Quarter 7 - Week 8

For once, I was actually looking forward to going to work on Friday after class. I'm damn sure that work hasn't really gotten better. So that means....

E-Business Models and Strategies

The first session was hosted by this really inspiring entrepreneur-graduated-to-VC guy. I call him inspiring because of the way he communicates with us. He spoke to us in a simple manner during our orientation to PGSEM way back in May 2009, and he did the same even now, the only difference being some added management-y jargon. He went on to give a very realistic portrayal of why VCs behave the way they do. They apparently put some fire under our backsides, mainly because of the fire under theirs. Quite interesting to understand the different aspects of getting funding from these guys.

The second session was about this joint creation of Pandesic by SAP and Intel. You'd never have thought that a company created by two amazing giants could have such problems. But then again, you wonder if the baby of two highly intelligent people is intelligent. Nature and the corporate life have a strange sense of humour. Anyway, learnings from the case were that when you try doing something new, try and keep some checks and balances in place that will ALWAYS challenge your assumptions. When you have a very good inflow of resources, it becomes really easy to waste them. It's entirely upto us to figure out what we can do to keep wastage to a minimum. Or pull the plug if its futile.

Research for Marketing Decisions

True to our expected attitude, we forgot there was a study presentation till the day before it. If anything, I now totally believe in the statement - Past behaviour is the best indicator of future behaviour. (I only talk for my team here, the other teams appeared very well prepared *cough*).

Imagine how thrilled we were when the prof took longer than expected to teach us something through which we slept, only to find out the presentations had been postponed to the next day! That's all we needed, more time! Too bad we just used the same ppt anyway. Should do MUCHO better.... next time.

The second session had quite a few presentations that had us looking through various aspects like New Product Development, Pricing Research, Customer Relationship Management etc.

Marketing Communications

This media agency comes along and gives us a guest lecture for the first session. Now our guys were really looking forward to guest lecturers, especially after the last one we'd had for MC. I was totally expecting some set of hotshots who'd come by and give us some decent gyaan. Unfortunately, for me, less than half the way in the talk, I fall asleep. I've NEVER fallen asleep in a guest lecture. I mean, who falls asleep in a guest lecture?? But hey, things were the way they were. And THAT's why I was looking forward to work, these guys zapped the hell out of me.

The second session was supposed to be on Digital Marketing. While it was all right, I was looking forward to hearing the guy from the advertising agency. Too bad he couldn't make it due to some urgent issues. In any case, it was fun. Nothing too new or old that we didn't already know.

Peaceful week. Only two more weeks to go. I need to submit all assignments and projects by end of next week. That gives us enough time to chill out before the formidable Q4 begins.