Snaps of the ISB Campus

A few more snaps in this web-album

Graduation Snaps

Here are some snaps from our convocation rehearsal, the class photo-session and the convocation ceremony.

More snaps here

the stage is set

shine on you...

crossing swords

with my parents

our class is too big for a single snap

walking in to the makeshift auditorium...

... and Mr Tee poses for the camera

Back to Term-2: A crash course in macroeconomics

Graduated!!

oops! I threw my hat too high!

hat throwing: take-2

waiting for the snaps to be burnt to CD... didn't anyone study Service Ops Management?

ISB's class of 2007: the final handshake

Placement Story

When watching TV last night, I hit upon CNN-IBN playing this news snippet:




To quote from the text version from CNN-IBN's site

Five students from the prestigious Indian School of Business have bagged international jobs worth Rs one crore annually with the highest clocking Rs 1.2 crore.

Five crorepatis? Well, sure 416 is a big class, but I didn't know it was big enough for me to miss meeting (or even knowing) these five classmates of mine.


Update [17 April 2007]
After intense speculation, some friends of mine & I did come up with five possibilities who could have hit the one-plus mark. So I (probably) do know these five classmates of mine.

done with it

This time last year, I was dreading my last day at work. And today, I'm done with my last examination at ISB; nothing left but the convocation next weekend.

Yep, the roller-coaster is over.

And the emptiness will sink in pretty soon.

Work-ex for an MBA at ISB

As an ISBian, I keep getting queries from potential applicants whether their profile is good enough to be selected at ISB. One of the more worrying aspects for many aspirants is the amount of work experience they need before they can apply. ISB has a policy that reads

Preferably two years of full-time post qualification work experience.

We'll come back to my interpretation of the "preferably" in this statement in a short while, let me look at the aspirants first. Some of these people are really young; it's not rare to come across people in their final year of graduation and they go - "How should I spend my next two years before I apply to ISB?". Whew! talk about focus! Do you know why you want to do an MBA, I ask. And the reply usually starts with "ummm..."

Back to the subject - the number of years of work-ex is just one method of quantifying how much you have worked. The other method to measure the work-ex, perhaps not quantitatively, is to look at one's résumé. When one writes one's résumé, it takes a single line to mention how many years one has worked. What about the other lines? What is the story that they tell? Do they speak of a leadership that raised the value of your organisation? Does it speak of a benchmark you set for yourself, or for others? Does it speak of knowledge? Does it say that you chased your professional desire? Well, what does it speak of?

At the end of the day, when ISB's admission committee receives a huge bunch of profiles, it's the résumés that are going to get compared (yes, there are some other things that get compared too - a GMAT score, recommendations, essays, yadda yadda yadda - but let's stick to CVs for now). Naturally, a person who has worked for long would have a greater chance of having a richer résumé than one who's worked for say, just a year.

I also came this article earlier today: Opposing the Youth Movement. It justifies business schools seeking only those who have lots of work-ex. Essentially,

The whole concept of an MBA program is based around peer-to-peer learning—people coming with diverse experiences into a structured framework, where they're learning potentially how to run a business. So I don't feel that people who have experience are going to gain as much from [a program that admits undergrads]

This is probably a good description of the thought process running at ISB.

Right, so what can an ISB aspirant draw from all that's written above? Here would be my quick list:

1. Forget an MBA - focus on your career. When the time to think about an MBA comes, you will know.
2. Pick a career that gives you exposure to multiple aspects of business. B-schools value diversity all the way - in fact, a person who has spent two years in a programming job, followed by two years in sales might have a better looking résumé than one who's done four years purely in sales. Not trying to make a blanket statement here - but do think about it.
3. Try to stay with an organisation long enough to have seen different aspects & levels of the company's hierarchy. Unless you've spent enough time to experience hierarchy first-hand, it might get difficult to learn from it, or comment on it.

If you prefer to comment or ask questions by e-mail about this post, my address is pqtsocss@trashmail.net.

3,2,1: My placement story

shortlists - 3
offers - 2
accepted - 1

Hyderabad = home for quite some time in the near future :-)

BTW, does anyone know a place that I can rent?

Misguiding content

The website of the National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG) loops through five images on the opening page -- two of these images are pictures from ISB. Even in the photogallery page, there are seven images shot at ISB.

I'm surprised why an organisation would put up photographs of facilities that are not their own. I mean, let them put up pics of the IIIT campus where they reside. Or at least, let them mention that these pics were shot at ISB.

BTW - does this count as image plagiarism?

Advertising for Morphy Richards

I spent some time this weekend working on an advertising assignment that was due today. We were asked to prepare a single-page print advertisement for Morphy Richards, for any/all of their products.

So here's how I went thinking about this assignment:

1. Identify the attributes of the current advertising Morphy Richards uses:
1. Clean advertising & simplicity - no garish images
2. Their products don't have any major differentiator, so current advertising doesn't use the "buy this because we're better" tag line. Instead, their advertisements try to instil a positive association of the product.
2. Most of their products are for the homemaker (read the woman in the household) - the ad has to appeal to women, it would influence buying decisions on their entire product range.
   
3. Use creativity to generate emotional appeal - reinforce the feeling of homeliness with Morphy Richards products.
4. Identify which product(s) I want to create the advertisement for. I ended up deciding between sandwich makers and hair dryers.

Once these decisions were done, I went about using a combination of google's image search, my creativity, and my skills at gimp & MS paint to come up with these.


The first one


This one turned out to be really clean with a "can't hurt the eye" white background. But the image was bad - it was a sandwich that wasn't from a sandwich maker! Surely the prof (or anyone else) would see through that. And see through that, my quaddie did. Back to the drawing board...


Another sandwich maker ad



So this one featured an improved tag line. Had gotten rid of the "A sandwich" trailer. But there were three problems with this one:

1. the colours are not uniform throughout - half the ad is in a shade of brown and the other half in a bluish grey
2. the sandwich is ugly - it is a very greasy sandwich that no health-concious homemaker would ever giver her child.
3. In hindsight, the tag line doesn't make any sense. How can a sandwich be the next best thing to sliced bread - a sandwich should be better than sliced bread, shouldn't it? I'd worked on the tag line from the phrase "the greatest invention since sliced bread", but I'd lost the meaning somewhere during the transition.

Time to move over to another product - let's check out the hair dryers.

The first hair dryer ad
So, who would buy a hair dryer? A woman who has a bad hair day. Hmm, more googling and more work on gimp made me come up with this:


All right, now I'm violating the cleanliness principle. Yeah, the colours probably look good, and the format is fairly simple - visual description of the problem, textual description of the problem, visual description of the solution. But the woman is not right - she looks agitated. And people never look agitated in a Morphy Richards ad.

So the challenge is now - come up with a visual description of a bad hair day that would appeal to women, without indicating any agitation.

Well, more googling, and this is what we come up with:

The final one



And did the ad work? I don't know - I submitted this to the prof only today. But a few "oh cho cute" comments from the target segment did make me think it's come out well :-)

Thanks V, I couldn't have done this assignment without your feedback.

Words Worth

ISB is conducting a competition to test your thinking.
The prize, for the 15 best entries, is a trip to ISB.

Check out the competition at http://www.isb.edu/wordsworth/

What MGTO missed out

Watch Kramer vs Kramer or Jerry Maguire? The scenes where the two chaps get fired are pretty neat, eh? Here's a thought. Would an MBA grad be able to fire the two characters any differently?

Is there a fundamental disconnect from being an MBA grad and being a manager? Sure, an MBA (maybe) teaches us the quant skills and the hard facts to look out for when we are running a show. But then, doesn't it take a bit more to be a manager? Let's go back to the firing aspect - how would I, as an MBA grad, be able to tell a subordinate that he is going to lose his job, because of no fault of his? Should I take solace in the fact that it is a decision based on profitability?

A lot of companies go through crunch situations, and lay people off at one time or the other. Strangely, some people are willing to go back and work for the very same companies when times improve. I think that probably happens out of goodwill, more than anything else, of the managers. And I doubt one can learn how to create that goodwill at a b-school. Yeah, you could have courses which focus on how to improve one's personality, and how one should train oneself to react to situations; you could also have other influences during an MBA program, such as ideas of social responsibility. That, however, is one end of the spectrum. On the other end, an MBA might teach you how ensuring goodwill with fired employees reduces recruitment cost later. Somewhere between these two extremes is where MBA programs are creating the manager of today.

MGTO = Management of Organisations, a course we had in the fourth term, one of the few people-related courses we've had.

Global Social Venture Competition

The Global Social Venture Competition began in 1999 and is a student-led initiative pioneered by the Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School, and the London Business School. The Indian School of Business is a full partner -- with responsibility of promoting the competition in business schools in Asia, mentoring the teams, and holding the Asia semifinal round. GSVC is a business plan competition whose mission is to promote entrepreneurial businesses that satisfy two criteria:

• They have clear and quantifiable social objectives and impact
• They are financially sustainable, in the sense that they are profitable or self-supporting through revenue generation.

The team must have at least one person currently pursuing a full time MBA programme or has graduated during 2006.

Further information is available at www.socialvc.net or www.isb.edu/gsvc

Important dates are:

• Registration with five page summary (optional, if teams require mentoring support) - Wednesday, November 15, 2006 (to ISB at GSVC@isb.edu )
• Submission of final plans - Friday, January 12, 2007 (to ISB at GSVC@isb.edu )

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For any questions regarding this event, please see the FAQ on
http://socialvc.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=109&nodeID=1

Tie-ISB Connect 2006

The Indus Entrepreners & the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, ISB are organising the TiE-ISB Connect 2006 from September 20th-22nd.

More details and registration information available at - www.tie-isbconnect.com

Corporate Quiz at ISB

The Net Impact Club of the ISB, in partnership with Asha (Hyderabad), will be conducting a corporate quiz event. The quiz offers participants a chance to pit their brains against the best, win attractive prizes and most importantly lend their support to a deserving cause. The proceeds received from this would go towards the mid-day meals provided to the students at Ramakrishna Upper Primary School at Yellammabanda, Kukatpally, Hyderabad.

The details of the event are as follows –

Date: July 30, 2006
Time: 1:30 P.M. – 5:30 P.M.
Venue: Khemka Auditorium, ISB
Quiz Organizer: J.Krishnamurti (J.K)

More details & registration forms (for participants & sponsors) available at http://www.isb.edu/ACE2006/

ISB's email address

This is a suggestion for my batchmates at ISB.

If you're trying to email the ISB folks, please use the new email address that has been listed on the new admits' micro-site. It is meant to be used for queries by the new batch, and I suspect one gets a prompt reply if one contacts ISB on that. I'm sure ISB usually gets flooded on the other email addresses, which is why they've set up this new mailbox for queries from incoming students.

Secondly, the hyperlink on that email address is incorrect. Do not click on the link to email them. Instead, copy the text of the email address and use it.

I'm not listing that email address here on my blog, for obvious reasons. I would appreciate it if no one posts that in the comments either.