Quarter 11 - Week 7

There's a lot of buzz in the air, it's the last fest of the year... this is the time when the students kick their boots off, give their books some rest and take part in Unmaad, IIMB's very own cul-fest. There's a buzz all around, and even though some classes have both PGP and PGSEM students in it, they go half-empty as people are busy bunking for that one last time. In a few weeks, our time here will be done, now's the time for a final futile attempt to hold on to the feel of our college days. I can see a white light at the end of this road, and there's this huge empty white canvas there... the future looks bright, or is it blank? I don't know... I'm just taking the colours I've accumulated here, let's see what I might do... in just a few weeks time.

New Enterprise Financing

Aah, I've missed this feeling for a while now. It's also going to be the last time I feel this way. It's the sudden realization that the speed is picking up. If there's one thing that I've harped on about each quarter, it's the fact that what starts off at a snail's pace in most courses suddenly builds to a blistering pace, and you've just got to keep running and running and never stop. And so the same happens with NEF! Till last week, I could afford to think of doing the case work 'during the next week'. This week's pace and the schedule from next week has put a rest to any of those hopes. I now have to catch up with a whole bunch of practicals, I can already sense myself getting into an Excel-filled nightmare.

This week was about the concept of how different the viewpoints are - of the entrepreneur and the investor. Since the future is quite uncertain, both of them have conflicting views on the value of the firm. The entrepreneur paints the most optimistic picture and expects an exceedingly high value. The investor paints a pessimistic/cynical picture and suggests a much lower value, since he expects a larger share of the pie to come to him. We had quite a bit of elaboration on term sheets. You remember the control vs. economics argument I made the last time? Apparently the term sheet is an informal agreement that sets the rules of engagement for the investor and entrepreneur. Once this is agreed upon, the investors pours in his money, gets on the board and they all try to live happily till the period of investment matures. So the case on Avvai Electricals shows the different views that the investor and promoter have. The second session is about the aspect of 'Exit'. What the prof's trying to bring out here is the various aspects of how and when to exit, and what sort of controls the investors can set in place to ensure that the promoters don't go all maverick and try funny business.Towards the end the prof just went into a blitzkrieg mode, and was pelting funda after funda which I don't seem to remember now. Yet, looking at the slides will refresh my memory. All I remember thinking was 'This is heavy stuff! Revise again!!'

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

It looks like we've fallen back to our wastrel days again... very few read the case, or the associated readings for anything this week. The prof has anyway set some low expectations, and he knows enough not to expect anything from students during fest-days, so he actually took some time to explain the theory and essence of the articles of reading, and tackled the cases. The first set of cases were about Arvind Eye Hospital in relevance to one of Peter Drucker's last articles - The Theory of Business. This essentially discusses the need for organizations and leaders to question what their purpose is, what their understanding of the environment is to ensure if they're still on the right track or if what they considered static has changed over a period of time. As an example, Kodak that was majorly into film photography didn't adapt fast enough, and is now on a fast decline. Many such cases of 'yesterday's behemoths and today's starving creatures' come to mind, and the usual thread that joins them all is 'Why were these guys blind to the changing scene? What caused the stagnation, when the world was passing them by?'.

The second session was about business models, business plans and knowing when to reinvent the business model. Almost an hour was spent by the prof going over some of the fundamental aspects of strategy and business models, and then he moves on to the actual discussion of the case. The cases were supposed to be on Tanishq's growth and NSK Software Technologies (damned if I know who they are, I should read the case!), and we tried mapping Tanishq's situation to the points we had jotted down about business models. Anyway, the prof wants us to go over the software case as he says it'll have a really good description of how to maintain a business model and all that.

Things are coming to an end, I can feel it. Pssst... only three weeks left.