Of IIT's and IIM's .. the fishy things in their business fests..

I remember that during one marketing case discussion session when one of the students used the term bribing the prof strongly objected to refrain from using these unethical vocabulary. He said that though some may use all this to overcome competition, the danger is that there still might be some ethical options left which you are ignoring.

IIM and IITs are considered to be the pioneer in the technical and management education but still some of the future managers who will resort to these unethical means to prove themselves the smartest and the best may be from these premier institutions also. Though I don't want to spark a debate but still I have few examples which indicates a trend.

IIM Lucknow holds it's Manfest every year and is proud to do it on a mega scale. They had a cricket simulation game called Corporate Lords for which I still have no idea how they played it and on what basis they calculated the final score. Everything happened behind the scene and then they came out with the final results saying that out of the six teams that qualified two belonged to IIM L itself. I am not doubting the intellectual capabilities, my area of concern is the manner in which the game was conducted. Their website failed (poor management when they have best of the brains), the excel sheet format was not transparent and nobody know what formula they worked out to get the final list.

IIT Delhi went one step further and declared one of their fellow students as a prize winner of 20000 Rs. cash when one not IITian had higher net worth in that game. Now that LBS girl is spreading the word around but then end of the day these IIT fellow will come with an excuse that they didn't notice or may be they will tell they took the round figure and then as two people qualified, they flipped a coin. Well, I wonder what these group of people are going to do in their organization. This was not enough. After 10 days of breaking their heads with the treasure hunt people discovered that nobody was declared the winner as nobody reached the final stage. Well, if I put a question like When did Lallu's white buffalow which he bought on 17th Decemeber last year delivered it's first baby? I guess nobody will be able to crack this puzzle (not even Lallu, here lallu is the small tea shop owner near IIT gate). So nobody will get the reward.

IIM Bangalore takes great pride in hosting one of the biggest cultural fest in India.. That's good but when the professors inside classrooms and the student after mugging up the whole Kotler's book talk about Customer Experience Management, i think the accomodation arrangement was pathetic. The sight of girls carrying a bucket and walking about 50 meters to get to a nearest bathroom reminds me of Indira Gandhi days when the family to toilet ratio was 4:1 or even lesser in some parts of the country. For 3 days IIM was even poorer on that ground. You can't hide behind this fact that it was a mega event. I think that with a budget of more than 1 crore (as claimed) you can do a better job.

Well all said and done, I think that we a bunch of 27 people did a fairly better job with our own fest Abhyudaya. The hospitality was damn good with a personal touch. We vaccated our own rooms to accomodate outsider and we take great pride in this fact that the facilities provided to us in our rooms is beyond comparison with some of the big business schools in our country. The manner in which we conducted our fest was if not great, still better than those who talk about scaling up and seeing the big picture but then consciously ignore the smaller parts which constitutes the big picture. Economist Schumacher rightly said "Small is beautiful" well it has a message. Even when you become big.. don't loose the beauty.

Humour**

Red bull is very strategically targetting all the institutes for promotion. Well in our college they rather met an old custome who happens to be our favorite marketing prof. He asked that cute looking girl that what is so bullish about Red Bull? and is there something Red in it? After enquiring about the cost he asked that will it last for like one week? If not then do you think that you will be able to find sufficient number of customers? Well, that girl had no answer but Red bull has to find for sure to sell the bullish drink.