In the midst of nothing!

The happenings in campus are almost nil, for the first time in hell. Actually its the first time that I can virtually see the seconds on my watch pass by. Reflecting back at the last 17 odd months, (although this may not be the right time to reflect back, better would be to prepare for the up coming placements otherwise only "reflecting back" would be left with me :D) it has been a long journey in the sense that time travels at such variable pace here; remember the last 5 minutes during exams when it is at its fastest and the same 5 minutes take an eternity to get over when its an afternoon class (although I think classes at other times are equally painful). I have learned so many things in those passing months that its difficult to sum those up in a small blog post. The significant learnings/take-aways/achievements are summarized below:
1. Giving presentations (read "speaking in English for more than 2 sentences", although I am at the "giving presentations" stage only and there's a long way to go to be able to "sail though ppts").
2. Being finally able to win some competitions.
3. Appreciating the essence of team work- its in the way you gel together that is important and not how "equally" the work was divided and done.
4. "Excelling" :D, one of the most critical tool for managers. (Excelling- its "the 'art' of converting simple situations into complex MS Excel spreadsheet so that the same simple things appear more complex and more importantly, more MBA like).
5. Completed "24", "Scrubs" and "HIMYM"-all seasons and currently up to date with "Heroes", lost track of "Prison Break". Rest all sitcoms are not of my liking.
6. Finishing-off projects and yes, I have done many of those.
7. Made great friends for life; but the list is still completely biased towards only one gender :( and I am happy with it (no! no! I am not ga#)
8. Got to know that IIM grads are also human, speak hindi, and "don't" earn in crores (or even lakhs).
9. Also got to know that logic is still the scarce commodity and common sense still scores heavily.
10. "Networking" drives the whole corporate world, but still I don't care a paisa about it (readers are encouraged to use their own preferred word instead of the bold one)
11. My belief got stronger, "Sachin is still the GOD".
12. On the topic of GOD; Hell has now two Gods- Shantanu Parmar joined Sharad Dagar recently by becoming the ICON-"young business leader" at FMS's management fest. (Those who don't know why Sharad Dagar is God are advised to please find time from their busy schedule (of classes, (useless) committee activity, batch mails) for campus activities.

The length of this post is exceeding my average and hence its better to end it; so that the regular customers don't get irritated.
PS: Watch out for the most awaited post of the year (next post)-"The Branding Bubble".

The World of One Dimensional Performance Measures

I think the topic needs a little bit of explanation. I feel most of us tend to rate people based on a single character attribute- students based on grade/CG, professional based on salaries, neighbors based on "acres of land",friendship based on favors done and so on and so forth. You can pick any profession and you will find that there's one dominating characteristic that draws all the attention. This is a good way of assessment and makes the life of the analyser a lot more easier. Since not every one is an expert in every field so it becomes handy to have a single performance measure, so that people from unrelated fields can easily build their rankings. A perfect example can be GDP growth rate being taken as a proxy for a nation's economic development. So it becomes easy for general people to gauge performance of nations without going into the depth of economics. But then a healthy GDP growth does not always translate into healthy economic development. There may be cases when the economy grows only on account of rich getting richer and poor not touched at all and hence economic disparity increasing. And economists have created indices to capture all of this, but then it becomes hard for non-economists to understand these indices.

But then what is the problem?

The problem is this-People (generally) try to extrapolate that one characteristic into other dimensions (attributes) and try to create a holistic picture out of single characteristic."

So you can see what is the problem. People try to draw the complete charactristic profile of an individual based merely on a single charactersitic. Examples are numerous-

-Kids being characterised as bright and dull on the basis of a single number- "percentage" (does TAARE ZAMEEN PAR rings a bell?)

-Professionals on the basis of "salary" earned and "growth" (in salary) achieved;

Although it is very essential to meaure performance and these single characteristics are very handy to take decisions; but those decisions should be taken and that's where it should end rather then extrapolating that single measure into other attributes and charateristics.

I believe there are "as many number of attributes/qualities as there are people in the world" and hence everyone has that one dimension of superiority over others; or in short everyone is special. But the hard fact is life has been modeled around just a few attributes; and mostly people try to move on those lines without trying to convince themselves of their inherent attribute. This herd mentality does not get properly scrutinized till the time it becomes extremely essential; when the question is slammed across the face (for instance 1-Why MBA?, 2-Why this job?...the only ones which I can think of and relate to at this point of time)

And this herd mentality gets ingrained even before we start to think about ourselves. The Kids are virtually forced to attend coaching classes to get into the elite engg. colleges and they get into some branch of engg. based on their rank. [mostly] It is never asked as to what a kid's aspirations are and never do parents try to find out what's the "core competency" of their child is. Kids get into engg. college, find out everything being taught is useless, try to find out more fruitful avenues. Some find MBA much brighter (moneyer) than engg. and start preparing for MBA entrances even in 2nd year of their engg.; before they even get to know what their stream of engg. is all about. To a great extent the fault lies with the (false) branding being done by most of the top MBA colleges. And then this mentality drives most of the MBAites to streams with wealthier job avenues.

So what is the solution?

Its simple! make friends on the basis of friendship attributes (not because someone is a rank-1, hey! but that does not mean leaving out the rank-1 compulsorily); rate people on the basis of the interaction that you have (rather than what their bank balance suggests!).....

As always there was more of problem searching and less of solutions; but then its more important to identify the problem. Everyone is wise enough to find the solutions, or should I say solutions are better left for individuals to be found as those are to be implemented by themselves.

Of "Advanced" Oral Communication, My analytics account and 3 lettered acronyms

Attached is a screen shot from my google analytics page (the site which keeps count of the visits to my blogspace) and it says in plain language "pathetic". And I believe thats the purpose of me signing up for analytics, at least I can have a feedback.
Oh WAIT! Where am I going? This one's about AOC- "Advanced" Oral Communication. Theres something about MBA courses that I am yet to figure out- Why this fascination for three lettered acronyms? CFM,SFM, MFS, SOM, CBM, CRM, SCM and so on. You can create any permutation of three letters from the alphabet, ending or starting with M and lo! you will end up with a MBA course name.
So whats AOC? This one is the only non-finance/operations course in my elective list for second year (apart from one Econometrics Methods). That is to say this is the only so called "soft" course in my list. Its exactly what the name suggests- an advanced level oral communication course; aimed at improving one's already acquired communication skills (from the previous two compulsory courses on communication in first year). My motive to take up this course was to get engaged in numerous presentations and thus get ample "net-practice" before the final placements.
So far two sessions have gone by and the course has already gained pace. The prof. has conducted these sessions mainly to gauge the level of skills already present so as to organise the rest of the sessions accordingly. The primary tool was 1-2 minutes Impromptus on general topics- "Leadership boils down to character", "The tale depends on who tells it", "I was born intelligent but education ruined me" and something on "two skills most needed in present job market". Overall it has been a nice experience and I hope to get some improvement in the level of my oral communication skills [written part is already on the right path :)].
The other two courses that I have in this term are International Finance (an apt name could have been Global Financial Management, so as to fit the 3 lettered acronym condition and to have the most prised word of business language, "Global") and Operation Strategy (lo! another exception to the 3 lettered acronym rule but strategy saves the day for OS and gives it the perfect feeling for a MBA course).

Ethical and Nonethical: Why only two options?

There is a common tendency among people to move everything or to adjust everything (and everyone) towards the mean (or is it the central tendency?). What it means is that people on the superior half do not get appreciated as they should be in an absolute manner and people on the other (inferior) half get unnecessary sympathy.
The point that i m trying to make is in reaction to some of the questions that i have confronted recently. The quality that i m talking about is the morals and ethics being practiced by people.
Qualities/attributes/performance are generally measured in a relative sense, a person's wealth (rich and poor), knowledge ("he is more knowledgeable than me"), class performance (ranks) and so on and so forth. But when it comes to ethics and moral values people generally tend to make judgment in a more absolute sense rather than relatively. Not even Lord Ram was sparred in this regard (yes, i m talking about the "agni-parikhsa" of Maa Sita).
So, why this bias? The answer to me lies in the same old central tendency and even more in the tendency of human beings to "pull" or downplay others' qualities so as to justify one's inability to stick to the right path.
When it has been generally agreed upon that attaining 100% in any measurement is close to impossible (one of my learnings from MBA) then why do we try to impose 100% compliance in ethical behavior. People generally try to find out that one-off incident/instance to totally negate a certain person's otherwise "morally/ethically" commendable behavior. But why this discrete function of ones and zeros, we are humans not machines! Can't we assign a percentage rating to the level of ethical soundness.
[THIS POST NEEDS SERIOUS REVIEW AND I'LL BE BACK WITH A MORE THOROUGH AND ELABORATE POST]

PS: Comment is a scarce commodity here, so every kind of it is welcome :)

I m back!

My google analytics shows that the weekly trend of no. of visitors is on a declining spree recently (after showing strong positive trend for quite some time- although the visitor count never exceeded 9/week). And so it requires some drastic measures to be put in place. So, here I am back to the writing board.
Things have changed way to steeply that even "change" does not aptly explain the happenings. I-banking lost its existence, markets went hay wire, I got 7.8 in IV term [is thr a negative correlation between economic growth and my CG? :)], I lost my wallet, Jumbo and Dada retired, Aby came second for the first time in IIM L and ...
To start off with cricket, the retirement of Dada was really sad and even though it was time for Jumbo, the way he had to bid adieu was unfortunate. The story of these two great contributors was kind of compressed in their final appearances; while Jumbo held onto his final wicket as a C&B with stitched fingers (which speaks of the commitment that this man has showed over and over again), Dada's final test was an equally apt summary of how "Bollywoodish" has been his journey- he missed out on a hundred in the first innings (that 85 will still be remembered as his final reply to critics) and the first ball duck in the second innings which happened around a loud applause from within and outside the ground.
The "Dadagiri" which changed the whole mindset of Indian cricket will forever be remembered as the most crucial mile stone in Indian cricket and had I not witnessed Sachin I would have ranked Dada as the best Indian player ever. And when I say, "best player", I look at the whole package that this man brought to the game. He was instrumental in Indians becoming fearless abroad and more importantly becoming the ones who look straight into the the eyes of the opposition rather being stared at.

Blogger's Block

Its been almost 2 months since my last post and that is why this post. Although many blogs are in the pipeline [typical MBA jargon :)] but it will take time to come up with the next blog (or is the wait over?). Just to commit myself to the posts and to accelerate the process of pipeline to blogspace, i thought of putting up a list of up coming blogs. Although not in order but here's a tentative list of what I am supposed to come in next one month or so:
1. The Theory and Practise of "Nightouts": An Empirical Observation
2. The World of One Dimensional Performance Measures
3. The Blogger's Block
4. The BIG picture
5. Term IV review- What have we learned?
6. Valuation- How subjective can you be?
7. EXECUTION- The need of the hour!

Wait and watch!

The BIG Picture

I knew this would happen. But I am happy that it continued for a while and now I am back. The thing I am talking about is the string of posts that I could manage (a total of 10 posts in 3 months); and I did a great job going by my historical trend.

So, where's this post headaing. I want to focus it on the "big picture" concept; but excuse me for if I wander a bit [or may be 10-20 bits :)]

So what's this funda of BIG picture. Its one of the mangement/intellectual jargon of looking at things/processes/systems/business/organizations from a high enough point so that the whole of it is clearly visible. Or in other words simply- "looking at the big picture".

But why? The point is to have every aspect of a particular system in mind before making any decision or understanding the whole system; and not merely looking at the tit-bits. For example: if you have to understand MBA; merely falling for the huge salary(and that too is an well articulated illusion) would not give a complete picture. There are a whole lot of more important things that one must consider before making up an opinion about MBA.

I think that one went out of the "BIG picture" arena and into the why MBA debate.

Anyways coming back to the big picture idea; its important to incorporate such vision into your outlook and I feel it is valid for all aspects of life and not just management.

But then what's the point. If its important then let it be; why this post???

There you go! You learn the most when you don't do it right. And having learned it the the hard way....(unfinished)