Quarter 8 - Week 2

The corridors are a little quieter, they're a little more spacious. With a couple of the batches graduating and far fewer of the 2008 batch amongst us, there's almost a little dulling of the energy around us. Oh well, lesser hustle and bustle at the tea shop and lunch counter for us. Every cloud, silver lining, therefore profit etc... blah, blah.

Ethics in Business Management

The first session was a continuation from the last one, on the basics of ethics and a simple framework. We were trying our hands out on a case, that of Enron, to figure out if what happened was ethical or not, and who was to blame. After pulling it a bit here and there, the class almost came to a consensus that the founder was the person who was most to blame (no surprise there, but hey, we applied a framework... what did you apply? Common sense, sheesh, mere mortal!)

The second session brought back some reality to the class room. The prof asks "How many people go through the readings?", and a few hands slowly climb up in the air. The vast majority on the other hand is studiously examining their notes, or name badges, as going through that will undoubtedly bring us the knowledge from the readings. The prof is obviously less than amused, and in a good-humored manner makes us all stand up... hold our right hands in the air... and solemnly take a vow to read all cases in this course henceforth. I don't know about the others, but I'm now actually motivated to read the case! Now to see what comes first, integrity or sloth! Coming away from all such things, the learnings from the day involved understanding the different views of ethics, and how they've evolved. How it's possible to look at a particular scenario from multiple views, and then come to a more informed conclusion on whether or not the route taken to the decision was fair, and just.

Managing Off-shored Software and IT Services

For the first session, we had two REALLY big cases to go through. And I can understand why, they're apparently Mega-Contracts. It was very interesting to see the nuances that people go through when they're trying to form a long term partnership or contractual agreement. The levels of bargaining, the bi-yearly refinements to the contract, the advantages and disadvantages of off-shoring tasks, and how to choose when to offshore them. All of these make for very interesting readings.

The second session was more to do with understanding contracts and services from a financial angle. For e.g. what are the possible long term effects from doing off-shoring, like is it possible that the other party might be in a far stronger position than you're in right now, to almost take advantage of you... or if this is a service that you require frequently, in which case you MAY be better off in acquiring the company itself. A lot of interesting nuances, and views on these, based on which yet another framework determined what we should look at when we try to off-shore or acquire a company.

The week belonged to frameworks, showing us how to use particular frameworks. I just worry that we might take these frameworks too seriously, too seriously and miss the evolving market out there. At least it's encouraging to know that we don't accept such frameworks easily. If there's one thing that we've learnt at the IIMB, it is to question. Question carefully, and choose the right question. For that will bring you the answer. And so endeth the drowsy midnight lesson.