Whats happening

A tumultuous week and a half it has been, since the term break started. India barely escaped with a draw in the first test. Dr.Hanif's case reached a crescendo but finally he has been released and is flying back home. The Tatas are leading in the race to buy Jaguar. Danone and Wipro are trying to buy Bisleri. The sensex is experiencing major corrections. Prathiba Patil has been elected to become India's next president. Looks like Najma Heptulla will make it two women at the top and the Harry Potter series had yet another round of success with both the book and movie doing really well so far.
And things have not remained so far behind at ISB. Two leadership development sessions, one on people skills and another on presentation skills happened and Term-3 kicked off last Monday with loads of pre-reads and an assignment to complete before the day-break on day 1 of the term. Prof. Bhagwan Chowdhry from UCLA is teaching Corporate Finance for us and his classes are really awesome. Prof. Atul Nerkar teaches the Entrepreneurship course and has really charmed the whole batch. The very first class included a case analysis of a worldwide private equity venture and our section debated the case in and out with Atul. When we had 15 minutes left finally, Atul introduces Jay Dehejia, one of the partners in the venture and one who we read about in the case. The whole class roared into a thunderous applause and we were all spellbound to see a person from the case come up and talk to us. Even though most of term-2 results are out and assignments & AIKYA(A hyderbadi family is adopting my study group) beckon ISB students this weekend, we didn't forget to party. I'm just back after the 'Pirates' party and it was sheer fun. The enthusiasm was electric and the booze was really free flowing.

Term 2 Done - 25% MBA

Time for the next term completion post. After five weeks of great learning and a bizzare two days of exams term 2 has finally come to an end. This break I'm staying back in campus. This will certainly help me catch some breath before we get into one more term of berserk activity. The major highlights of this term were MARKSTRAT(the marketing simulation game), macroeconomics and decision modeling. Ziv Katalan's flamboyance, Jagmohan Raju's wit, Krishnakumar's dedication, Milind Sohoni's passion and Harbir Singh's lethal execution will remain etched in mind for a very long time. Except for the finals which I hated once again the learning was immense. Got two good friends, CD and SP in this term and we three with AB are going to be doing a marketing strategy assignment with a large Indian corporate over the next few terms. So alls well that ends well and successfully the class of 2008 becomes 25% MBA.



Pic: A popular one around the campus on the Decision modeling course. The subject is my personal favorite but I still loved this strip.

At wits end

Term 2 is drawing to a close very soon and looking back at the last two terms I can see that there has been so much of an evolution in the student community. When we all first met a couple of months ago there was an all pervasive spirit of developing our knowledge repository and only pursuits that helped add knowledge seemed to be the right thing to do. But after three months of roasting, asses are on fire and pursuits and perspectives have generally gone for a toss. There is so much of cramming happening everywhere and quite a lot of this makes me feel totally uncomfortable. I'm so out of the stage where I will try to eat something that I dont like 'coz it is socially acceptable to eat that particular something. The 1 year MBA is certainly an experience that tries and tests your psyche, patience, wit's end and hopefully I will end up with better perspectives. News is out that, amidst this mad pressure, two of my batchmates traveled to SPJain this weekend and won two case analysis contests hands down. These ISBians certainly have their perspectives right. On a side note I have succesfully bid for a whacky exchange program to an exotic mediterranean b-school and if alls well I'll finish my MBA with supposedly the most intelligent race on earth.

Dipak Jain on campus

The really great are the one's who can have a light head in spite of great achievements. Today I found that Dipak Jain(Dean of the Kellogg School of Management) is one of that kind and not just that. He is the first Indian to become the dean of a top US B-school and is a truly inspirational speaker. His address to the ISB student body was titled "Global Macro trends" and he touched upon a few major trends

i) Demographics - The western world is aging. The number of centurions in Japan is increasing every year. The proportion of old people in western countries is going to increase dramatically over the coming years. In this context India has a unique advantage 'coz we have 70% of the population less than 30 years of age. This effect is totally gonna polarize the world with the majority of the workforce from India. Prof. Jain calls it the 'Browing of the global workforce'

ii) Hypercompetition - The next trend Prof. Jain emphasized is the way competition is looked at. According to him the competition to the airline industry is not essentially between airlines. Rather it is video conferencing. Bulk of the air travel is business travel and if video conferencing reaches a certain level business travel will reduce as much as 80%. So the strategic angle for airline industry has to be perceived in a totally different way.

iii) Innovation - While we learn a lot about first mover advantage and market share and how great it is to have these advantages Prof. Jain talked about how Google enters after Yahoo/Microsoft and captures everything. The way the company innovated was the key. The customers of Google are not really the people who use the search engine. It is rather the website that receives the click. Google realized the fact and this innovation was the key to it's success. He notes several Indian students in a Mexican business school trying to learn Spanish(with a Mexican accent). They are all going back to India to set up BPOs to cater to the burgeoning spanish speaking American population(mostly migrated from Mexico). These are ways to innovatively forge ahead.

Prof. Jain's humble beginnings, his meteoric rise and true Indian spirit was totally inspiring. I felt really enthused after the speech. Well, anyhow I should have guessed that you cannot go wrong with a name like that.