Quarter 9 - Week 10

The final week of classes... it's a relief! The last week has all the presentations and the cases being submitted, and you finally wash your hands off all of that. Nice blank feeling, you never get tired of it, even after eight quarters. All this despite the fact that there are going to be exams the week later. Looks like projects worry us more than the end-terms!

Consumer Behaviour

One final case which no one was asked to present, but prepare for in any case. Interestingly the case was very real-life-problem-ish, since it was about understanding the steps that a local kirana store (kaaka-angadi) should take to combat the swanky new hypermarkets. Never mind that our recommendations were poles apart from the professor's... in fact, if there were two planets, we were on the opposite poles ACROSS the two planets. Get it..? No...? Sigh, it was REALLY different, all right?

The second session was on compulsive purchases and a couple of other simple concepts. Call it the end-of-quarter euphoria, but the number of questions that we peppered the prof with on the last day was phenomenal. The prof was surprised, since he expected a quiet fagged-out class on the last day, it's good to see the confused happy look on a prof's face... it's not often we get to shock profs at the IIMB.

Strategic Leadership

6 hours of presentations, all 6 ending with some great feedback from the prof. Mark my words, when I say great feedback, I don't mean praise. I mean very different thought processes. If you never get into consulting, just hope that you have profs like this one to judge your presentations. Considering the multiple topics you take up, you'll know enough about a lot of other industries by the end of it.

The basic statement the prof kept making -> where's the insight? You guys have so much information, that anyone can get by Googling... where have you applied your learnings from this course? Go deep into the problem. Ask why... ask how... get to the point where you realize why some company managed to buck the industry trend. If anything, that's the last and most important question I learnt from Strategic Leadership - Question EVERYTHING.

Personal and Interpersonal Effectiveness Workshop

The set of articles for this week build on a very interesting idea - spirit. Do you have it in you, to give without asking.. time, love, money, thanks... do you have it in you, to rely on your inner goodness... to lead you towards the right decisions than be frightened into the wrong ones? More importantly, do you have it in you to stick by your passion, instead of giving in to 'work'? And how long can you keep at it? The entire point being, you get stronger, by making your spirit stronger.

We went through the commencement speeches by Steve Jobs, the well-known Apple-honcho, and Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes fame. It's really disconcerting to see that most of these top-types, have been through hell and back. And they returned with a smile. In almost all their cases, they had to see complete failure, before realizing how they could not fail worse... and hence the only way let was forward... to succeed.

Our class shared a lot more than we typically did, I still solely attribute it to the last-day-of-classes phenomenon... but hey, who really cares huh? We know each other a lot better now, we've learnt from one another, we've shared with one another. We've even philosophized and giving holier-than-thou advice to one another. What more could you do to bring a class together?

The final project in strategic leadership and a research concept submission stand in the way of us and a blanker mind. And so I go back and join my team, in collecting the elusive pockets of data...