Quarter 6 - Week 7

A take home midterm is not really the best of both worlds, if anything it makes your week a living hell. This insight is the reason that we all come here, week after week, hoping that some week will be different. This week was a lot more easier in terms of class load, so that got a few of us hopping for joy. As expected, it was shortlived, but more on that later.

If I seem incoherent, it's because I've just slept for four hours daily in the last week. Trust me, I've been doing a lot more deleting than I've been typing today! So I'm going to just let nature take its own course, and scare you into deciding that given most of the problems here, if you'd want to play in it.

Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation

This week we dealt with how we attract the right stakeholders, and more importantly, how do we bootstrap. Since the second was more interesting, I'm going to spend more time talking about this. Bootstrapping is the form by which people get their business started, without much upfront investments, and more importantly keep their overheads low. In an example we went through, we saw the case of a person who wanted to start a business, but the finance required for the interprise was far more than he would want to afford. And so he goes on a spree, where he picks one other entrepreneur after another, and then pitches his idea to them. If it sells, great, he's probably got another person in it with him, and so he reduces the actual cost that he was about the spend. The beauty of this is that most of these serial entrepreneurs rarely put their own money!

Getting the right stakeholders was also quite similar, but the focus of that was on how you pick relationships that allow for mutual benefit. This too had a similar scheme of sharing the profits, due to which the stakeholders really saw that added advantage for them, if they chose to continue.

Social Entrepreneurship

We had two guest speakers this week, one was the creator of a vast chain of Self Help Groups in Southern India, and the other was an activist who helped execute the RTI Act. There's a lot of difference that you see in these two people, and there's a small chance that you actually find something similar between the two speakers. What's REALLY interesting is that both these guys had major opportunities to work in more affluent surroundings, and thanks to this there's a lot of change happening in cities. This shows the direction, determination and calling that some people readily seem to draw on, when everyone else is busy figuring out how to avoid listening to such problems.

While these speakers are really famous, I don't feel they'd be very comfortable with knowing that, they're being talked about so much. But that's just an assumption I've made, and it looks like this might indeed mean something for the future.

B2B Market Management

I dont know how this really happened, but irrespective of the extra time I found to study, I could only follow on the first case, and the second one went out the window. There was some general gyaan that the course involved, and the prof. used the case to better instill in it our mind. Will read the case, so that I can better explain to someone else.

International Business Negotiation Skills

The past six weeks of what to do in a negotiation, and what not to do, all went out the window within 10 minutes of the Carrera case study. A few of us began yelling, there was no decorum or a sense of calmess. We spent close to five hours on something that should have just taken 3. Finally, we came to a conclusion, now we only have to explain how and why we came up with such a solution.

This week, if you've gathered by now, was a combination of sleepless nights and hallucinations. While the classes were just about ordinary (except for the guest lectures), there was lesser insight that that compared otherwise, but it was enough to understand more about the ventures involved. Now to wait till morning, to realize what the heck I wrote.