Dhamaal!!!

Dhamaal, the first cultural event organized by PGPX 2, arrived just in time, when the stress levels at PGPX-2 were about to hit the roof, with all the end-term exams and assignments and what not. Christened so, by our very own cultural secretary Nitin, and touted as the ultimate get together for students and all of their family, Dhamaal was planned and executed meticulously to perfection by our team of volunteers, consisting of Sumantra, Shwetab and Venki. The event was compeered by Nitin himself, who did a splendid job by keeping the audience on their toes right through the event and some of his one liners literally had the audience in splits.

The event took off to a slow start with the crowd slowly building up toward the latter part of the evening. The initial limelight was stolen by our very own crooners taking the stage bright and early and hitting the right notes. The notable performances came from Manav, Anuj and Vinay, with the others not left too far behind. A scintillating dance performance by one of the PGPX spouses, set the tone for the remainder of the events. Snacks and drinks were served on the house, to keep the energy levels afloat.

The main attraction of the event was the skits and the mimicry performances written and directed by, the supreme all rounder of PGPX, Venky. He and his team created waves of laughter with their imitations of whatever that went inside the closed doors of PGPX Term-1. The notable acting performances came from Sumantra, Ganesh, Suresh S, Pramod, Manju, Vikas M and Ram P. The PGPX kids, never to be away from the center stage, also played their roles with panache, especially the son of Pramod, with his mock one liners, delivered with kiddish exuberance. The audience also joined in with great energy, with the participation made memorable through cat calls, repeat requests and what not.

The skits were followed by a fancy dress show by the PGPX kids who were present in all pomp and glory. Soon characters from mythology, comic books and real life, all walked right out on stage. The first prize in this event was won by Manish’s daughter who came in dressed as a Flower Girl. The marketing pitch that she did about the variety of flowers she had in stock and the features of each and every one of them, had our budding marketers in the audience, wonder struck, making her an automatic choice for the top honours.

The pick of the day as far as the kids were concerned was the magic show by S. Kumar’s and sons. And to be honest some of his numbers even had the adults in the audience spell bound. And once the magician and his troop disappeared, there was Vinay and party arriving with their Antakshari competition planned out. This event had the PGPX folks and their spouses pitted against each other with the audience members also forming a crack team, to pitch in whenever the opportunity was ripe for a tune to be let out.

The evening came to a close with an open dance floor for all and sundry to let their hair loose. And let loose they most definitely did. The energy was infectious and the dancing and the fun and frolic went on till well past 2’ o clock in the night. Needless to say, an event for the ages, Dhamaal unlimited left each and every one of us, as we took leave, looking forward to the next episode.

These cases are making me thirsty…

In one of my earlier posts I had described my PGPX plight as it would be done in a Harvard case.

http://biju-blog.blogspot.com/2007/05/continuous-wasting-time-at-pgpx.html

But to be honest, I was shocked by the lukewarm response that I got from my classmates for that one. Guys who were waiting to take out that champagne to celebrate my blossoming as a writer, wrote to me with feeble –

“Very Good Sir! Although the element of humor is not very high, you have presented it like a genuine HBS case, and the subtle satire on every important aspect has come out very well”.

Holy cow!!! Where did that come from? And what the hell did I do to deserve that one? This writing thing is sure hard. I am not making this up. (Thanks Srinath for being very polite with your words and still managing to tell me that it sucked big time. Please accept my apologies and your appointment as my CXO – Quality Control. Your paycheck is in the mail!!! )

And then I decided to go deep. How could this happen? Where did I go wrong? Am I loosing my nascent blog-o-share already? Is there anything more than what meets the eye? Slowly I could see some parallels emerging between the case at hand and the kind of case discussions (Exhibit 1) that we were having in class these days. And then it hit me. Yes, friends. I happened to stumble upon the million dollar answer, and it ain’t pretty.

Our guys are not even reading the cases anymore!!!

Yes, now it all makes sense. But I didn’t stop there and went a little further along with my hypothesis and voila, I came out with the mother of all case analysis recommendations.

Case studies are a huge waste of time!!!

I know this revelation of mine is more of a “king is naked” kind of a situation. May be it’s me, but I am just not able to see any clothes on this beast. Forget a Panchantra Lungi or a Benetton T-shirt, even a bare minimum Lotus thread is becoming hard to find.

For starters, most of them cases start with the following disclaimer – “This case is not intended to serve as endorsement, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. “ What??? Did I read that right? Then why am I even wasting my time on these?”

The sad part is that, this is only the beginning of a very slippery slope. There are much more disturbing disclaimers that have been left unwritten. Here is my not-so-short laundry list that should be displayed prominently in all cases, to warn the uninitiated:

• Extra care has been taken to obscure information within irrelevant details.
• Information presented may be more useless than you think.
• Questions asked may not have any connection to the subject matter.
• Solutions appearing in your mind, especially the Eureka ones during late at night, are wronger than you imagine.
• Exhibitionism may reach mind numbing levels, loaded with contradicting information.
• Managers may act as zombies: All clueless, with who am I? Which company is this? How did I end up here? Why am I having all these problems? What should I do? All I know is my name, age and my joining date. Not to mention all the looking out the window and listening to the rain falling outside and the leaves rattling and all that creepy stuff.
• WOW cases – Too long winded, with no problems to begin or end with; mostly involving Japanese companies; designed to create envy and frustration in equal proportions.
• BS Cases: Seat belt and helmet mandatory for the serious reader; a pillow and a sheet will do just fine for the slackers.

I have to admit that I saw all these coming. And that too way back…

http://biju-blog.blogspot.com/2007/04/looks-like-mine-is-gone-case.html

Exhibit 1 – Case discussions in class

Prof: So what do you think Mr. X, of the PGPX corporation should do?

CP1: Sir, I think that is a tough one to answer.

Prof: Obviously. Why do you think we are here discussing this?

CP2: Good Question sir. Can I answer that?

CP1: No, what I meant was that there are so many different options that X has to consider. And “if you read the case very carefully” you can see that there are no right or wrong answers.

Prof: That is because you haven’t read the case carefully.

CP3: Sir, I had a very Eureka moment last night. X should close down his European operations.

Prof: But his company doesn’t even have European operations.

CP3: Nevertheless, close only but also. How about we acquire one and then close it down? A strategic acquisition, if you may…

CP4: Yeah… In Infosys…

CP5: Sir, if you listen to Jack Belch’s ‘Straight from the gut’, you can hear a very clear, Emmmm… Excuse me.

Prof: What do you think is the role of a General Manager?

CP5: Mostly comedy, sir. With some melodrama thrown in during appraisals…

CP6: Sir, there should be a third option…

Prof: Most definitely, but how about the first and the second?

CP6: Sorry, Sir. I am the Third Option Expert. Jumped in a little too soon.

CP7: Sir, I think X should take a well balanced approach by consulting all the stake holders and then on the basis of a detailed analysis of all the relevant, differential and critical considerations, should push for a win-win solution in the best interests of the share holders and employees, keeping the internal and external customers of the company in mind.

Prof: Excellent…that would mean…

Sorry, to burst the bubble sir…but that just means that we haven’t read the case yet…

The Kerala model keeps you in high spirits!!!

I remember an old Wipro recruitment ad, which told me how unfortunate I was to have not learnt driving from Michael Schumacher or batting from Sachin Tendulkar. But when it comes to Macro Economics I don’t think PGPX has left me with any room to complain. Our professor on this subject happens to be very much on top of things and incidentally, in addition to his day job of teaching duds, err.. dudes like me, he also finds time to sit in the sixth central pay commission. So needless to say, our whole class is excited to hear his experiences and views in setting our macroeconomic policies straight.

Today during class discussions, I got an opportunity to talk to the out-and-out capitalist in him about a contrarian view, the one that is presented by the famed Kerala macroeconomic model. I was not surprised that he was quick to dismiss that as a failed one.

So I got back to my drawing board and here is all that I could find in my attempt to pull it together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model

If you think that materialism, fuelled by consumption led economic growth as practiced in the west is the only way to prosperity, then you should read this article by Bill Mckibben.

What is True Development? The Kerala Model
http://www.ashanet.org/library/articles/kerala.199803.html
Some excerpts:

• Demographically, Kerala mirrors the United States on about one-seventieth the cash. It has problems, of course: There is chronic unemployment, a stagnant economy that may have trouble coping with world markets, and a budget deficit that is often described as out of control. But these are the kinds of problems you find in France. Kerala utterly lacks the squalid drama of the Third World--the beggars reaching through the car window, the children with distended bellies, the baby girls left to die.
• Kerala undercuts maxims about the world we consider almost intuitive: Rich people are healthier, rich people live longer, rich people have more opportunity for education, rich people have fewer children. We know all these things to be true--and yet here is a counter case, a demographic Himalaya suddenly rising on our mental atlas. It's as if someone demonstrated in a lab that flame didn't necessarily need oxygen, or that water could freeze at 60 degrees. It demands a new chemistry to explain it, a whole new science.
• In Kerala the birth rate is 40 percent below that of India as a whole and almost 60 percent below the rate for poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found that the birth rate had fallen to replacement level. That is to say, Kerala has solved one-third of the equation that drives environmental destruction the world over. And, defying conventional wisdom, it has done so without rapid economic growth--has done so without becoming a huge consumer of resources and thus destroying the environment in other ways.
• One-seventieth the income means one-seventieth the damage to the planet. So, on balance, if Kerala and the United States manage to achieve the same physical quality of life, Kerala is the vastly more successful society. Which is not to say that we could ever live on as little as they do--or, indeed, that they should. The right point is clearly somewhere in between.

Here are some additional resources:

Is There a Kerala Model?
http://chss.montclair.edu/anthro/julypap.html

Kerala: A Lesson In Light Living:
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC26/AtKisson.htm

Kerala State: A Social Justice Model
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0795.08.html

Female-Supported Households: A Continuing Agenda for the Kerala Model?
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/anthro/febconf.html

The Relevance of the Kerala Model in the Emerging World Order
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/anthro/augpap.html

Is the Kerala Model Sustainable? Lessons from the Past
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/anthro/decconf.html

For all those guys out there who are still not convinced, let me take out my brahmastra. No statistical discourse on Kerala is complete without highlighting our per-capita-alcoholic consumption, which happens to be the highest in the country. If that doesn’t convince you that God’s Own Country is the happiest and the happening place around here, then no amount of Macro Economic mushrooming will. I rest my case…

PGPX Survival strategies!!!

With the term 1 and a 20% MBA under my belt, I think it is time that I documented for posterity, some of the PGPX survival strategies that I have learned so far. Without further ado let me get straight into it.

Deemphasizing grades: The PGPX game doesn’t even start unless you have this strategy firmly in place. And if you are one of those souls, who have trouble doing this, then I have only one advice for you. Please log off and start hitting the books right away, because it is never too early with Term 2 classes starting tomorrow.

Social Loafing (SL): Now that you are still with me, let me share with you the most powerful tool that is available to PGPX-ians, in acing their course and graduating with flying colors. If not for this strategy, PGPX would not have been an option for lesser mortals like me. For the uninitiated, SL is where you ride off on the effort of people of your syndicate group, who are more motivated, hungry and thirsty than you are. Yes, knowledge is what I am talking about and if these dear friends of yours happened to exit at my point above, then your case looks all the more promising.

Skimming: Now SL may work sweetly for group activities. But, how about all those long winding Harvard cases and tones of other reading material that you have to pre-process, to even get to a point where you can confidently attend your classes? This is where I prescribe skimming, to all those folks out there, who value their time enough to not spend it on reading things, which you are most likely to forget anyway, even before you hit the next page.

Skimming is an extreme art form, where you read the first and last line of a paragraph and anything else that might be written in bold to make sense of what the hell the author is talking about. And if you are the kind who believes in marginal utility, you can also pay attention to whatever that might be written in the margin or whereabouts as bonus material. But please make sure that you move on fast, completely ignoring any tables, figures, graphs or any other attention grabbing devices that the author might have put in to block your progress. Any slip up here and you will soon get trapped and will be forced to read each and every line in that page, chapter and sometimes even the whole book, and still end up as an utterly and thoroughly confused soul, with all your earlier productivity gains thrown out the window. I am telling you, the god isn’t in the details on this one and it ain’t worth the effort.

Class Participation: Now that you have done enough SL and ‘assimilated’ all the reading material and everything, it’s time to take your game to the center stage, the class and earn brownie points or what we call in technical terms as the class participation points. But remember, here you have to take things a little easy as it is a hotly contested field as I explained in one of my earlier posts.
http://biju-blog.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-party-cpiim-launched-with-much.html
Some of the profs are also very aggressive and a small misstep here can get your whole ass’imilation’ exposed.

The trick here is to hold it in for the initial 5-10 minutes and try to be a good listener. If you find this difficult, imagine as if you are the speaker and others are there just to hear you speak. Before you get started, the initial 5-10 minutes is for the rest of the folks to tell you what they would like you to speak about. Once you get a hang of this you can come out swinging. And it doesn’t matter whether you have anything to say or not. The most important thing is to stake your claim to fame by raising your hand or whatever else that catches the prof’s fancy and gets you the air time. And if you can work big-sounding but hollow words like apriori or dual slack into your talk, then you will be cooking with gas in more ways than one.

In the unfortunate event of your mind drawing a total blank at the inopportune moment that you are picked, there are always ways to score through unconventional ways, by opening with Sir, I have a question and proceeding to use any of the following tried and tested methods:

Can you explain that last sentence again? - This classical ploy draws its effectiveness from the inherent assumption that you have understood everything except the last sentence and you have also very effectively relinquished the mike and bought yourself some more time to play yourself back into the game.

Can’t there be a third option? - This is surprisingly strong because of the general rule that most of the time debates happen when there are two plausible options. But you got to be careful with this one because it can boomerang on you and you could end up working on the nonexistent third option yourself, right there, at a very short notice.

To be Continued…

Jest in Time @ PGPX!!!

It is that time of the term when you are just running from one exam to another with little reprieve in between. So, yes, the good news is that my first term as a back-to-school student is nearing its climax. But the anticlimax that has made this already harrowing end-term experience even more difficult is our institute’s philosophy of examination rigor, which can be summed up in as little words as this: “A system designed to fail, fails if it fails to fail”. If you think this hardly makes any sense, it can mean only one thing. You are not in touch with the most recent advancements in Operations Management and Just in time (JIT) concepts. But don’t worry. Help is very much at hand. My dear friend Raju has got you covered.

http://exploretime.blogspot.com/

Currently I am very busy chalking my poor performances against this POOR (Philosophy Of Over Rigor) pedagogy. And needless to say, this whole system has put the most of us in Deep JIT and we can’t wait for this ordeal (err… Sorry, I meant to say the rewarding learning experience) to get over. But to be fair, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Once this term gets over, we will have one full day’s worth of scheduled break before the next term starts. But that is also because it happens to be a Sunday. So all in all, things are looking pretty smooth for the next round of onslaught (read ‘term’) to start. With the next term, our first module of Building Blocks will come to an end. It is a totally tangential matter that I myself, have been more focused on Building Blogs; but for everyone their own.

From the way the IIMA machinery is quietly working in the background, I can already feel the sequential pull that is being exerted on the Academic Materials Supply Chain Management (AM SCM) system, all across the world, to bring in the thickest of books and the longest of cases for our next term. And to play my part in this AM SCM and counter balance this pull, I am already planning on exerting some push technology to get my old books and study materials out the door onto the streets so as to free up some valuable shelf space. And more importantly, we are also planning to apply some similar space freeing strategies to our mind by engaging in some spiritual pursuits, all as part of our knowledge management best practices. After all, unless you get rid of your old knowledge how will you acquire new knowledge? And by looking at our course outline, it is quite clear that there is a lot more that remains to be acquired. So the least we can do is to say cheers to that…