My management Dilemma.. Managing By Common sense

Well, I am updating my blog so infrequently that even those friends are complaining who like visit my blog once a month. So taking note of that, I came back to flood this space with all the blabbering I can muster. The complain seems to be valid which is evident from just 3 articles written during the past one month. So thought about writing something which I use to bug my classmates and friends.

Jargons have become so integral part of my life that I am speaking in marketing lingo since last few days. Even while discussing about movies I am asking questions like what is the target audience and what is the value proposition? Jargons are everywhere around us and its better if we pick up them in our daily language. JEM (Jargons every Minute) is our SM (Suo Motto). Now most of them are actually TLA (three letter acronyms) which we use for the heck of using (JLT:Just like That). The humorous side is that it's really funny to use these TLA (some of them are made "OTS" which is on the spot and not the usual Opportunity TO See) and they make the moment lighter and also in a way shapes up your management thinking.

Well, in one line I think my expertise is that I am someone who can make your life HOH (Hell of Heaven) depending on what kind of mood you are in. Most of the time, I do not make any sense but then, who the hell want to remain in their senses. MBA has enough in it to confuse you and I feel that the one thing you loose after joining a B school is your common sense. In desperate attempts to become more logical and organized and someone different you loose your appetite to crack or take PJs. Anyway, my only Jargon which combines MBA and life is MBC. Management By Common sense but ya! at the same time I think it's more like MCS (Managing Common Sense). I know I am not making any sense and going on blabbering but then I told you.. It's JLT (Just LIke That.)

Eklavya : Dont expect anything.

Seldom you see a congregation of so many star faces, seldom you expect poor show from Vidhu Vinod chopra and seldom you expect Amitabh to be a part of such a poor thing. But well, all of that has happened with this movie Eklavya which I think is a sheer waste of time and money. To comment about story, i think that there is no story and it's just an idea to bring some stars under one flag and make them act pretending that you are going to make a movie of the lifetime. Sanju baba has no role to play and he is out there only for a couple of scenes. I think the director could have saved a lot of bucks by putting any tom dick harry in his place. Same could be said about the role of Jacky and Jimmy Shergil. They are again out of place and a poor fit to the movie plot.

The story is set in Rajasthan somewhere in 70's or 80's and Amitabh is serving as guard to the royal family and he has some secrets which he will take to his grave. His father laid his life to save the highness and he is supposed to do the same. Raima sen is again a waste here in a role of girl who is half insane or half sane (I mean the way you like it). I was unable to comprehend half the dialogues they were saying and there was this scene where Amitabh shoots at a pigeon with blindfold on and catches the ghungroos. Man, any tom dick or harry can catch ghungroos with a blindfold on.

Well, I think that I was sleeping in theatre holding my head after a long long time (I don't remember any such instance after Trimoorti). Well, for me it was really a bad bad experience. So my advise is that don't expect anything from this movie.

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.

Up For Sale: Are you Game?

Chennai has become a shopper’s paradise as most of the high end apparel companies have their booties up for grab. The results are clearly visible, in normal days you will find little crowd inside magnificently decorated show-rooms and the yellow display board with SALE written over it has remarkable effect. It’s surely a crowd puller as the regular brand shopper take it as a chance to pre-pone their future purchase and the low end shopper welcomes it as an entry to the brand conscious club.

The question is what’s the logic behind the sale? Are the prices really low? In some cases it’s yes and in some cases they simply markup the price and then offer a discount which actually means only 10-15% for the customer instead of
the promised 40-50%.

The UpTo deal: - I often get frustrated when I see the UpTo SALE like upto 40%. The simple idea is that they offer high discount on slow moving items so that to recover the loss in revenue from the quantity and utilities are frustratingly priced at a premium. So for the company it’s always a win-win situation. Like I went into this Adidas showroom to find out that their 50% sale condition is that you have to pay full on the product you price and then you can redeem the discount on some other article. So if you have to buy a shoe worth Rs. 5000/- you will get discount worth Rs 2500/- on the next purchase which has to be made on the same day. I doubt that consumers are not dumb enough to fall into the trap and most of the shoppers are the brand loyals only. So their purpose might only be to drive traffic into their lavishly maintained showrooms.

The purpose: - The purpose behind SALE offers are ideally one of these clearing the stock and making way for new arrivals as taste and preferences changes every six months, targeting those people who have the desire and offering them some incentive to take purchase action or simply driving traffic to store by putting a SALE banner. Consumers are not that ignorant now, they have their own mental accounting and they can quickly guess that what should be the ideal price of the product and the sale tag really add some value to them or not. Simply putting a sale banner and charging exorbitant prices are not going to do any justice to your sales and the volume turnover won’t differ much. It could be the opposite way also where you run your promotions for so long that the discounted price is actually perceived as the real price. Koutons is an excellent example where the company runs promotion for like all round the year with discounts as high as 60%. Now, there are few takers for Koutons at the markup prices. But, the company is still happy because they have penetrated into the market segment where loyalty is little and people are willing to switch a brand if they get value for money. So, a short term tactical decision for Koutons may become long term strategy for the pricing of their products. The big question is that where will these promotions stand after the entry of big brothers in retail like Wall Mart and Sears? May be apparel industry should start looking inward and focus on implementing a target costing approach.

We are all slave to our habits..

“The future of a person depends on the kind of habits they have. And we all are creator of our habits”. Among those million two liners from Navjot Singh Sidhu, this has somehow managed to grab my mindshare for long. We all agree about the thing about individual habits but then how many of us have tried changing our habits in let’s say past one year? Anyways talking about myself, I really have tried changing some of my old time habits (I don’t smoke or drink so considerably it should have been easier for me) but I can honestly acknowledge this fact that I have failed miserably.

It’s a cruel reality that over a period of time subconsciously we all become slave of our habits. Even a simple habit like lying down while studying is hard to change, forget about the other strong things like smoking, drinking or even getting up late in the morning. Many people end up making resolutions like going for a walk early in the morning or eating breakfast daily but then my experience suggests that it’s really hard to change even simple things in our lives.

Well the important thing I want to highlight is that though we may find ourselves incapable to change these things and instead learn to live with them I think that we miss out on the hard fact that in a way we loose control over our lives. The stronger a habit becomes, the lesser control we have on our lives. This lack of control sometime plays with our conscious mind too and it reflects in poor utilization of our time and sometime poor decision making. Well, it happens in those cases also when we are exposed to a particular life style and we try to develop certain habits like being friendlier, going out more frequently, being impulsive or may be smoking and drinking also. Now, it starts casually but then it takes over your personality after some time and people may feel guilty, stressed or tensed over their incapability to launch a restore operation.

But then, after all we ourselves are creator of our habits and the only thing is that we have to learn not to give up. We should know that if we are capable of developing a certain habits then let it be the solution to the same problem. We do not actually need to change our habits as it is a demanding process rather with a little bit of expert counseling and help we can always inculcate another habit which offset the negative effect of the other one. This is one area where I think that knowledge of group dynamics, motivation, attitude, perception and human psychology can help. And even if the theoretical understanding proved to be of no help, then what are friends for? Well, so my idea is that work on just one good habit of choosing the right people in your life and you will never regret.

Humour**
Somebody please help me with my habit of blabbering continuously. I really have become slave of it or may be it is too much of listening to Sidhuism. As the master so the disciple.

Life is really beautiful.

It was one fine day in March when my surgeon announced that you are out of any danger my son! But you have to continue with the chemicals for one more month as to make sure that your system remains immune. I was diagnosed with Lymphoma in June 2005 and had excision biopsy to confirm that. If I say that I was not terrified at any moment then probably I would be lying because I was really terrified. Not for me but for my family members who knew that I was just one diagnosis away from death. Months of chemotherapy followed and I crawled my way out of the claws of cancer. Well, most of my friends were unaware of this and probably if I say today that I was with them laughing, shouting and cracking jokes during my final days in college probably no body will believe this but it was one truth that I chose to hide from everyone and my family chose to hide it from my Mom. I was completely unsure about my future and every swig of those chemicals use to remind me of that terrible thing that I was carrying inside my neck. My emotional trauma was so overwhelming that I use to cry alone in dark and those were the times when my thoughts really shaped up. Those were the moment when I decided about moving ahead with my MBA. I indulged myself in reading. All sort of reading. I indulged myself in other activities but this thing was always playing at the back of my mind that I was living a borrowed life.

Today I am here, six months deep into my MBA waiting for my summer placements where I would be perhaps closest to any organizational setup and which will decide the direction of my career but then if I have to pick one period in which I have learnt the most is not these six months of MBA or tiring years of Engineering but rather those 12 months when I was hanging between life and death. Well, it’s no mean achievement considering the fact that some spend their entire lives and never realize the purpose of their lives.

Humour:
My friends always ask me that how come I manage to sleep so much as it’s considered a crime to sleep for more than 3 hours a day in a B school but then probably because I know what I have to do with my life. Nice excuse, isn’t it?

2007: One Step Close

Year 2006 was of significant importance to me. I graduated in Engineering (even I am wondering till date that how) I traveled all the way to south India to start with my masters against the advice of my father and family members. But well, today I am sitting here on my desk trying to do an inquest on my last one year.

I am trying to trace the reasons behind my decision about my career. All I remember is that there was this vague picture inside my mind about the white collar job with six figure salaries offered to MBA graduates but then one girl tried to change all this. She questioned my attitude and then to find some answers to her questions I learnt a lot about changing the world. She did not ask me to join some NGO or to do something really stupid but rather she convinced me that how my MBA can fit into the schemes of things that I wanted to do. Well, I don’t know in which part of the world she is now but then all those thoughts are still fresh and honest inside me. Those thoughts were seriously sticky. The idea of providing mass healthcare on affordable cost, educating masses without compromising with the quality of education, empowering people with low cost skills improvement programs, at this point of time they may seems to be farfetched but I know that even ordinary individuals have done extra-ordinary in the past. It was sad that I was unable to meet her during her stay in India and god knows when I will be close again to her but then to inspire you need not to be very close. All I want to say to you is thanks Piali. I am one step closer to my dreams.

New Year.. Anniversary Post.

Whoa.. My blog turned one year older... I am happy because I successfully held on to at-least this one resolution of mine. If there is something to remember I guess I started my year with a fitness routine and I pressed myself on jogging, walking and lawn tennis but I lost my way out due to travel and then to this MBA. Life has never been so demanding for me. Though I still don't study much but then, I have learnt to appreciate this new and stressed way of life. I know life will be like this only so better be prepared. Well, if I have to take one thing out of this year and carry it forward then probably I would take the memories from my convocation. For two days I felt like I was doing time travelling. There I was standing at the crossroads of the two different lives one "of a freak" and the other "of a somewhat serious freak". Anything it will be sheer injustice to summarize that experience in one or two lines. The new resolution is to pen down all that the year 2006 has taught me. Hope I will hang on to it. Three cheers to the new year... Hip Hip hurrah..

Raju Srivastava - My all time favorite..

This is one video which I liked most about Laughter challenge. I don't know how much time has elapsed since I have watched the part 2 but then I am not to be blamed as the deterioriating quality of the laughter challenge 2 contributed a lot to it. The challenge could be better described as Reading SMS jokes challenge. Have stumbled upon this video on google video site and found that I can share this bit of humour with all my MBA friends. Enjoy friends, you deserve this one.

Taking 'M' out of "MBA"

When people start preparing for MBA entrance exams, the only thing which hovers around their mind is this Master word and not Business administration. The kind of media publicity that the MBA’s have got in India over the last few years, have contributed significantly to this distorted perception. Young students freshly out of college and young executives with a couple of years of coding or manufacturing behind them gets a shot of adrenalin even at the recall of this word Master. You ask any fresher, they will say that they want MBA for value addition, seeing the bigger picture, completing the education cycle in one go and blah blah blah. Executives will go one notch ahead and you will hear reasons like their team leaders actually does nothing or their project managers just keep going on world tours, they are unable to connect to whatever they do, no excitement left in their present jobs, they want some challenging career and some more blah blah blahing.

I am not saying that these reasons are all craps. Some people may relate to whatever they are saying but majority of Indian students belong to that category where the manifestation of thoughts and the actual thoughts bear no correlation. I myself can give thousand reasons but somewhere down the core of my heart I know that the only thing that provoked this need was that rosy picture being painted by media year after year.

Poor thing is that the realization of the shattered dreams does not come immediately. You go through weeks and months of business education to reason out that whatever you are reading will go obsolete in next five years and whatever you are doing bear little resemblance to the actual picture. We talk about average salaries which has changed to median salaries and which may further change to a combination of average and standard deviation (statistically this is the best measure) to prove that which institute is better than which but then in the process we forget the emotional trauma of those who fall below average figures.

Today, after spending close to six months here, I look around myself. All I can see is some confused people who are becoming more and more confused. Or may be they are focused towards their subconscious goal (consciously thought but putting it forward in a way that it should sound like their last priority) of getting a job which pays above average salaries. I wonder, I was always under illusion that we will learn how to be masters but what the profs can do when we are hell bent on learning only the business administration part?