Quarter 4 - Week 5

This week we had an interesting session by Professor Suryanarayana A of the NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. He spoke to us about what makes an entrepreneur tick and about the incubation systems they have in place for the budding entrepreneurs amongst us. A little interesting tidbit - Contrary to popular expectation, entrepreneurs are amongst the most risk averse of people out there. It's just that they've managed to take care of their most important fear - that of failure, and the rest is history... or future, as we see it.

I think I have entrepreneurial qualities that way... I have no fear of failing my exams. But then again, do my personal idiosyncrasies really matter when you're here to know about this week's sessions? And so, here we go.

OperMan - We had a different professor filling in for our regular prof(whatever happened to letting the class free for once?!), and he took us on a trip through Toyota's processes for the manufacturing of cars. Together, we questioned if there might be some connection between the case we studied, and the recent news in which Toyota's name has come up and none too favorably at that. It was a nice long walk through the Just In Time process where we studied how it works, and in a way related it to the culture of the workers in Toyota. The next session we had our mid term examination, and hence there was more of attempting to write what we understand of OM and hope that our bottlenecks dont stop our flow. Or whatever, I didnt get enough sleep anyway.

CorpFin - I know there was a lot of talk of Risk and all that, I remember the Beta word being thrown around a lot, but I draw a blank after that. Considering how we have a midterm next week, I'll be well placed to explain what I learned (or the prof was attempting to teach me) once I brush through those chapters again. However, I did get to look through what I studied last week due to our well timed exam this week, and hence I can explain the fundas of Investment and even the complications that taxation brings, to a somewhat lucid extent. It basically goes like this. I think I explained Present Value last week. So if you subtract the cost you paid initially from this PV, you get the Net Present Value or NPV ( a cool short form). Which should be positive or else you're making a mistake in investing in it. So that's one way of doing it. What we learnt newly is, for some god forsaken reason, some people felt that NPV isnt necessarily the only way of determining the profitability of investments, and hence they came up with three or four more methods based on how lazy they were (atleast from what I read, some of these have been downright described as simplistic and lazy solutions by the author), except for one - the IRR. This essentially tries to calculate what is the expected rate of interest at which the original funds are expected to grow, to get an NPV of zero - or to ensure there is no loss. Hence, you can compare different investment options based on their respective IRRs.

Dont understand? Join PGSEM. Then we all wont understand. Just kidding, it makes sense, we just need a lot of time and attention and patience to really understand. Apparently, PGSEM students have this in plenty. So join us to develop these senses. If nothing else, your significant other might begin to think that you pay more attention once you finish the PGSEM. Scout's honour! Our alumni attest to this!!

MPPO - This week we discussed how the theories of motivation that we learnt last week can be applied in the real world. We also went through what happened in organizations that grow rapidly, and the unexpected/unintended consequences of this for the employees. We had a couple of cases where we saw how people began to feel better at their work when provided with some forms of job enrichment. This seems to point towards the fact that people, when given a sense of entirety regarding their roles, seem to find their jobs more fulfilling and hence are intrinsically motivated. While both caselets seemed to paint a rosy picture, I wish I had a glimpse into atleast a single case where such a solution did not work, so we could analyse what went wrong. For the rapid organization growth session, the role of the HR team was highlighted and the role that they play seems to have been given the lime light. This is more than I can say is given to the HR in our organization, or probably any other that I know of, atleast today. I do agree with the prof when he says that whatever the HR does seems to be hidden, and that probably somewhere the HR head is discussing with the country heads to identify areas of improvement, but maybe it's just me, but as long as I feel that someone is observing and studying me and not interested in directly communicating with me for whatever valid reasons that they have, I find it hard to trust and really open up regarding the problems that we face. For I dont believe they'll truly understand. They are incapacitated by their distance from us, and their analysis of us from a remote spreadsheet. It's like looking through the bars of a zoo cage to determine what makes the tiger walk up and down the edges and not sit still during the day. Maybe their consensus might be right, but would the tiger really feel that the ones that stare at it all day are helpful and not threatening, or would they stay defensive and never open up.

But then again, I dont have a solution on how a minute percentage of the firm that claims itself to be an HR team can "sync" with the thoughts of the greater majority of today's equivalent of blue collared workers. Maybe they have a solution. From that distance. Who knows?