Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation
Five minutes into class, and the prof drives right into the case for the day, a case revolving around an online PC distribution model. He poses the first question, expecting the burst of energy he's seen in all the previous classes, and other than one/two hands lazily climbing into the air, the only sound we can hear is the AC. (No, our ACs aren't loud, I'm trying to say the class was so silent, you could hear the subdued hum from it!) In all my past quarters at college, a few such instances have come, and the professor wrings his hands in despair, and makes an almightly plea while reprimanding/motivating the class to read the case for the day! The truthful profs also add that even though they really like to only hear their own voices in class, they also like the occasional question, disruption, banter that the class involves in. And then the usual spiel of "I put so much into preparing for the case, I think you students should also do the same". All totally valid points. But the students typically always have a reason why they hadn't read the case... the "Sir, we have internals today", "We had to submit four assignments today", or the rare-but-typically-unspoken "Case was boring, I thought some other classmate would read it". And this time was no different! It's midterm season, so everyone's preparing for some exam or the other, this time I had B2B's quiz, I'll come to that later.
Anyway, our prof didn't say any of the above, but we could see it in his eyes. No, I'm not kidding! We know that look! And then the class gives the response look, and then after a short impasse, we continue with the class... participating in a subdued manner, and the prof taking every chance he can to tell us "Read the numbers at the end of the case!". Unfortunately, when you combine midterms with a first-time-situation in this class where we have brilliant exhibits which we need to crunch for information, it almost makes our class look juvenile when we argue on the qualitative merits, instead of hard quant. This time, the case revolved around how you need to remember that even if your enterprise is out to fix a major problem, if some of the most important parties is being affected more negatively than positively, it's not going to fly. Overall, what you propose may be a very well-warranted solution, but sometimes without safeguarding the interests of all affected parties in the business, you're actually going to have an extremely tough ordeal ahead.
Social Entrepreneurship
This week we spoke about agricultural co-operatives. After last week's session, one thing was quite clear, the fundamental value in a co-operative comes from the people involved, not from the patrons behind it. It is not meant to be managed by someone, it is meant to empower the people themselves, almost democratic in its own way. The prof minces no words when he says that well meaning do-gooders come to the villages and try to setup co-ops, and leave disasters behind. There's no point coming to a village with a solution, without understanding the problem. He mentioned a personal experience where he went to a village with a few other people, and first tried to understand the problem itself. Obviously, since he was an outsider, he didn't want to seem too intrusive, so he was casually asking about the directions to nearby villages, and slowly after circling started asking stuff like "what's the name of this village?", "How many people here?", "What do you do?" etc. Within a short while, the villager tells him "Sir, there are enough poor people here, just come and do what you want.". And this prof is taken aback since he hasn't said a word about what he wants to do, but this guy has already understood that this "self-appointed-do-gooder" wants to do something, and directly given him the answer. and pat comes the moral of the story. Villagers aren't stupid, don't go there thinking anything along that direction.
They are used to city slickers coming down, and distributing money, baashans, advice, and clothes. So it's not new to them that someone wants to help them, even though its a passing fling. So, if you want to do something well-meaning, and empowering, you're definitely going to have to stay at it for a long time. More important than anything else, if you want the villagers to commit to an initiative that you start (irrespective of whether it's going to be driven by them), and take risks, you're going to need to earn their trust. To one of the questions "Can we assume they'll be capable of managing such a co-operative? They're not as well educated as us", the prof gives us a very interesting answer. He says, even if you go by statistics, 5% of people anywhere are going to be smart. It's not like the smart people are clustered only in metros. So, you go to such villages, these 5% will automatically stand up and take leadership. He also gave an example where a lady who had only studied upto the 7th grades, was handling the entire accounts for a very successful co-operative in the area. So, don't worry about the capabilities of the people. In fact, it's very important to let them run it, because if you do everything for them, and protect them from mistakes, when will they get a chance to learn? They'll always be dependent on an external entity, when in reality the external entity should only be responsible for the initial impetus, nothing more. So, let them make mistakes, let them learn from it. All we need to do is help them build a system of transparency, and accountability, and let the people take care of themselves.
B2B Market Management
This class was the reason why we hadn't read the cases properly for the other two. I think today was a perfectly valid reason. We had three chapters to read, from an extremely intense book, and you could easily fall asleep in 3 paragraphs! So much jargon and intense reflection-packed statements make people reflect on their own lives, and totally forget about marketing. I scarcely remember a time while reading these 3 chapters (actually, I could only make it to two, I had to rush through ppt slides for the third, god bless this prof and his advance provision of slides). By the end of day Thursday (or should i say the wee morning of Friday), I had read so much about value, that I was beyond thinking of "value". This is like a repeat telecast of last week. This "value" thing is getting to be very addictive. I am still trying to quantify the value of me writing this blog now, instead of sleeping. It's really tough. Good thing we recently learnt about intrinsic and qualitative value. I can now postpone this blog quant value tradeoff to another day.
This week was negotiations week! There was a very interesting case, and our teams had to work either as a buyer or a seller, and work with the other party to decide on a final price. Looking at all the crunching we had to do, this price decision was actually very well thought out. We looked at all the factors, time of employees, breakdown idle time, annual maintenance, the entire shenanigan, and then we pitch our points. Results from all the teams were collated and then we did a final analysis, on what would be the right way to deal with such negotiation. Regarding the quiz, suffice to say that the prof nicely gave us some objective type questions. Knowing completely well that by the time, we'd be probably have only the word "value" in our brains and tick every answer that had the word "Value" embedded somewhere, he wickedly put "value" just about EVERYWHERE. Each question had atleast two answers that had this word, so the last minute gimmick of the unprepared did not work.
And now, on a Sunday morning, on to the next set of assignments.
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