Big MAC in Gujju land. I'm lovin it!!!

Valery Niewland & her son Ryan Immanuel

Valery Niewland is no stranger to hardships. But, hardships from a stranger? This may have been her very first time. And that too for something as silly as a project report. What can I say? Managing Across Cultures (MAC) is no walk in the park and I am glad that I could teach that to her the hard way.

I am a 34 year old middle aged guy going through a midlife crisis working on a stupid project, titled ‘Walk awhile with someone having a different worldview’, that forms part of my MAC course.

She is a 28 year old, Belgian citizen, born in the central African country of Congo, where her father, Nieuland, a man of Caucasian descent, was working as a manager in a textile factory and fell in love with Mayama, a lady of African descent.

Ours was a match made in the IIMA gym, which is no heaven, despite some strong evidence presented by angels who have been spotted working out there.

In this project I had to “identify someone who is most different from me and establish a relationship with that person so as to spend a few hours getting into that person’s world.” I couldn’t resist this opportunity and decided to barge into her world with a huge thud.

My pitch was pretty weak and involved uttering meaningless phrases like deadline, cross-cultural, worldview etc., with a generous dose of anxiety prone stammering thrown into the mix. But being a management student herself, (at the Solvary School of Business at ULB, Belguim), and more importantly on exchange at IIMA PGPII, she could identify with the kind of stiff odds that I was up against and agreed to help me out. So the date was set.

What she went through on D-day would have brought an all knowing smile to the face of Guantanamo bay prisoners undergoing torturous interrogation by FBI. The following are some of the insights I gleaned by chipping away at the block. Boring details have been restricted to the project report, already placed in my recycle bin for further reference, if required.

Valery spent the first 5 years of her life in Congo, before entering Belguim, when her father moved back home, after working for close to two decades in Africa. Her first language is French, but speaks, reads and writes two other languages - Dutch, and Swahili, in addition to English.

Her son, Ryan, is currently staying with her in IIMA. This means that in addition to being a full time student, she also has to play the dual role of a teacher, to her son, who gets his study material couriered from his school in Belgium. This offshoring idea helped me invent a new business model on-the-spot, which I am naming KPO – Kid Process Outsourcing.

As I understand it, parents all across the western world are growing increasingly fed up of their kids’ messed up processes that are jumping all over the control chart. Once they hit the ‘enough is enough’ status and realize that they badly need a break, all they will have to do from now on, is to send the kids over to us and follow it up by couriering their books every once in a while. We will educate them right here and keep them all set and ready to take up their hi-tech jobs right here, as and when those get outsourced too. This could be the next big wave of end-to-end outsourcing, the patent filing for which has already been outsourced.

Valery also talked about her experience watching the Bollywood movie, Kuch Kuch hota hai with French Sub titles and how it was a huge hit with all the members of her family, friends and relatives. She was all praises for Sharukh khan who, according to her has done a real swell of a job. After hearing this, there was some kuch kuch that was hota hai in my mind also, mostly driven by Khan Envy usually found in able bodied Indian men of all shapes and sizes.

Valery is currently specializing in Finance and wants to get into a banking career with an intention to grow into a managerial role in a year or two. Her long term ambition is to become a social entrepreneur and set up a Not-For-Profit venture, for the underprivileged children of Congo. I know this might sound like a ‘Miss-World’ speech but having met her and seen her inner beauty I left with a readiness to take this to the bank. I wish her all the very best.

And last but not the least, the ‘funniest guy of the project’ award goes to her son Ryan, who proved beyond doubt that comedy can be delivered even in as classical a language as French. He knew only French, and in my temptation to exploit the ‘economies of scale’ in the nascent project that I had set up, I asked Valery to be the interpreter and ask her son to share some of his experiences of being in India.

After some cajoling, our man, Ryan started sharing his profound wisdom and I was left clueless when she started laughing out loud, with her son still keeping a serious face. I was curious as hell and wanted to know what was going on, to which Valery, after a couple of minutes of serious laughing, responded thus. “He is complaining about the cows walking around the streets in India”.

I was dumbfounded by his abstruse analysis. Even small kids @ IIMA are turning culturally sensitive. I earnestly wanted to know more. So I continued. Why does he think so? To which the reply came prompt.

He is saying that when he sees them, he gets reminded of his favourite food back home, eaten with French fries and his mouth starts watering. Talk about cultural sensitivity and the ‘holier than cow’ attitude. Proves beyond doubt that even in the middle of a MAC attack, kids still say the darnest things and it doesn’t matter whether they are from Belgium or Belgaum. In the process, I got my message too…Dubaarah Math Poochna…

Balanced score card at half time!!!

Now that the first half of my ‘program’ is over and gone, and I see myself turning into a bulk processor of cases and reading materials, I couldn't help but look outside the window. No, this was not a knee-jerk reaction to something titillating going on outside, but a thoughtful response from a Harvard educated management practitioner. For all of you skeptics out there, yes, my loving attorney (my wife) has OKed the use of the H-word on record, as most of my so called management education has been through Harvard cases.

Now let me tell you that the one big takeaway from all these cases has been this ‘look-outside-the-window’ approach - the one and only surefire way to enrapture the readers with the dichotomy that you are facing. And if you can start to ramble more about your company, things look even better. For me, even though I have been blessed with good company off late, there is enough reason to get started off on my own case, at least to fill up all the time that I have freed up in this term, using some innovative elective selections. So here I go…

I am choosing to call mine, the ‘grand mother of all dichotomies’, one that confronts management students all over the world, past present and future. And here it is.

Is the premise of management education as something that can be imparted to a class of willing, well founded? And more importantly, can managers be created using formal schooling or is this all part of a self-fulfilling system, a system, leftover from the yesteryears of ‘too many’ competing for ‘too few’ opportunities and MBA being used as an artificial entry barrier for acceptance into coveted management positions? Hasn’t decades of entrepreneurship, innovation and ubiquitous information made such a system obsolete?

I am not discounting the fact that there is always knowledge that can be assimilated or skills that can be acquired that can improve one’s effectiveness as a manger or an entrepreneur. In fact even in my own case, there have been some indisputable ‘program learnings’, which is the subject of a whole different post that is already in the works. But that aside, my basic question is on the approach of dedicating one or two years of time, money and effort, all in an attempt to learn management, full time, in a class room setting?

There cannot be any doubt in our mind that we want our doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants etc. to be well schooled and on top of the happenings in their field. Something as common as a common-cold may not send me scurrying for a doctor, but the moment something uncommon starts happening, I go looking for a certified physician. And these days it is a straight drive to ‘specialization’ on precisely the very organ that is troubling you, without even a glance towards the generalist.

Now, how about if, what you are having is an uncommon idea? Something which you think has an economic value because of it addressing an unserviced market space or an unrepresented product space? Do you run to the nearest IIM to get some fresh ‘managerial’ talent or is it a ‘DIY’ (Do it yourself) task that we have at hand?

To me it appears that if you,

1. can truly understand your potential customers and what economic value means to them
2. are clear on the big-picture of how your idea provides this value and how to make it work financially
3. can spot talent and build teams, be it to design/build/market/do accounting
4. can pick up rudimentary management ‘gyaan’ on the fly

have enough emotional acumen to connect with your team and elicit high performance from them

you don’t need anything more than a song on your lips and a smile on your face to build great businesses, to become great entrepreneurs.

Then there are great general managers who build tremendous shareholder wealth, not only by scaling their businesses but also by perfecting its internals and ensuring its profitability, predictability and sustainability. Now are these folks created in the crucible of their own real world experiences and in spite of what they have studied or were ‘taught’ or are they executing a recipe which is being bottled and marketed by B-schools around the world?

Brealey & Meyers even went to the extent of documenting the 4th unsolved problem in Corporate Finance as – Is management an Off-Balance-sheet liability? For example, the stock of closed end funds often sells for substantially less than the value of the fund’s portfolio. Real estate stocks appear to sell for less than the market value of the firms’ net assets. Many of the oil companies tend to have market values less than the market value of their oil reserves. All this can only happen if the value added by the firm’s management is less than the cost of the management.

Now that leads the layman in me to ask the same question in a slightly different way - Isn’t management just common sense clothed in good presentation skills? With the obvious corollary of – Aren’t B-schools all over the world, just over-hyped institutions that select for common sense and convert the selects into good workers by giving them enough and more to work on?

One of the trends that gives this away is the popularity of articles which tout the concept of ‘What they don’t teach you at B-schools’. Now if a lawyer or a doctor starts practicing what they were not taught in their respective schools, I am pretty sure that they will soon run out of opportunities to experiment. Now how is this different from business education and why is this contrast not unsettling?

Like all good cases, mine also ends with no right or wrong answers. Even worse, I don’t even think that I have any answers to offer. But sometimes as they say, it is more important to have all the questions than the answers. Looking forward to that day when I will start getting paid for my questions….till then, there is so much to be managed and so few people to do it.

And to that I say - I shall do it. I have substantial experience to boot…not to mention the innumerable Harvard cases that I have cracked…

At PGPX, Creativity is going to be a do or die!!!

It is one thing that I took this elective mostly to get away from all the other alternatives that were offered, which would have involved case readings, number crunching, Excel-ing, quizzes and all sorts of other stuff that Profs make us do to earn their living.

But as my ill luck would have it, unknowingly I may have walked into a lion’s den, when I signed up for ‘Managing and Creating Creativity’, an elective taught by Krishnesh Mehta, a visiting faculty from our neighboring, National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad.

http://www.nid.edu/people_faculties_m.htm

From whatever he has told us till now, this could turn out to be the course that might make everything else that I have undergone till now in IIMA, look like child’s play. For starters let me remind you, that till now, no professor in my life has threatened me yet with bodily harm. Yeah, the occasional, “I will push your thick head against the wall, if you do arbit CP without reading the case”, might have happened. But I have always had the knack to see through such empty threats for what they really are – a rhetoric used to discourage divergent opinions - and get on with my life.

But here this Prof was looking to do an open mind surgery on us. And he was kind enough to forewarn us that it is going to hurt as hell. So before we began, he started out by making us write up and sign our name on a disclaimer which started out in a mild fashion as follows:

“I Biju Nair take full responsibility of whatever happens to me physically, mentally, emotionally etc. during this course, because of my own doing or doings of anyone participating in this course or any other stranger or any animal, insect, reptiles, or any other creature natural or artificial that will be used for the conduct of this course.”

“I agree to perform anything or everything that I might be asked to, as part of this course, whether I like it or not and whether I agree to it or not”

“I am agreeing to all of the above out of the choice of my own free will and am doing this with full consciousness and awareness without being under the influence of any kind of drugs, force or influence.”

And then the rest of the disclaimer went even more hay wire and eventually put us summarily responsible for anything and everything that may or may not go wrong under or above the sun. But strange as it may sound, I was more than happy to sign up, having fresh memories of my recent brushes with the IIMA rigor and its ‘grade factor’.

Now even without any such disclaimers, the kind of stuff that the professors over here have been able to make me do over the last 6 months or so, can make my hair stand up, even when I am just thinking about it wearing my favorite Nike cap. And now this quasi-legal agreement to top it all off… Needless to say, I started to get worried.

So we quizzed him on what were all the different things that he had already planned out for us, to warrant such an air tight agreement. To be honest, he was not very forthcoming, (with the kind of blanket agreement that he had already gotten from us, he didn’t need to be) other than telling us something about taking 200 steps through thick jungles in the middle of the night and sharing drinks with ferocious wild animals and some such stuff like that. He also mentioned something about having a near death experience and all. But I think I may have had my first one right there just hearing about all this, so this may not be applicable to me any more.

Another interesting pre-course ritual was the baselining of the Field Resonant Images (FRI) of our brains, to be compared with the ‘after‘ pictures to be taken at the end of our 8 week, course. Our Prof has promised us some really colorful results, if we follow his instructions properly. Yeah, right…Disturbing sleeping wild animals in the middle of the night is definitely going to kick-start my creativity for sure.

Now that I think of it, there seems to be only two ways this course is going to end for me. Either I will prove to be creative enough to come up with a good excuse that will convince the Prof to allow me to drop this course. Or I will be snacked on by wild animals in the jungles of Gujarat…

Talk about the pressures of having no other option but to be creative. Move over pass or fail courses…this one is going to be a do or die, from the way I see it...

Updated on 25th June 2010:

I do feel victimized, by the way Times of India reporters have gone out of their way to extract bits and pieces from this post, all in the name of investigative journalism, to malign one of my very beloved professors. As can be figured out from my responses to the comments that I received for my original post, my experience with this professor, as well as his course and teaching methods has been extremely positive. I do firmly believe that all the teaching methods that were used for this course were relevant and beneficial to the objectives of this course as experienced through my personal realisation. I totally agree with my fellow PGPXer's post given below and I myself couldn't have presented the case in a better way.

http://iima-pgpx4-impressions.blogspot.com/2010/06/nid-professor-is-clean.html

Thanks bro for this excellent post..You have said everything that needs to be said and that too after pertinent analysis of context and content...Wish our brethren getting paid for their journalistic efforts could even be half as effective, instead of pursuing unethical means to sensationalize matters and in the process only helping to obscure truth and obturate justice.

PGPX in remission!!!

After 5 months and two terms of mindless rigor the first break finally arrived, giving me a chance to transport myself from Gandhi’s own country to God’s own country. And let me tell you folks. It is right what they say. God is great indeed. And then there was light!!!

As can be figured from the picture, there were certain new bottlenecks that I could introduce to form part of my solution to overcome my persistent dryness problems. Soon things started working out so smoothly that I almost ended up becoming part of the problem, because of the overuse of the solution. All this happened in the famed Poovar Island resort where the Neyyar River meets the Arabian Sea and more importantly the pool side bar and dedicated servers allows C2H5OH to meet with you, while you are swimming in a pool of H2O.
http://www.poovarislandresort.com/
This can make you feel larger than life. Almost god-like as can be seen from the next picture…

As I was busy vacationing away, one of our professors did try to throw a spanner in my works by mailing us our grades for one of the exams that had just gotten over. It was no coincidence that this professor taught us ‘Setting and Delivering Service Levels’. But for no apparent reason other than as a cruel joke, he conveniently took a very bad occasion to practice what he preached, ignoring the most sanctimonious rule regarding service levels – “Never give customers what they don’t need…especially during vacations…and that too in GOC”.

But luckily he threw us a bone, by naming the email subject appropriately with words like ‘SDSL’, ‘Course Grade’ etc, and I was more than happy to read and interpret these as what our Nitin would refer to as ‘NNTO: No need to open.’ and treated it like mails which have abhorrent and repulsive subject lines like “Nude pictures of Kournikova”. Believe me such mails mostly end up crashing your faith in electronic mail, not to mention the software powering your hardware.

All in all it was a very relaxing and invigorating vacation indeed; something which I am sure will prep me up for rejoining the rigor scheme of things come Monday; a surreal experience that sent a nerve tingling jolt of excitement right through my spine. But as my worst luck would have it, I got a little over enthusiastic and ended up opening a mail from the PGPX office titled, titled Term III schedule.

I guess I will never learn the art of being responsible with my mail. Currently eagerly looking forward to my next break…

T-Nite draws to a close: With Salsa Caliente!!!

Before the flags went down on T-nite 2007, I got just enough time to slide in one more performance. This time it was some Suave (smooth) Salsa!!!

Un momento caliente en mi experiencia de PGPX!!!

Overall, the event ended in bit of an anticlimax for us. Even though we went into the final day with a sizable lead, a bad day at the office together with some unexpected glitches with the music system during our performance, made it a narrow loss for us, pushing us to the second spot behind PGP section C, who delivered a rocking performance to snatch a sweet come-from-behind victory.

There was a lot of soul searching done and innumerable lessons learnt, to be passed on to PGPX-III. But nothing could drown the sorrow of being so close yet so far from winning it all. The perils of performing in a perennially dry state!!!

IIMA Talent-Nite: Swing is in the air!!!

Couple of snaps from my swing dance performance in T-nite!!!

The PGP II junta was right there to pronounce the verdict:

And yes, the writing was on the board!!!

We currently have a sizeable lead over our PGP brethren in the overall standing, with two more days of competition remaining!!!

Bracing ourselves for that final onslaught!!!

PGPX delivering some breaking news!!!

If you thought that this is me and my homies going for news paper delivery in the morning, then you have been had my friend. On the contrary, it happens to be a snapshot of the PGPX-brigade that is out to deliver the bad news to all sections PGP…C, B, D, A.. Whatever!!! Things ain’t going to be that easy anymore my dear fellows!!! Because PGPX is here and if you watch closely you can read the newsprint in our hands. Yes it is breaking news indeed!!! Breaking all PGP hopes of winning anything that is worthwhile, over the coming T-nite week-end!!!

The tide was turned in the opening event itself, the PUBRUN, which marked the beginning of the annual Talent-nite 2007, at IIMA. To say that we beat the crap out of the PGP sections, decades younger than us, is just an understatement. We ended up wining the bellwether event with more than a clear 20% points lead. Our captain Rajeev did such a phenomenal job that most of the bed sheets in IMDC, has ended up, stuck up on the mess walls, as placeholders for PGPX posters, with the result that most of us are currently sleeping sheetless!!! But I say it is only a small price to pay for scaring the SHEET out of our esteemed PGP competition.

Now let me disclose some trade secrets to engage my impressionable readers. We have been getting queries from our younger PGP brethren as to the secret behind our spectacular runway success in this event, and I think it’s about time that I spilled the beans on this one. To be honest, it had all to do with the dryness of our current state. In fact, some of our guys were so incredibly thirsty, that the mental picture of a cold one, painted using the fake-o-nym PUBRUN, was enough to send their pulses racing and they ran. With everything that they could gather; newspapers, pillows, bed sheets, coke bottles, glue sticks, whatever….And the rest as they say is history…

But now it turns out that, this whole PUBRUN stands for some sort of ‘publicity run’ and needless to say, our runners are pissed…, and that too way beyond pacification. The last time I heard, they are getting their tiger war faces painted on… with the intent of revisiting the mess and sending shivers up the spines of all the fresh ones that we recently admitted to the hallowed portals of WMIWI. Hold on to your SHEETS guys, because it might all be coming off pretty soon…

Don’t say that we didn’t warn you!!! And not that it’s going to help, but anyways….