ISB snaps.

2005-08-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

Link to Chandra's blogpost. Here.

Am thinking of starting a photoblog containing regular foto updates from ISB life. Lets see.

Diary 3rd Aug...

2005-08-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

We have been having our elective infosessions on all concentration areas these days. Y'day, Prof Bhagwan Chaudhary, while talking about finance electives available this year, said something which kinda shook some of us. He said that- we should consider our formal MBA over after 4 core terms. All that was there to learn essentially is covered upto Term IV. Thereafter, it is totally application oriented. This statement really left, atleast me, quite nervous. In real terms, its been just about 3.5 months here. & To hear that time is flying past us so fast is kinda scary. I dont even realise that.
In a few days, we need to take a call on the choice of electives. Which, if done consciously, should align with one's larger career objective. Which in turn means that one should have clearly chalked out his post MBA goals. I have been hearing this - Focus, focus, focus on what you wanna do.., dont go with the herd.., be clear.., etc etc etc since the day I landed here. The LDP has been bombarding us with all sorts of tools & stuff like MBTI, EQ, Psycho-Biological make up of humans & what not .. which are supposed to take us on a journey to 'the land of self awareness'. Personally, I agree with them only to an extent. Maybe because I am yet to meet a person who has used them & has come out a better person. Duh, loser me!
Anyways, the LDP course (euphemistically called as 'Leadership Development Program') is an interesting one. The prof Rajeshwar is good. He is extremely well read & a great speaker. Some find him a little over aggressive. I like the idea of the course viz basically making us more aware psychologically. Usual gripe is - too timepressed to mull over it & practice it. Maybe I shouldnt be blogging now but introspecting. But somebody said writing has a catharatic effect. Am waiting for it to appear. :-)

Elsewhere, there is a deluge of speakers at ISB these days. If I recall the speakers/visitors who came in term III only (viz in last 2 weeks only), list grows pretty impressive. Starting with the TiE-ISB event in which lots of VCs & entrepreneurs descended, CEO of KPIT Infosystems, CEO of RaboIndia Finance, CEO of Induslogic, BV Jagdeesh of Exodus, Arijit Ghosh - the country head of Unilever Vietnam. In the pipeline this week is a talk by Swaminathan Aiyer of Swaminomics fame. Add to all this regular seminars, workshops by different Centers. Like the TGIF every first friday of the month. Or the upcoming Indian Capital Markets Symposium by CAF. Add to this the regular internal speaker series that various clubs keep on arranging.
Am not even half way through the list of activities but it already appears maddening. Plus beyond a certain point, the returns from attending all such events start following the 'diminshing returns to scale priniciple'. But life here is well & truly happeneing. & making choices is pretty tough & important too.

A True blue entreprenuer.

2005-07-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Rajul Garg was on ISB campus today to give a talk on tech entreprenuership. He is a 98 batch pass out from IITD comp sc & started a company called Pine Labs in the 3rd yr of his graduation. He then cofounded a company called IndusLogic. Apart from the usual impressive growth stories, most insightful aspect about his talk was his to-the-point gyaan about starting up & taking a company through different phases. Am quoting some of his points:

# Entreprenuership is like hunting whereas a corporate career is like farming.
# Knowledge is a double edged sword. The more you know, the more are the chances of you becoming risk averse simply coz now you know so many things which could go wrong. Being ignorant is actually helpful in that context.
# Ability to be able focus on the immediate issues when you are small & not losing sight of the bigger scale picture.
# Kind of a fact - Cost of running a team of bright young software programmers in a startup kinda environment is roughly a lac Rs per engineer per month. & That doesnt include your marketing expenses.
# Utmost importance of having a local sales team. Sales people pay for themselves whereas engineers dont.

All immensely valuable nuggets of wisdom these. & Not many can be mentioned in such a lucid fashion from Case studies & text books. Value of actual work experience.

My bet is that he is a guy to watch out for in the Indian IT industry. & he is all of 27-28 yrs old. Younger than most people who were present today to attend his talk. He heads a 500 strong organisation. No wonder he got a round of standing ovation.
Attending this session was worth every second.

Elsewhere, life's been a little easy in past 2 days. Been watching many hollywood war classics.
The batch party tonite has kinda started. I can hear the music. Gotta dunk our CR Dipanjan today in the pool.

& yes, lest I forget, let me put one powerful dialogue in one of the movies I saw -

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution,brings men into such swift & close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

Reminds me of Rajeshwar's trauma transformation funda. I guess, if you think enough, we are having a holiday when compared to those soldiers in the battlefield. That is real trauma. No wonder, movies which talk about life deeply show so much death.

Trauma transformation - Round III begins...

2005-07-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Term III started today. Supposedly, the busiest of them all. Most of us were coming from a long, relaxing break (5 days is pretty long by ISB standards).

Proceedings started off for our sec with the Operations class by Prof Sunil Chopra from Kellogg. He was able to generate a lot of interest. Dealt with very basic issues to start with. A character of all good profs I have seen here thus far.
Quote of the day from him - ' The whole point of coming to a business school is to develop your own model of how business works & when faced with practical business issues, run them through this model & systematically arrive at a conclusion'.
I hope the model development is underway for us. Should be atleast 25%+ complete by now. :-)

Class on Entreprenuership by Prof Venkat from Darden was next. Like strategy, I was sceptical of the purpose of the course to begin with. As in - can something like Entreprenuership be even discussed in a structured environment like that of a B School class, let alone be taught? In the strategy course last term, my initial discomfort about gave way to realisation that if nothing more, Strategy course atleast exposes me to workings of many different industries through cases. In Entreprenuership, must say, my doubts got removed to a large extent in the first class itself. Prof Venkat explaied that most of us in the society belong to a category of indviduals who are not entreprenuers in normal course of things but would become one if certain conditions exist. The fact that these conditions are totally different for different people is counter intitutive. We normally believe that free flow of information, capital, etc breeds entreprenuership best. True, but at an indvidual level, its the case of conditions matching the risk preferences. Quite insightful. He further told that people who are waiting in the wings are suffering from either of the 2 ills - ' Bias for analysis' or 'Bias for action'. First one is similar to the concept of analysis paralysis & latter one refers to people who are scared of clock ticking away; they hurry through things in the fear that somebody else would pip them to the post. Both the biases lead to sub optimal results.

Things like Entreprenuership, imo, are not easy to discuss in a class setting. Prof Venkat's effort seems to be in the direction of developing a state of mind where we can perceive & evaluate business opportunities in a objective, unemotional & free of personal biases way.

Infact, I cant help but observe this kind of common message by most profs till date here. More than the set of tools & frameworks which form the MBA course, its the way of thinking, approaching which needs to be developed. Prof Ziv Katalan said the same thing about managing uncertainty. Prof Raju spoke about being able to think through firm issues from various perspectives not just pure marketing. Prof Krishna Kumar exhorted us to develop an eye for understanding macro phenomena according to the basics not what the pink press says.Going back to term I, Prof Waterman spoke of interaction in multiple regression being akin to synergy in business environment. All seem to be saying similar things.

The quantitative models & frameworks either back an intitutive theory or provide reasons for a counter intitutive one. But there is no substitute for having a mindset to deal with business problems as they should be. A far more important thing to gain here than specific subject knowledge.

btw, did some nature photography here at ISB campus in the past few days. ISB campus looks prettier during monsoons. :-)
Here's the link: photos.yahoo.com/capreal26
Will add more albums from actual ISB life. I guess ISB deserves a photo blog.

Wrapping up Term II.

2005-07-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

End terms tomm. Has been an extremely busy month & a half. Sapped of all energy. Hope I improve on my grades & get better than -->

What is Risk ...

2005-07-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

..., in financial terms? & How does it differ from 'uncertainty'? Is Risk always bad? How should companies measure & eliminate risk in their businesses? There are no easy answers to these questions. But for any firm whose fortunes are tied to a volatile quantity like price of crude or interest rates or foreign exchange rates, Risk calculation & mitigation are central to its activities.

Had my first real exposure to this concept today in a discussion of the Offshore Drilling Inc. case in Decision Models class. We were supposed to prepare a write up consisting of a few questions pertaining to the case. In the process, we did some Monte Carlo simulations & calculated some NPVs. Only to discover in the class that we had missed the crux of the case entirely. We got the numbers right but didn't realize why were those numbers important.

Prof Ziv Katalan was on fire today, literally. The way he exhorted the class to think about the options before the management of the company under consideration was quite insightful. The story was not only about numbers & statistics. He was able to let us appreciate the finer aspects of the case. He described the logic behind the way insurance companies behave. The case is about financial contracts between 3 companies & one volatile quantity - Crude Oil prices.
How should a small cash strapped company like ODI insure itself against the vagaries of Crude prices volatility? It can even exploit the opportunity to increase its cash flows. The idea of VaR (Value at Risk) & the concept that mu & sigma may not always be the best way to think about risk return tradeoffs.

Super insights & all packed into a single 2 hr session. People here are amazed at energy levels of Prof Katalan. Even in the 4th class for the day, a 5-7 PM session, he is so energetic & passionate. He really pushes the envelope far & forces students to think hard & develop intuition about concepts. Its easy to rule his way of teaching as ineffective (heard some people groaning after his classes) but, imho, one is forced to concentrate hard in his class. After setting the stage with basics, he zips through the remaining concepts. But I would take this mode of teaching anyday to a comfortable, easy to grasp session which misses the entire point. If you are'nt getting his point, you ain't trying hard enough.

btw, I read on some discussion group on the net that somebody has the impression that visiting faculty coming to ISB (most of whom are Indians) come here to have a 'holiday' rather than teach at ISB. My response to such comments would be - sit through one of their classes. These profs teach 4 sections, arnd 350 students for a total of 8 hours per day. & Still are able to bring so much commitment, energy & insights to each & every session. Don't think this would be an idea of most people's 'holiday'. Anyways.

btw, this is the last week of term II. End terms begin next Monday. This term was group work heavy. End Term exams carry only about 40-50% of weights for all subjects. Hope I improve my grade point average this term. Time to get back to prepare for another long day tomorrow.

Ability to think small.

2005-07-08T01:23:00.000-07:00

It is not always that you hear this advice in a business school class discussion. But when you put yourself in the shoes of a product manager who has an excellent new technology at his hand & the responsibility to launch it, its very easy to get carried away by all those fancy projections (with figures in 'K' s & 'Mn' s) .
But reality could be quite opposite. Prof. Raju, in another one of his brilliant case analysis, yesterday explained this with the example of ODI case. Why technology adoption cycles could be much slower than we might like them to be. & the crux of this understanding is getting down from big-picture, 10,000 feet numbers to an actual micro-level model of technology adoption cycle. Unless one thoroughly dissects the entire adoption cycle & understands the key pain-points, best products can be disasters when brought to market.
Another insightful concept introduced yesterday - 'Diffusion Innovation'. The key being the rate at which you want the new (essentially cost reduction) technology to diffuse into the market. & As a marketer, one might actually not want the new tech to spread very rapidly. Because then the comparitive advantage of early innovators is nearly nullified & there is no incentive in adopting it. So, one might think of not trying to overdo things initially. Hard to appreciate things unless one actually does the job of a product manager. Anyways.
Marketing -2 has been worth every second spent.I find the approach with which Prof. Raju analyses the case is (for the lack of a better word) orgasmic. Something which cannot be picked up as a tool. Can only be developed as a way of thinking through situations. Great value add.

Of Markstrat ville, Aikya, Commanding Heights, etc ...

2005-07-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

These have been some words on the top of ISBian's minds in the last few days. I guess obsolescence comes pretty fast to things here.

Markstrat world .. although a lot of number plugging & guess work is a part of this simulation, there is a LOT of direct application of concepts being taught in Marketing - 2 directly in the Markstrat world. It would be very difficult to appreciate concepts like Semantic positioning of products, MDS, customer segment evolution, competitive actions, etc without a near real - life situation as modelled by Markstrat. If one studies the results of past periods carefully, there is a lot to be learnt about some of the most basic issues in Marketing, like - 'Why do some products sell & some dont?'
& I also like the way course is designed to run parallel with the 3 week simulation exercise.
Only wish that the simulation could have been somehow longer than 3 weeks.

'Aikya' .. is a concept here at ISB where prominent families of the city are invited to associate with students by adopting a study group each. The series kicked off yesterday. Mr. Shakti Sagar, country head of ADP India, & his family were kind enough to have lunch with our study group here. He has founded Indian operations of 3 MNCs in India. I guess, it is more of a networking opportunity.

'Commanding Heights' .. Kind of an epilogue to Global Economics midterm paper, this was screened in the audi for students on Saturday. Very well produced documentary film. Captures the essence of events which shaped the Economic landscape of the world for past one century very well. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth a million words. Not in 10 classes would we have learnt so much about the ups & downs of socialism/capitalism in world economies. Great idea by our 'Chicago Boy' - Prof Krishna Kumar.

With each passing day, as we get exposed to more n more tools & management concepts, my worry about retaining the ones we have already learnt increases. Prof Anjani Jain, in his last class, also expressed concern about the issue of extra-frenetic pace of academics in a 1-yr MBA. We hardly get time to step back & reflect upon the what we learnt 1 week or 1 month back. & I guess, we need to develop that ability fairly quickly, if we havent done so already. Different subjects give us various angles to business situations. Professors give us brilliant insights. But ultimately it is upto us to integrate those learnings & retain them in some form & substance which can be applied when we go to business world again.

Diary 25th June..

2005-06-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

Been a hectic week. Lots of classes. Assignments. & First round of decision making in Markstrat simulation. It was interesting to work with it. Lot of what we are learning in Marketing can be applied to this. I guess real fun will start once the TA runs the simulation for the entire batch & round I results come out. Lets see.
Today's was an evening well spent. Prof. Jagmohan Raju spent an informal evening with the batch of 06. He is one of the founding forces of ISB. It was enlightening to hear from him about ISB's story, marketing in general, IIMs, Wharton, what separates the schools like Wharton from others, his own career, research, etc. Its always a pleasure to hear from him.
To top it all, he sponsored the booze for the evening. Generous he. :-)

Diary 21st June..

2005-06-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

Had a brilliant first Marketing - 2 class today by Prof. Jagmohan Raju. He uncovered insights into the competitive scenario between Sony & its smaller rival called Barco in the industrial projectors market. By the end of the class, I realised some fine approaches into analysing a marketing case. Very impressive I must say. & with introduction of simulation game Markstrat, it is supposed to become more interesting. I am totally looking forward to Marketing - 2.

btw, I realised after this class that the opportunity cost of not coming to ISB would have been very, very high.

Whats up, hows life...

2005-06-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

kinda conversation with my quadie proved quite insightful (okay, atleast for me) today. as usual, on being asked abt the day, I said the I find it real hard to stay awake in the gyaan laden Strategy class. he was surprised & said the he is enjoying the subject. I thought.. okay .. another instance of 'I-can-see-big-picture-better-than-others' types. So, i got pretty enraged. Said it has no direct application for most (say 95%) of people passing out of a B School simply because they dont land up in a senior (or upper middle) management role directly. & Thats where you would ideally do a firm level or an industry level analysis. & by the time most people will reach that senior level (if at all they do), they would have kinda forgotten all frameworks & models they learnt at their B School days 10-15 years ago. (Ok this is a bold statement, what I mean is that they would perhaps value their experience more than a textbook theory).
So, question remains - what is the utility for an average B schooler to read Strategy? His response was quite insightful. What he meant, in a nutshell was that while most of the strategies may emerge from the line manager ranks (people who do day to day operations), whether those proposed strategies are good enough to be implemented at a firm level ? Every credible idea that makes its way through to senior management has to be vetted through a proper framework to see if it is in larger interest of the company. Hence the need for a formal strategic planning cell in any large organisation. & Hence the need for us to read Strategy. :-)

bam'Booz(e)'led

2005-06-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

Lots of booze in last 3 days. First the sec B party on thursday eve. Got sloshed, dunked. Then batch party y'day. Free booze so again got sloshed, albeit a little less. Today, attended a 'Smirnoff Tastemaker Session' at a pub called Bottles n Chimney's in the city. A small 3 hr session on cocktails. Now I know how to make martinis & cosmopolitans & a good bloody mary. Session was excellent. Great value for money. Tulleeho!!!
btw, final grades for Microeconomics came out y'day. First one at ISB for this batch. A small percentage of people even got D grade, which I feel was completely avoidable. Understand the need of differentiating, etc but such severity could have been avoided in the first term, first subject. Anyways.
Term II is hotting up. Economics (Macro) seems to be a good read. I dont find Strategy interesting.
Another thing is, with almost all GSB posts finalized, real action is about to start in clubs. Plus a host of other activities stare in our face. I need to quickly decide on things I would be immersing myself in.

Diary ..

2005-06-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

First week of term II been a little better.One class per day. That too with a subject like 'Competitive strategy'. & its been raining almost everyday in the evening.
Today was also the last soapbox for candidates of GSB. I have now started feeling that Students Board (GSB) is a little too big. So many official posts, I wonder whether each elected representative gets to make an impression during this short period of 9 remaining months. Some presentations were really good. Showed true intentions of making a positive difference. Others simply smacked of nothing but furthering personal gains out of the mileage a Leadership position provides.

Anyways, received Stats marks today. I fared very poorly as expected. But I didnt feel bad at all and that which made me realise that subconciously I have kinda given upon race for grades. In fact, this could prove counter productive. I must do as well as I can, atleast. & For the record, learning from Stats during term I was best compared to other subjects.

Now, to the tagging business. One who is tagged (as I am in this case) is supposed to talk abt atleast 5 books he/she is currently reading. Well here goes my list (in order of my liking for them) ..

# Crossing the Chasm - Hitech products marketing (finally reading it)
# The Goal - Goldratt (started reading it.. sounds interesting)
# Learning Statistics thru MS Excel (JMP aint gonna be around after ISB)
# The Art of War - by Sun Tzu (this some how is also on the recommended readings list for Competitive strategy subject. I have read this book thrice over in last 3 weeks. Been taking it to the loo with me. All I could take from it is - All warfare is based on deception. Fine, great idea but why is it such a great insight for business. What gives it the status of a classic. I cant understand. & btw, I am not enjoying the Strategy subject much as well. Too much of high level gyaan & jargon. Makes me feel that its basically hyping up simple common sensical things. Maybe I am not made for strategy. I guess so.)

Term II begins...

2005-06-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

Classes for 2nd term commenced today. Subjects this term are 'Competitive Strategy' - first strategy course for us, ' Marketing Decision Making' - continuation of Marketing, 'Decision Model Optimisation' - an excel spreadsheet modelling course & 'Global Economics' - Macro.

Have just 1 class perday this week. Had first Competitive Strategy class today. Infact, when I opened the course description a few days back, I was wondering what is the logic in having a Strategy course in term II - so early in MBA. Strategy is supposed to hold all other disciplines of business together & makes most sense when you have an appreciation of most of the business functions. Some people refer to it as mother of all subjects. So, with this doubt lingering in my mind, I entered the class of Prof Aks Zaheer. & I was pleasantly surprised to know that this question was the first he addressed. His view is that having strategy early into the course gives a good idea of where each of the functions fit in, as & when we study them. According to him both the approaches, Bottom-up - where Strategy is taught as a capstone & Top-down - course like ours where strategy is introduced early on, make equal sense.

Personally speaking, I would have liked a corporate finance course in this term. Not having to read a Finance core till term III in a 1 yr course might create a temporal disadvantage to people looking to shift to Finance.

Anyhow, the strategy course sounds interesting. Read first case - Cola wars in the 90's. Good to read about the industry value chain. In fact, a great analysis of 'Why soft drinks industry is so profitable ?' is available here.

btw, received marks for Micro Eco today. I did not fare as bad as expected. Thats all I can tell ;-)
Now, Subbu has tagged me. I need to find out what it exactly means in blogger's parlance.
Also, have been thinking of improving the design of this blog since many days. I better do it before I leave ISB :-P .

Term I ends..

2005-06-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

Phew, finally all 4 exams are done. Accounting was good. Eco was terrible. Stats was fine too but for a stupid error in reading the exam instructions on my part. Marketing was grueling but manageable. I think I should just scrape through to the interquantile range of scores. Hee Hee (thats mid 50% of the class 25%-75%).

Time to chill for next few days before grind restarts..
Just finished watching 'Barbarians at the gate'. A gripping movie about the famout 'Leveraged BuyOuts' of the 80's at the wall street. Its based on a novel by the same name. & is based on true facts. Its not fiction. Not a financial book. Is more like a suspense novel. Good to see category.
Plan to use the LRC's DVD collection to a good extent in the next few days.

exams are good !!

2005-06-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Simply because they provide incentive to gain depth & breadth of subjects. Now, am not talking about acing my grades. I leave that task to lesser mortals.

Meandering through introductions of concepts like risk, correlation & regression models in Statistics, I somehow ended up spending last 2 hrs reading about one of the most spectacular financial meltdowns - the collapse of LTCM.
{LTCM - Long Term Capital Management is (was!) a hedge fund started by legendary trader & a few Noble prize winning economists in mid 90's}

This article is a great primer all about LTCM & its rise n fall.

'When Genius failed' is a book written by Roger Lowenstein about the story of LTCM. Added this to my 'to-read' category.

I gotta quote some pieces from the article:

And, of course, beating the market was the game that Meriwether and his cohorts were playing. LTCM concentrated on what are called "relative value" trades. Imagine, for example, that Ford and General Motors are essentially the same--in their profitability, riskiness, and prospects. Assume that both earned $2 per share last year. But also assume that today, Ford's price in the stock market is $20 and GM's is $30. Something is screwy here in the relationship between Ford and GM. So an investor might buy a share of Ford stock and sell short a share of GM. (In selling short, you borrow the share from another investor, selling it immediately for cash and promising to return the share later. Your hope is that the price of the share will fall, so you can buy it back more cheaply.) With this trade, you expect that the natural, logical state of affairs will soon come to pass--that the prices of Ford and GM will converge. You really don't care if the market rises or falls--or whether Ford stands still and GM drops, or Ford rises while GM stands still. All that counts is the convergence--Ford's price in comparison with GM's.

This is correlation in action.

If there was one article of faith that John Meriwether discovered at Salomon Brothers, it was to ride your losses until they turned into gains." In other words, if you have enough capital to stay in the game, to make the interest payments on your borrowings and even to increase your position, then, in the end, you will win the bet.

Is this concept same as we learnt that statistics rewards patience? I dunno but I would guess so.

& This one takes the cake:

Merton, who was teaching a class at Harvard, got a three-minute ovation from his students. He humbly warned, however, 'It's wrong to believe that you can eliminate risk just because you can measure it.'

Phew, enough of indulgences. But statistics has definitely whetted my appetite for finance core courses coming up in next terms.

btw, if life keeps going like this, I might have to review the title of this post in a couple of days.

Sec B - Prof. Mark Finn

2005-06-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

DSC00752
Originally uploaded by capreal26.

Fin Acc prof Mark Finn with Sec B on the last day of the course. Thanks Mark, for a great intro to accounting !

PS: yours truly is first person on the left of prof.

IMG_0003

2005-06-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

IMG_0003
Originally uploaded by capreal26.

View from my room.

Two useful blogs.

2005-05-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

http://typaldos.blogspot.com/

Blog related to Software Product Marketing, Web communities & stuff alike.
I find the articles on Product Marketing particularly interesting. Its also a kind of an aggregator blog site with lot of related links.

http://inventingmoney.blogspot.com/

Blog of a investment analyst in US who specialises in tech sector. This site has been listed by Forbes.com as one of the best in investing blog category.

Starting to find feet at B school ..

2005-05-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Life finally seems to be settling into B School ways. Getting up at 7:30 AM to attend classes or slogging for Econ assignment or fighting with the groupmates over marketing case is now becoming acceptable. Thats going to be the way life for next 10 or so months. & I am not complaining!

When I first came to this place, all I heard was that life would be hell. 1 yr MBA is not for weak hearted, blah blah blah. Dont think its that bad. Lot of it is hype. Ultimately it all boils down to simple things like managing your time well. There would always be people who would excel in acads, participate in extra cirriculars & not miss on the other learning aspects as well. Only thing is ... they operate at better efficiency levels. & I think a B School punishes you for not being efficient. Its not an option.

The part about ISB I am liking most is .. the sublime quality of faculty & the opportunities available to improve yourself.
Enough has been said about faculty already. I wouldnt harp on that much more but only thing I can say after 4 weeks here is that a great prof can make a difference between going over a subject & really liking it.
As regards opportunities .. the clubs activities & the talks by Biz leaders are best examples.
Clubs give you access to people who are also focussed on your area of interest. Obviously most people see it as an activity to improve the marketibility of their resume but if properly done, these activities will make one a better person I believe.
Regular talks are another interesting thing here. Every now & then some biz leader comes to share his insights about his career, company & Biz world in general. Yogesh Gupta, the CTO of Computer Associates came last week to share his wisdom about succeeding in IT industry. Today, Mr. Thierry Moulonguet, EVP & CFO of Nissan Worldwide shared his gyaan about famous turnabout that Carlos Ghosn & his team brought about at Nissan.Perfect example of globalisation. A Brazilian born manager turned around an alliance between a reeling Japanese automaker with a French company. He vowed to quit if Nissan didnt turn profitable soon !

We have a panel discussion tomm titled 'Do B-Schools add value?'
& it is being attended by Arun Maira of BCG India, IIMA's director & 3 other industry executives. These guys know more about B School education in Indian that anybody else. Would be interesting to hear from the horse's mouth.

Only crib in life now seems to be that this class is too competitive. When most of the class scores 90%+ in assignments, it does create a lot of peer pressure. & Frankly, I dont understand why everybody should be running after grades. Only the consults/I Banks look for grades. & 90% of class aint gonna be landing in a McK or a GS by any measure of imagination. Then why screw up the entire experience only mugging up & fighting for every single mark. There was a concern raised by one of the profs about purpoted honor code violation taking place for assignment submission (ppl are not supposed to collaborate to complete assignments unless mentioned otherwise). I dont understand this, when everybody realises that there is an incentive to break the rules or atleast a disincentive to follow the rules, how can violation not take place. Blame the Mck's & GS's of the world. I hope majority understands that one isnt a winner only if he/she bags a Strat Consult/I Bank job.

Anyways, must stop cribbing & accept this too as a fact of life. People will mug & raise the bar for others. :-

End terms in 9 days from now. I gotta lots of catching up to do. Will probably blog next after exams.

Diary.. May 16

2005-05-15T14:23:00.000-07:00

2 weeks just whizzed past me .. Acads in full swing, Sec B - the GachiBulls (g)razing the footie & volley fields, club activities kicking off informally, intimation for GSB elections, lengthy Eco Assignments, lurking Stats midterm, etc etc etc.

Coming week looks much worse.

However, this weekend was slightly better off than last since we didnt have a case submission. 2 weeks into the course, I kind of reflected upon what I picked up (or should have learnt). Here's my take on 4 subjects this term, thus far:

~ Marketing: One which I am finding most interesting. No theory. Case based. Appreciation of importance of quants in marketing plans. Pretty close to real world marketing function.

Takeaways: How to prepare a case. Business Writing. Marketing is not all faff, it is a numbers backed function.

~ Fin Accounting: Been a li'l mechanical till now. Constructing financial statements & appreciation of accounting rules & concepts.

Takeaways: Interpreting the state of business of a company by looking at the major financial statements.

~ Statistics: 100% application oriented.

Takeaways: peek-a-boo into quantitative analysis that might go into finance subjects. Concept of Risk/Portfolios was extremely interesting. & yes, a s/w from SAS called JMP too. It does all the dirty calculations, draws fancy graphs & much more.

~ Microeconomics: Mainly theory. Most fascinating to read if only I had loads of time. Develops the economic sense behind phenomenon like Price Discrimination, Monopoly,etc. Now, I have a little idea of what goes behind those variable air fares or why telecom providers have a 2 part tariff structure. (Read: little idea :-) )

Takeaways: ummm in my opinion, not much thus far.

btw, I got a interesting viewpoint about the dilemma of advance prep for a class v/s reading post class. FinAcc prof says that learning comes from both self study+class participation. If you study in advance, understanding in class improves a lot & if you study later, self study becomes much easier. This seemingly obvious view can be appreciated by some lazy souls like me only. Others like Bharani are too smart.

Young Turk

2005-05-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

Those who are familiar with a internet forum called pagalguy.com/cat would most probably know who Allwin Agnel or PG is. Well, he is gonna be featuring in the 'Young Turk' prog to be telecast on Thursday (12th May) at 10:30PM.
I aint gonna miss it.

updates from ISB .. loads of em.. later.

Curve is getting steep..

2005-05-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Thats learning curve. When you got to 'learn' 4 subjects like Marketing & Accounting in 1.5 months, its a no brainer that learning curve would be steeper than many of us are used to.
The profs from partner schools are great. & We have been told that better days are still to come. I wonder what would that entail when currently 3 out of 4 profs are from Wharton/Kellogg.

Personally, I am starting to enjoy the marketing management subject the most. It is good to learn although most cases deal with very high level decision making, a level which very few of us would initially break into.
btw, Scott Ward, the mark prof, mentioned a must read for anybody interested in HiTech Products marketing. He speaks about a 'Chasm-like' situation most hitech products face in their sales after intial period is over. Must read this.

Another thing which I found impressive is the swift use of tech in almost everything we do here. For eg .. a system called 'Blackboard' is used for acads. Everything from lecture ppts,to schedules, to assignments, to solutions , to grades , to discussions, et all.. are online - courtesy this system. The infra here does rock at all levels.

Rock n Roll time ...

2005-05-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Classes start today. The C's & P's of marketing were talk of campus y'day. Everybody sounds excited about their first case studies. Our study group too had a fairly good discussion about the case.

Saturday, it was Talent Nite. Kinda freshers' nite. Some good performances. Some took potshots at issues we had in last 2 weeks. Overall, mood seems to be starting to shift towards studies slowly, but surely.

Lemme attend this week of classes & then write about the 'perception vs (perceived) reality' of truly Global faculty.

Great coupla days..

2005-04-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

The orientation week is in full swing. Fresh in my mind is today's 'Career perspectives' session. To sum it up - I just loved it. ISB invited a panel consisting of accomplished professoinals from across industries & asked them to talk about what they would have liked to know just after they graduated from their biz schools. (obviously so that Co 2006 can learn from them ;) ). They spoke about their career progression, the professional & personal choices they made & the consequences of those.

The panel consisted of an accomplished banker, a COO of a big IT firm in India, an HR Guru, a senior leader of a software firm & an ex CEO. Discussion was moderated by a Branding Consultant called Harish Bijoor. The articulation with which all the speakers condensed their life gyaan in 10 min (limit for each of them) is too difficult for me to reproduce here. I need to see the video of the session again to digest some of the points. One recurrent theme was that all of them had taken charge of their careers & not let the organisation or the boss (or boss's wife for that matter) control it. Easy to hear but very difficult to implement.

Earlier yesterday, we had an interesting session on MBTI .. a tool to categorise personality types of humans under the Leadership Development Program. It is being conducted by a Thunderbird Alumni. He is an awesome communicator. Or a seller, I shud say :-). Nonetheless, I am totally looking forward to polishing my soft skills through this long & drawn out program.

btw, I have hardly geared up myself for term studies starting next monday. Looks like it will be a kick in the ass for me. One objective I set myself, using preterms to gear up, gone crashing.
& I need to fly back to Delhi tomm evening for my Bro's marriage on 29th & come back on 30th morning.
Hummphhhh.

Now off to welcome dinner.

Blogs are going mainstream in Business.

2005-04-25T03:56:00.000-07:00

This article on BW. Also, I keep reading about increasing potential of blogs in Corporate world. Looks like this application is here to stay.
Btw, SUN Microsystems is one company which has adopted blogging well.
blogs.sun.com --> a site where any SUN employee can start his/her blog.

Incidentally, Jonathan Schwartz -- President & COO of SUN Microsystems is famous for his candid views thru his blog. One interesting story .. once he walked into a room full of Wall St analysts waiting for updates on his company. He popped a ques - how many of you track my blog actively ? More than 50% of the analysts raised their hands. Reading a blog from somebody as high up as him is surely a privelege. Blogosphere rocks.

First taste of things to come..

2005-04-24T04:29:00.001-07:00

Had first real taste of the year to come. First abt today. Started off with Dean's welcome address to Co 2006. The talk by Mr. Ajit Ragnekar, deputy dean, was particularly interesting & myth-busting. Admissions director, Mr. Menon shared data about the profile & achievements of the incoming batch. It sure was impressive. The average age is 27 yrs. Average GMAT arnd 695. 45% from tech work ex.

Then was the presentation from Graduate Student's Board & Council VPs. Seems like our seniors had put in real effort in getting processes in place & refining them. Our batch should continue & make use of their work too. I would be specifically interested in the Marketing & Communications Club. Lets see how it turns out.

Y'day .. we had a visitor from industry. An entreprenuer called upon by the Entreprenuership Cell . Sam Mathan .. of the fame of Amber networks (which sold out to Nokia for quite a lot of money during the boom days of 2000-01). He gave some good anecdotes & ideas. But I was not happy that talk was mostly centered around Tech Entreprenuership per se & ways and means to make it big in the Silicon Valley. I was expecting to hear more generic, broad level funde on entreprenuership. Maybe I was mistaken in my expectations. But a good start nonetheless.

diary 22nd April

2005-04-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Our batch seems to be very proactive in negotiating prices of almost every service provided here. Stuff like catering, house keeping are outsourced to third party service providers here. So, given the premium cost of goods & services here, we are leaving no stone unturned to get the best deal possible. On last count, ppl were discussing cost of meals, laptops, cost of acco (for one particular student's village is not completely constructed & ppl are not happy about facilities there). I think this is good & so far the ISB authorities or the service providers are also receptive to students' demands.
btw, almost all pre term courses are over. There is an introductory dean's address on Sunday. & then orientation week. After that, real fun should start.

diary ..

2005-04-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

First indications abt the profile of batch of 06 came today in some email. As expected, the batch is dominated by engineers (abt 70%) with a good 40-50% of total junta from tech background. & then there are a sizeable number of ppl from other industries such as ITES, Consulting, Finance, Marketing/Advertising, Operations & some from rare backgrounds such as Navy, Airforce, shipping, fashion, entreprenuership. Feels good to be in such a batch. Even the majority -- techies have rich experience. So, normal discussions also turn out to be quite insightful & enriching, from tech industry's perspective.

btw, I finished coupla books last week - the alchemist & snapshots from hell. Snapshots was a good read abt MBA life.
Alchemist is like a short story. Story of a boy who wants to take his destiny into his hands. & he takes a lot of risk to do that.

some key sentences are worth mentioning here & worth remembering too ...

~ The principle of favouribility or the beginner's luck. ie . when you want something very badly, the whole world conspires to help u achieve it.

~ When ppl are young, they are sure of their destiny. They are clear about what they need to do. but then a certain negative force begins to convince them that it would be impossible for them to achieve their destiny. & that is when they give up.

quite profound.

aKKounting

2005-04-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

Pre Terms... FinAcc... learnt that not only RoI (return ON investment) but RoI (return OF investment) is a critical quantity. Hummmm
Well, before Mark Finn arrives from Kellogg, need to learn what the hell is a Balance Sheet, a P&L statement & a Cash Flow Statement.

Checked in @ ISB

2005-04-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

First post from the campus. Came y'day evening. Done with registration. Excellent facilites & the processes look smooth. All's well till now.

The pre term courses start day after tomm.
On an unrelated note, I have a 'meet-the-parents' kinda scene tomm on Sunday. :) hope that goes off well.

How to ace Microsoft Job interview.

2005-04-08T01:44:00.000-07:00

This post. Again courtesy Gavin Shearer (2nd yr MBA student at UW). Great post. Enjoy.

Mocha's

2005-04-08T01:41:00.000-07:00

Spent a coupla hrs at this new Coffee joint y'day eve. It has a nice-ish feel to it. Lounge style seating. Good place to hang out. The coffee is great (I had 2 Jamaican Blue Coffees, supposedly the best coffee on planet!) & lots of chocolate indulgances. Bad on waistline. But what the heck!

Debate on the value of MBA degree.

2005-04-07T02:16:00.000-07:00

There has been a debate of sorts going on between the protagonists of MBA degree & the camp who says that investment is not worth it in terms of time/money. Many renowned ppl first claimed (during the boom of 99-2000) that MBA is not mandatory to earn truckloads of money. & then again, when boom went burst, MBAs were blamed for excesses.

Well, I am not taking any sides here. Maybe, I will be able to appreciate the value proposition of an MBA degree after I complete my studies at ISB.

For the mean time, chew on these:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/good_news_and_b.html

http://showcase.blogpulse.com/conversation?link=http%3A%2F%2Fsethgodin.typepad.com%2Fseths_blog%2F2005%2F03%2Fgood_news_and_b.html&max_results=25&start_
date=20050314&Submit.x=27&Submit.y=14&Submit=Submit

Interesting reactions there from blogosphere. Some saying that academic knowledge is a very small part of takeaway of your B School education & others saying that you could do without an MBA just by reading som 30-40 best sellers on Mgmt stuff ! (the list is there too). Enjoy.

MTA says Economy to miss Plan target growth rates.

2005-04-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this news ..

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=87134

The Mid Term Appraisal (MTA) of Indian Economy states that the 5 yr Plan target of 8.1 % growth in GDP is unlikely to be achieved. The culprit, it says, is agriculture, which has grown in the range of 1-2% in first 3 yrs of the 1oth 5 Yr Plan. This is quite disturbing, especially when one is made to believe that Indian Economy was performing better than ever.

On a similar note, GS recently said that Oil prices could spiral to over 100$ per barrel, resulting which the world economy would go into recession. Everyone is hoping that they arent true.

Talk abt practical utility of B School knowledge..

2005-04-05T03:36:00.000-07:00

Was surfing through sites of some of the ivy league B Schools of US. Stumbled upon this link ..

http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyResearch/ResearchCenters/Centers/Tozzi/

This speaks about a recently acquired Tozzi Financial center by Ross School of Business, Michigan.

& quoting from a 2nd yr student's blog :

"Stacked with the same hardware (Bloomberg terminals, flat screens, etc.) and software (Bloomberg, Factsheet, eVal, trading simulators, etc.) that you'll find on the Street, it's a great tool for both education and job hunting. On any weekday, you'll find several S&T-focused MBA1s in there following the markets, doing company research, and taking classes (FIN 640, the "Financial Trading" class, is run there). The Tozzi Center has logins to the client research sites for Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, UBS, and Merrill Lynch, meaning students can download the morning call research report for a bank, minutes before heading into an interview with them. Personally, I haven't yet taken a class in Tozzi, but spend several hours a week in there following the markets and doing research. In addition, starting this term Bloomberg has begun providing Product Certification courses on Fridays, giving me a head start on learning an important skill for any summer finance job. Truly, the Tozzi Center has been indispensible in my preparation for Wall Street interviews. "

Impressive. Talk abt real life training at B Schools. Think, this is as close as it can get.

This sets me thinking about the importance of research output in a B School's perspective. I hope ISB's strong academic lineage does provide an ideal platform for it to become a major producer of Mgmt research. I read (somewhere) dean M Rammohan Rao stressing on the need of increasing the research output from ISB.

As a sidenote, downloaded some interesting excel based financial tools from this site. Fun to play with. I can hardly make any sense out of the numbers there. PitchSheet.xlt gives a good view abt company's financial position.

Grad day (not mine :) )

2005-04-03T23:16:00.000-07:00

The ISB class of 2005 graduated last friday. Chief guest was worldwide MD,CEO & Chairman of Novartis - Daniel Vasella. (He is supposed to be one of the initial supporters of ISB). As usual, there was a gyaan laden speech by him to the passing batch.
A couple of excerpts I liked -

As Nehru said, “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism, the way you play it is free will…There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”

Quite profound.

Ambiguity is something we have to learn to live with, without its creating discomfort for us.

Couldnt agree more. Infact, personally, this is one thing, I think I have developed in myself over these past 5 yrs of working. Ability to digest the uncertainity. It is quite natural to feel the urge to see the goal to be able to motivate one to move forward. But in most real life situations, ultimate goal or outcome is soooooo much dependent on hazaaar other factors, people that one cant really say that my final goal motivates me.
Or maybe that I have lost all clarity of thought during these working years. :(

either way, the above statement makes sense to me.

btw, my batchmates were able to negotiate laptop prices with the ISB appointed vendor to a certain extent. According to latest prices, I will be getting my R51 at about 3k less. Thanks to all the efforts of my classmates.

Loans - I was told that getting an edu loan (upto the tune of 14.5 lacs INR max) is not an issue for ISB admits. I finally experienced it firsthand. I have already applied to Andhra Bank for the loan but I received a call from a SBI official asking why did I not apply for loan with SBI. He even tried to coax me into cancelling my application with Andhra Bank & applying with SBI & assured that he would get it approved within 2 days ! Now, a nationalised bank is the last place where I expected competetive customer practices. Must say - was impressive. So, moral of the story - Loans is a non-issue if you have an admit from ISB.

idle musings..

2005-04-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

so finally my manager tells me nothing more to do for the day. I resigned exactly a month ago. & I still get woken up in the midnight by these ppl expecting me to come & resolve the issue. bah! wtf. Dont they realise I hv become a bigshot now. I mean almost ! :)
First april is a good time to reflect on the yr gone by. lol, am not being sarcastic here.
Let me analyse my year in diff dimensions -

# personal - great. got to spend more time with my folks. spent lots n lots of greattttt time with my girl. ( Damn , I will miss her at ISB) . got time to catch up with some old pals.
# professional - best so far coz I made it to ISB. :) .. j/k. changed companies/cities this yr. Moved to a small firm after having spent 4 yrs at big fat firms. Experience was bitter sweet. Was absolutely horrified to see that some things we took for granted at big setups are totally non existent in smaller setups. But gave a more well rounded view to me of how this damn industry works.
# financial - disastrous. less said the better
# social - strictly speaking, I dont have this dimension. lol. Time at Udayan was satisfying sometimes & frustrating sometimes. All said & done, I now realise how difficult it is to really make a change to somebody's life. Outside of it, Devender tried & tried hard to get me hooked to a network of direct marketing. Must say that I would like to explore this more some other time in my life. Rest, www.pagalguy.com/cat is the only place where I have a social presence.

ok enuf of retrospective thoughts. Still havent really brushed those stats basics & basic accounting rules & how-to's in Excel. Reading 10-Day MBA & Snapshots from hell btw. Good reads both of them. Sneak preview of B school lives.

Nothing much is happening on the ISB admits groups too. Guess ppl have had enough of Laptops, loans, travel, placements, creches, food & whatnot discussions. Spoke to quite a number of ppl recently. In different stages of their careers. Some having done their post grad studies, some in the middle of it, some planning & seeking my advice. Next yr., when I will have graduated by now, dunno how will it feel to look at this post.

Fortune at the bottom of pyramid.

2005-03-30T04:38:00.000-08:00

C.K.Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits espouses the concept of tapping the hugely unutilised section of society comprising of economically weak people. Most companies target high or middle income sections for their products/services. Lower income groups form the fringes of their target populations, at best.

Y'day while browsing thru current issue of Business Today, I read this interesting article. It cites some case studies of Indian companies having positioned some product/services specially for the huge lower income section of India. Some of them are ..

# HLL's project Shakti
# DHFL - a housing finance co giving loans at decent terms to lower income group ppl. (I was shocked to read that other companies may charge as high as 25% interest to economically backward ppl whereas the default rate for them is lower than what is for normal home loan customers.)
# A PC priced in the range of 8,000 Rs.
# A low cost ATM machine.
# A telemedicine project by Apollo hospital to reach far n wide.
# A project to provide low cost, efficient water purifiers to rural India. (everybody knows many still dont have access to clean drinking water even)

Sounds good. But sceptics say all this is also very difficult to achieve & more of management speak. Well, I for one, certainly hope, that these surely succeed.

Bridging the divide between the haves & have-nots is the numero uno hurdle India has in its path to being a developed nation.

btw, interesting discussion on BW forums on the same topic.

MOSCOW principle.

2005-03-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

Read in some Godforsaken project document.
Sometimes they follow the MoSCoW Principle to define project/product requirements.

It stands for - Must have, Should have, Could have, Would have.

Damn, a nifty piece of mgmt lingo crap. Gotta learn them & start inventing some too.

Good reads.

2005-03-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

# First one on the role of 'Product Planner' in a software products company.
M$ in this case.
http://www.gavinshearer.com/weblog/archives/2004/07/index.html .

Thanks to this UW 2nd yr MBA student for a wonderful post.

# Role of analytics in Mgmt Consulting.
This industry is a black box for me. But after reading this article, I was able to appreciate why MC companies' entry level jobs are so research/quants/analytics oriented.

Research is the key ... is it ?

2005-03-28T03:42:00.000-08:00

3 reasons people invest their resources in MBA degrees are :
# Learning (academic or otherwise - from whatever sources on campus)
# Tap into the alum network ( a very very tangible takeaway)
# Better Job than existing one.

You can order the above 3 according to your priorities.

After listening to some general B School gyaan, I am somehow getting the feeling that B Schoolers' efforts to find the best fit job are not enough at worst, or misguided at best. And this is more true in the case of fresher schools where 200 or so companies ram into the campus in the space of 3-4 days.
This article : http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2005/mar/23rashmi.htm only corroborates the above arguement.

If landing a best fit job is such an important outcome of the MBA education, why is adequate effort not put into that ? Again, I would risk answering this question. Coz of foll. reasons :

# Overdependence on Brand of the institute

No doubt - brand equity absolutely rules in corporate world. But if a top B-School student thinks that best companies will fall over each other to bag him/her, there could be only 2 possible outcomes -
- disappointment on not bagging the wanted job
- disappointment on discovering what the wanted & bagged job entails.

# Herd mentality/Half knowledge

Typical MBA jobs - Mgmt consulting, i-banking are always the most glamourous & most sought after on most campuses. Any background, any skill -- the brand of MC companies & lure of i-banking paypackets are enough to sway anyone. True, that kind of money & contacts can help anybody make career shifts 5 yrs down the line but this cannot be planned. & there are associated downsides with them too.

# Misdirected effort

Dont think I need to dwell on this one. Self explanatory.

So what should one ideally to ? MBA opens (atleast theoretically) to so many possible positions, companies & sectors. How does one take a decision ? Set some criterion (in terms of brand, pay package, location, etc) & apply blindly to as many companies as possible until you get a job.
Another method could be to narrow down your search in terms of sectors, companies, positions, work location & then target fewer companies but in a much better way. (Obviously hoping that other factors notwithstanding, there are enough companies for you to take a shot inspite of so many filtering criterion).
What are the probable advantages of the latter method ?

# You have more negotiating power during interviews.
# Better preparedness because of focus.
# No surprises.

I am sure corporates like candidates who are well prepared. You may be the topper of your B school batch & have a top undergrad degree to boot, but if you show no interest in the company, it doesnt sound sweet to them.

So, now I wonder, how does one arrive at such a situation? How does one decide that he/she is gonna crack the acads so that he/she has a decent shot at the consults coming ?

Key to all that is, I guess - research & more research.

Reading up, talking to alums, talking to HRs -- all indispensible in arriving at this decision. And then, a couple of terms at B school would settle the issue I suppose.

Some online resources which could be good pointers to typical career descriptions:

wetfeet.com
vault.com
careers-in-business.com
mbajungle.com
Internet Discussion Forums like businessweek.com, pagalguy.com/cat, wharton s2s boards, etc.

Let me see if I can gather some sense out of these sources.

B School Blogs

2005-03-22T03:13:00.000-08:00

Blogging is a rage these days with prospective/current B school junta. Primarily because it serves as a veritable mine of first hand info/experiences of ppl who are actually doing things + it serves as a webpage (& comes as free ofcourse !).

mbaleague.blogspot.com is one site where lots of good (!) B school blogs are aggregated.

Am personally surfing thru many current B school students' blogs for nuggets of wisdom.
Planning to link up some terrific articles/discussions/links on the web/info sources here.

To chill out or work up ?

2005-03-21T21:37:00.000-08:00

With a little more than a month to go, this is the question which lingers in my mind. What should I be doing ? Taking it easy & relax till I can or tighten my seatbelt & get ready for the ride. Probably a little bit of both. Dont want to laze toooo much that I get used to it. & shouldnt be getting too worked up that I lose steam when actual thing starts (read Term 1 studies). So, as always, Balance is the key. Hummmmmmmm.

The ISB-Admits-05 Y! groups is one place where lots of good discussion going on. When people who hv been there & done it talk abt stuff like Mgmt Consulting or Role comparisons in Hi Tech Product Companies Vs Service Companies, it no less than a B School class. The composition of ISB Co 2006 seems to be good. Alum meet at Delhi a few weeks earlier was a good indication of that. For a techie like me, whos been surrounded by techies/psuedo techies in last 5 yrs or so, its a refreshing thing. I think this helps one in shedding a lot of baggage (read unlearn) which one picks up during corporate life & get ready for new learnings & experiences.

One more thing, I am about 3-4 weeks away from meeting my new classmates at ISB. But am already starting to feel the effect (through discussion groups). When a focussed group comes together, what ensues is .. lots of cross learning, peer pressure, some arbit cp, a sense of purpose. I think its a good buildup to 1 yr with Co 2006.

Hello Blogworld !

2005-03-16T23:41:00.000-08:00

Taking the plunge into Bloggerville. Want to keep this more as a diary for self reference.
Am going to Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad in about a month from now.

So, lets get down to business right away. Humm, so what am I gonna put here, & what not.
Starting with what am I thinking about putting here :

# Tidbits about ISB life.
As I see it. Sure will be one hell of an exciting year. Sharing the class with experienced ppl from diverse industries is surely a mouthwatering prospect. Am totally looking forward to this aspect of ISB

# Minor learnings, keynotes, small pointers.
Which generally we miss in Textbooks. Which generally we pick up in Classrooms from Profs & other students. These could come from anywhere .. a case discussion, a lecture from one of God-like Profs at ISB, group study or some arbit discussion/gyaan session at anywhere on the campus or anywhere else for that matter. So often, I have felt the urge to note down some concept, some funda, some link I just heard about & which I am sure I will forget. So, this place will also work as a postit board for me. More so during MBA, when learning will be like trying to drink from a fire hose.

# General gyaan.