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gmail search tip

Gobbledygook version
gmail indexes whole words separated by whitespaces, not partial subsets of text.

In plain english
When searching for different word forms, such as publish and publication in gmail, it's necessary to search for both words separately. Searching for publi is not going to fetch any results :-(

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.

Another ad mismatch

Paresh Rawal danced to a "ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ri, pizza aaye free" for Domino's. That tune doesn't seem to go very well in the Arshad Warsi ad, does it?

PM on the steel industry

Excerpt from the PM's speech at the IISCO steel plant, Burnpur, West Bengal. Here's a link to the story on NDTV.

Why does Lakshmi Mittal or Ratan Tata have to buy foreign companies to establish a global presence and expand steel capacities when our per capita consumption of steel is so low and when there is so much opportunity here?

Let me see if I understand the PM's statement correctly. Is he suggesting that:
1. Mittal & Tata should not be establishing a global presence? OR
2. Mittal & Tata buy only Indian companies to establish a global presence? OR
3. Mittal & Tata should match their companies' production capacity only to match domestic demand, which currently happens to be low, but could rise in the future?

Maybe we should just stop attempting to make sense of ambigous statements made by politicians and assume they're playing to the crowd.

The network comes home

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And they come with different ideas of life. Each one of them is brimming with gyaan about the college, about resumes, about life, about careers, about everything. And boy, are they getting an audience. Here's what's happening. Our annual alumni reunion - Solistice - is on this weekend, and the alumni have descended from all over to our campus. I guess it's a good way to end a week that was jam-packed with assignments for almost everyone.

I ran into alienwan shortly after he landed up on campus. Almost expected him to be reviewing someone's resume, and he didn't disappoint. Also met ford prefect. There are loads of other alumni I met, some for the first time. Interesting to hear what they had to say about post-ISB-life.

They've started to test the speakers on the lawns outside our block.. looks like it'll be a very loud party tonight. I'd better finish that SOMG work in the next 120 minutes :-(

INPE + CFPD + MHTP = a big smile

Advertisements, rebranding & bias

• KitKat's latest advertisement shows people wearing pants twice the size they usually wear. So, is KitKat now a health food?
• Sony Ericson advertises a music player.. it takes a while for the viewer to realise it's a mobile phone. Got to admit, I love this ad; should try to locate it on youtube sometime.
• ThumsUp rebrands itself as a men's drink, something that women won't understand.

Seriously, what's up with these brands?

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When on of our professors fired a "name three ads that you've seen today", we were stumped for a few minutes. He went on to say, "See, that's advertising for you. There's hardly any recall." I agreed with him then. But now I don't. If you ask people to name three political news headlines they've seen today, chances are good that they'll be stumped on that question too. That, dear readers, is selection bias.

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BTW, as the first three lines show, I seem to fare better on ad recall than the news recall :-( I hope advertising turns out to be a good elective next term.

Using tab-stops in MS Word

This post ought to interest people who are busy updating their resumes.

Please open up your resume in MS Word, and hit the button that looks like this symbol - ¶. That button is available on the standard toolbar – you might have to add buttons to view it.

Now, let’s take a look at two snapshots of a resume.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Make note of the poor alignment on the right side in Figure 1. The two lines don’t end at exactly the same length. What’s more, there’s an arbitrary number of tabs and space bars one has had to use to get the alignment as close as possible to ideal. But hey, what happens when you change the margins of the document? You’d have to go tabbing and spacing all over again to fix the alignment. Figure 2, on the other hand, seems a lot crisper. There’s only one tab that has been used, and that has taken care of everything. If figure 1 is what your resume looks like, and figure 2 is how you would like it to look, please read on.

The following steps will help you use a feature called “tab-stops” which is present in most word-processing software (including MS Word), but can be quite a pain to understand and use.

So, here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new style
1. Menus --> Format --> Styles & Formatting
2. Click on New Style. Specify the name, font, font-size, etc. Ensure that the Style Type is set to Paragraph.
3. Click on “Format”
4. Click on “Tabs”. A new options box should pop-up. The tab stop position should be set by default to 1’’
5. Click on “Clear All”
6. In the tab stop position, write in the length of your horizontal ruler. This would typically be the width of your page minus the margins that you’ve specified. For a page setup using “Letter”, and margin 1.25”, this would be 8.25” – 1.25” -1.25” = 6”
7. Set the alignment as "Right".
   
8. Click on “Set”, then “Ok”
9. Save the style with a meaningful name
2. Write out your line saying “Indian School of Business Hyderabad India”. Ensure that you provide only one tab between the words “Business” and “Hyderabad”
3. Apply your newly created style to the line.

Hopefully, your alignment problem would be solved. Now, if you need to change the margins of your page, you’d need to reset the tab stop position to something that suits the new margins.

She said he said she said...

..that so-and-so are seeing each other.

Now, I know these two quite well.. and I'm really surprised they didn't tell me themselves. It's not like I'd go and tell people and start gossipping. I might blog about it though, but that's not the same as gossipping.

Bottomline - A party's due!!

Taxi Tale

The gatekeeper had a pleasant smile, but it was definitely made up. No one likes being woken up at four in the morning, why should the gatekeeper be any different? Nevertheless, he had done his job satisfactorily after being woken up, he'd called for a taxi well before dawn for the two guests of the family in Apartment 14-A. Now the taxi was here, and the two guests were getting in now - luggage in the trunk, trunk snap shut, people in the car, doors shut, and the taxi was off.

M & Chi had reached Mumbai the previous night from Hyderabad, shortly after midnight. M's uncle had an apartment in Worli, where they caught up on a few hours' rest. And they were to catch a flight at this ungodly hour to Indore. In Chi's opinion, it was a crime to expect someone to wake up before 10:00 on any given day. And this was a weekend. To make matters worse, time adds up. If a flight is supposed to leave at five-forty, which by itself is bad enough, they expect you to check in at least half an hour earlier. Add travel time to the airport, and the time it takes to get ready, and then the additional buffer time in case something goes wrong. All of that meant waking up at four in the morning. But there wasn't anyone he could complain to; after all, it was he who'd booked the flight tickets. Now in the taxi, Chi thought he could catch a few winks, but one knows how sleep is. It doesn't come by when one needs it the most.

Neither Chi, nor M was familiar with Mumbai. M had close relatives there, but had never lived with them. Chi had lived there ages ago, but he was too young to remember it. Yeah, there was something that Chi noticed - Mumbai's roads were better than Hyderabad's. Maybe it was because of the early hour, but they seemed a lot wider than any road that Chi had seen. Another few hours, and these roads would be bustling with the life that Mumbai is known for. He imagined how the roads in Indore would be like - probably narrow and very pot-holed. He'd find out soon enough. They'd be in Indore by 6:30 or 6:45, around two hours from now. Hmmm.. almost 15 minutes had gone by sitting in the taxi. The airport was a good half an hour from the apartment, so they were almost half way through.

It was a too early in the day for any coherent thought. Maybe the upcoming competition at Indore had filled M's mind, Chi kept checking and re-checking their flight tickets. It was an Indian flight, he wondered if Indian's breakfast is any good. Strange name, Indian. You've known the airline as Indian Airlines all your life, and one fine day, someone just renames the airline as Indian. He wondered what they got out of the entire renaming the exercise. They keep doing this renaming business at Bangalore, Chi's hometown. Chi often thought when Brigade Road would be renamed.

It was 4:40 now, they should be reaching the airport. Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. And yes, the taxi was slowing down. But the familiar ramp of two terminals at the airport was not to be seen. Maybe it was right around the corner. There came a small fork in the road, and the driver pulled the taxi to a halt. Surely there was nothing wrong with the taxi, for the engine was still running.

The driver turned around and asked, "Aapko VT ke railway station jaana hai ki Bombay Central?"

Damned gatekeeper!


Epilogue
For the next half hour, the taxi flew faster than any aircraft that I'd been in. We managed to reach the airport at a quarter past five, and yes, we were in time for check-in.

At Indore, I exited on the first day of the Ashwamedha, but M made it to the second round. SS, from IIMI won the competition. More on that in a future post.

In my last company, our company's President always used to talk about how he admired Sergei Bubka, for his ability to break his own records. It was his way of inspiring us to perform better. ISB is a bit like that; it breaks its own records. Just when you get the feeling that you're done with the craziest term ever, you get a term that's even crazier to deal with.

Some alumni had been telling me about how the PGP eases out once you move into the electives phase. Now, I am convinced that I had sampled the wrong set of alumni, for my fifth term is awful - it's packed with a thousand things and I don't have a clue about where I'm headed. I've had to rename my "to-do" list to a "not-yet-done" list, and even that is growing faster than Hanuman's tail. With placement preps, half-baked attempts at b-school competitions, co-ordinating between three different study groups for three different courses, one PaEV course, I'm surprised I still retain my level of sanity.

I hope for a more relaxed weekend - I'm finally off to Indore for two full days, and I'd be spending the better part of Sunday in Mumbai waiting for a connecting flight. So no studies, and no ISB-related work - just a competition, and a novel if I get the time. It's a pity I won't be able to travel around Indore, but never mind that - I'm glad to be heading out of Hyderabad for a change.

It's three in the morning. Time for an omelette au fromage :-)

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

The price of being disorganised

My desk is a mess - there is a telephone, movie DVDs, my laptop's adaptor, coffee mugs, books, papers and God-knows-what strewn all over it. And my bookshelf looks worse. There could be a monitor lizard sitting behind all those books and papers and I wouldn't know of it before April 2007. And the silly thing is, the institute encourages this kind of clutter. Honest. Last term, our MGTO professor told us in class that clutter on the desk is a sure sign of a top-notch CEO in the making. Since then, I've lost all incentive to clean my desk.

In any case, I could never keep my room a 100% tidy; it can be very tidy for a short span of time, or slightly tidy for a moderately long period of time, but never very tidy most of the time. Thank God, Mum hardly visits, else she'd tear my hair out asking me to clean my room. I still recall my time in Bangalore - cleaning my room was one task that was always on my to-do list. It had occupied some kind of a permanent position on the list. Whenever Mum asked me to clean my desk, I was always ready with a quick "Next weekend." And weekends are wonderful days.. they're meant to stay in bed till late, not give a care about the world, and worldly chores such as cleaning rooms. Actually, I have a ready-made excuse in that regard here. ISB doesn't have weekends. Weekends exist on calendar but are not real - they're loaded with as much work as weekdays. So there, Mum, I'll clean my desk on the next "real" weekend :-) Unless the monitor lizard decides to come out from behind the books before that.

Coming back to the CEO-in-the-making-theory, it has occurred to me that it also takes a CEO lot more than a mere untidy desk to stay in the race. One also needs a very powerful memory to remember where one shoved those tiny bits of paper that other people gave you telling you they're important. You know, those little things that seem so insignificant when you accept them from others - things like lecture notes, class handouts, case discussion slides, etc. And I seem to be lacking severely in the memory department.

Our Operations course in the third term had a case study about a restaurant called Benihana of Tokyo. Actually, the name of the case is a bit misleading. Since the restaurant is located in the US, the case should've been named "Benihana of Tokyo of the USA". Adds to the clarity for folks who haven't seen the restaurant themselves, or pre-read the case. The misleading name apart, the case was an interesting read. The restaurateur's idea is a fantastic concept. But profs shouldn't make us discus food or restaurants right after a meal at ISB's dining hall. Makes you feel really bad about not getting your money's worth. As I always do with every case, I picked up the discussion notes which I later lost in the clutter of my desk.

And in the fifth term, we have the same case all over again in another course called Marketing Services. The professor for this course (he's fabulous, btw) expects us to pre-read every case and submit a written analysis before the class begins. The question he wanted us to answer for this case was "What is the role of the chef in the Benihana restaurant?" I distinctly remember the Operations prof discussing the exact same question back in the third term. And in my eagerness to prepare the perfect write-up, I spent a good half an hour trying to find my old case notes... but couldn't find 'em. And then I spent another half an hour trying to answer the question by myself. That's a full hour. One hour of non-productivity, one hour lost in the race to become a CEO, but more importantly, one hour less of precious sleep. Anyway, I shouldn't be complaining; I made up for my lost sleep in the Marketing Research class :-)

and a year later...

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Happy Birthday, dear blog!