Quarter 4 - Week 4

As was expected, a few of my friends made a plan to go for a trip out of town since it was an extended weekend. As was expected, they've stopped asking me. I wish they had asked. I would have said no, but still. Even it was on Sunday, I'd have said no. Why's that? Because when every other person in town was either goofing off, or going to church at odd hours over the weekend, my entire class was sitting from 8 AM to 2 PM on all three days in the cosy comforts of IIMB, paying attention to teachers who were explaining stuff that BETTER BE USEFUL TO ME somewhere down the line, or it was yet another opportunity cost of an unforgettable trip getting the better of me!

Classes on a Sunday. Yeesh. But all for the future good I always say, or rather I say after CorpFin class. More on this later.

OperMan - This week we had a case discussion about a company that was in the manufacturing line. Now most of the funda of determining a process comes from trying to optimize some steps to ensure that a bottleneck doesnt take up too much time in the system. Essentially, if one operation in a series is a bottleneck, this means that whatever comes after it gets a little free time while this operation churns out its output at a slooow pace. This means more coffee time and mingling time for the guys after this step, while the guys before this step will continue to slog. Kinda like my manager sitting after I do my work, just so he can take two minutes to send a congratulatory mail every now and then for work that took me six months. Aah, I'm kidding. My manager's awesome. Anyway, the next two days we were going to understand the fundas of Supply Chain Management (Ooooh ! Yes, I know.)

We played a beer game (Yea! in IIMB! Whoever said that Indian education is conservative?) where we were fortunately/unfortunately not given real beer bottles, but using some tokens we simulated what happens when an order is placed by the customer, and if I'm the retailer, then my supplier, and HIS supplier, and the supplier's supplier's supplier are involved in a serial chain, then it starts predictable at my end, but at the final point the demand is erratic. You need to go through it to really get it. Or use wiki/google. Your choice. Fun game, and the analysis of it was done on the second day. Interesting learnings. Join IIMB to learn it. I didnt sit through 1.5 hours of class on a Sunday instead of going to a cool place, just so I can share my learnings here. (Sorry, I seem a little upset).

CorpFin - OMG! I ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND what happens in this class now. I dont know if I mentioned it before, but since we had a test this Saturday, I tried (read 'was compelled/forced') to go through the first three or four chapters in this book. It's in a way like the ManAcc classes from last quarter, boring classes, simple fundas. All you need to do is pay attention, and read before class. Any way, the whole funda goes like this: When you buy something, then you need to make sure that this thing is profitable, not just immediately but over the long run. So how do you know if it is? Simple, you understand Compound Interest right? Great... so what happens is you do this backwards, but the value of the 'rate of interest' you use is not what the SBI gives you (those cheap, mean misers!) but what an object of equivalent risk gives you. For e.g. if I was to buy some shares, I could have instead put that money into something else that was comparable in terms of return. So I will try to figure out using 'backwards Compound Interest' (for lack of a better term) to find out if the 100 Rs. I spend today will be worth more or less in the case of the investment that I'm going to make, when compared to the other benchmark investment I was going to make. You basically have two rates to compare now right? So use that to find out the 'Present Value' of investments. You'd be surprised that this can be even applied to stocks and bonds and the dividends that come out of it, it's growth opportunities etc. Yes, it's a way for you to realize if your fund manager is making a fool of you! Assuming you've attended a CorpFin class.

Of course the prof taught something much more this week, but I can only explain that to you next week since we have a test on it this week. Yes, another test, I seem so blessed.

MPPO - This week was more about interaction, communication between people and what the possible barriers could be, and how we can empathize and listen, I mean really listen to people, and finally the different theories of motivation. Pretty insightful weekend, with the class sharing a lot. I think the surprise test that was there this week shook people up, so more of them were reading the articles before coming to class. I even saw a few people READ the material in the class just before the MPPO class! Fine way to spend Rs. 1250 (Yes, that's the price per individual class session, according to my poor calculations!). In fact, I guess one of these people had suddenly woken up in MPPO class, that he sent a mail to the prof that we can be a little more effective in class, that the training was getting diluted by people's talk and discussion than the topic on hand. I think OperMan got the best of him, but all of us did agree with him on some level. Less complaining about our work, more connecting to the day's topic! So the last session, we did just that... and I frankly liked this class better. There was more discussion regarding THE topic, and we kept referring to the case. Was good. I liked.

Anyway, on to prepare for the next week's test. And OperMan midterm. I love my life.