The End of our journey, the Beginning of yours??

Hello there, and welcome to this hallowed blog, ye common mortals! You step foot (or click mouse) on a page that has for the last three years been followed by, more than anyone else, my own classmates. Once in a while we do get the Doubting Engineers, who ask 'Can it really be true? Can an engineer really understand the world of business?' with the unspoken thought bubble 'Will I get a raise, a promotion? Will I make it large?'.

Unfortunately, the latter doesn't work out unless you put in your good deal of effort, but the first part.. YES! It is possible! There IS space in the mind of a techie for some business fundas/jargon/thingamajigs! Each batch is living proof that one can go in at one end, spouting stuff like Assets and Liabilities without knowing squat of what it really means, and come out 2.5f years later with all sorts of buzzwords aimed at those people who scoff at the concept of a bizengineer! (Or what we now call Product Managers, for lack of other jobs at the starting level that really mix the two).

So let's start at the end, shall we? This is us, branded and about to receive the ceremonial seal.

For the record, don't go on our bhola-bhaala looks. Each and every one of us is nuts. Take my word for it. Nothing like spending three years with a room full of crazies, to turn you mad yourself!

Our last official evening at IIMB had us wearing robes (which, for the record, felt hotter than a silk saree in Chennai on a May afternoon, as eagerly attested to by a sample of the women in our batch) and preparing to receive the PGSEM diploma from Mukesh Ambani. I'll take both your questions here:

1. The IIMs do not grant degrees, they grant diplomas... it's the way it is, and has been since inception.

2. Yes, Mukesh Ambani really DOES hand out each and every diploma, congratulating each person BY name when you get up close, and he does so without even the slightest grimace considering he gave out more than 500+ diplomas this year to students of the EPGP, FPM, PGP, PGPPM and PGSEM programmes.

I like to think that the point of making someone of Mr. Ambani's stature hand us our certificates at the end of the programme is to make us realize... that he too is just another man. You get a solid sense of that when you're seeing someone in person, and not just in the news. The feeling that, hey, I can BE one of these guys. It's the final piece placed in the foundation of confidence in each and every one of us. I've come to believe that this is what we come to IIMB for, to really build confidence in the fact that we CAN make a difference. Confidence, so easy to say, and so difficult to really build on.

Anyway, I can catch myself rambling.. you must forgive me, I'm an MBA after all (rather, a Post Graduate Diploma in Software Enterprise Management). Three years of listening to professors go on and on in an intense monologue can do that to you... all that bottled up pockets of wisdom, just waiting to be unleashed on the nearby unsuspecting stranger (or surfers in this case).

So, let me get down to what I have to say. Here's what you REALLY need to know about this blog. This is a week by week account of what really happens at the IIM Bangalore, in our PGSEM classes. Some of it is soporific, some of it is serious, some of it is downright funny, but I think a lot of it will tend to make you think that this is a journey that CAN be finished. I hope to show you that a techie will find what we learn here interesting, providing he is as curious about the world of business as he is about the world of 1s and 0s.

Here are some savepoints, for easy jumping:

The start of my journey into the PGSEM programme

Quarter 1 (Micro Economics, Financial Accounting, Strategic Management)

Quarter 2 (Macro Economics, Managing Organizations, Quantitative Methods 1)

Quarter 3 (Principles of Marketing, Indian and International Law, Quantitative Methods 2, Managerial Accounting)

Quarter 4 (Operations Management, Corporate Finance, Managing People and Performance in Organizations)

That's the core courses. Now, for some of the electives, the ones that I attended:

Quarter 5 (Managing Software Projects, Leadership and Organizational Change, Product Management)

Quarter 6 (Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, Social Entrepreneurship, Business 2 Business Marketing Management, International Business Negotiation Skills)

Quarter 7 (E-business Models and Strategies, Research for Marketing Decisions, Marketing Communications)

Quarter 8 (Ethics in Business Management, Managing Offshored Software and IT Services)

Quarter 9 (Consumer Behaviour, Strategic Leadership, Personal Interpersonal Effectiveness Workshop)

Quarter 10 (Business Data Mining and Decision Models, Strategic Thinking and Decision Making)

Quarter 11 (New Enterprise Financing, Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning)

I hope you have fun, and learn something in the process. I know I did.

Quarter 11 - Week of Exams

Well, what do you know... looks like I had atleast one more post left to write. Wonder why I was so worried about making the last one so emo anyway. I wish I could wax eloquently about my exams and make you go all senti, but I'm just happy enjoying my freedom that all of this doesn't seem to matter anymore. Let the past pain and pressures be forgotten, I say...

New Enterprise Financing

It's so nostalgic and fundamentally scary when you screw up your last paper the exact same way you screwed up a paper right in quarter 1. For future reference, people, the NEF prof is crafty and irrespective of however nice a case he puts in front of you, remember, this is a finance paper and not a strategy paper. Do NOT spend a lot of time on overthinking the assumptions and setting the context in place, crunch some numbers. If you don't crunch numbers, you'll come away pleased from that section only to horrifically realize that you just have five minutes left in which to do all the finance related crunching. Not worth it guys, really not. Focus on the numbers. If there's any parting advice I want to leave for those that follow in my step into NEF, it's this... watch out for the exam paper.. do the crunching first, you can give the bhaashan to the prof at the end if you have time.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

Right, so we didn't have an exam really... we just had the project submission. But that didn't stop us from breaking our heads, no sir. Coming in to college over the weekend, arguing the hell out of points you've already argued the hell out of... solemnly promising that your last project in college is going to be the best ever... it was all part of this. We finally managed to complete the project and print stuff out by 8:30 PM, a little more than three hours before the deadline.

I'd always pictured that moment... the last 'thunk' in the project dropbox that lies forlorn outside the office. I always imagined that it would be liberating, and the sun(or moon) would reveal itself from behind the clouds and I would be encircled by a focussed beam of light. A little trumpet sounds in the distance would be awesome too. Instead, after the aforementioned 'thunk' I didn't even hear a cricket... 'crick'. Hmm.

Whaddya know? Life goes on. I've completed the PGSEM programme, and the universe just yawned and went back to sleep.

Quarter 11 - Week 10

The final week. I feel this need to write something compelling, nostalgic, something that will bring a tear to someone's eye. Yes, I know... boredom is easy to do, but I'm looking for something poignant. And then I realize, this blog has never been about 'moving someone', it's about helping people understand that hey, this thing's hard.. but it can be done. And you'll be the better for it. If my batch.. and the batches before them... could withstand the pressure, so can you.

In a way, it's like marriage. Why should some people live a more carefree life than others anyway?

New Enterprise Financing

The prof enters in class, and you can hear the imaginary drumrolls and inspirational war music behind, when he says 'I promised to do these many cases with you, and I shall complete them!'. And the class settles in for a wordy battle, even though they're weary from completing the day's assignment from the night before. The first case was about how a newly started VC was approaching the concept of due diligence, and how they wanted to do lesser deals, so that they could concentrate on helping with the growth of those ventures. While studying this, the prof mentions that it's important to watch out for subtleties... he says that if we read this case carefully, we'd see that the company was trying to bring a new approach because of all the recent failures of VCs post the dotcom boom. Seeing how people were madly rushing in and throwing money, sometimes just after a week of not-as-due diligence, investment funds were getting very wary of VCs. Therefore, approaching the problem from a different angle, this VC was looking to take things slow so as not to make the same mistakes. Plus, they were coming up with this idea of using a framework, which could be refined over time. Such a concept, was for some reason, not already a reality with VCs, and so the prof describes how approaching issues from the concept of market need, ability to execute and capture, was an important aspect of new ventures and we looked a little deeper into the issues plaguing the venture that had approached this VC for funding.

We had a few other cases as well, but I couldn't begin to describe the subtleties, such was the nature of these cases. The prof did rush through them, we didn't get enough time to enjoy proper discussions as we'd done in some of the previous classes, but as long as the point gets through and the perspective of various players in different settings comes through, that's what we were there for, and I like to think that we had a fair bit of learning there. The prof managed to complete every single case, after all. Whether we should have finished them off so fast, is a matter for another day.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

Same ol' story as last week. Quite a few presentations, and some of the ideas stayed back... how people like Ken Kutaragi at Sony helped start off a whole new line of businesses there, even when it looked like he had no support, or when how a single leader in Surat transformed the city after a horrible plague, by just asking for accountability and setting rules in place to enforce it. Quite a few such inspirational stories, it's too bad that we didn't have the prof discuss this with us in his own way... I'm sure we'd have gotten a fair bit out of it.

It's a bittersweet way to end the last official day of learning at IIMB... on the one hand, we just saw how peering enough at the numbers and having some judgement and luck can go a long way, and how looking for the subtleties in the case will tell you more than what's explicitly written. And on the other hand, a bunch of awesome cases, just there for the reading, can be delivered in a not-so-optimal way, because a bunch of students didn't take the trouble to read cases and play their part in an active teacher-student interaction. Every action has its consequence, and nothing hits harder than that when your very last class is not as powerful as you know it could have been.

All that stands between me and a vast expanse of time, is one exam and one project. We've done this many times before, 10 times to be precise. It doesn't seem that hard at all...

Quarter 11 - Week 9

An overload of cases totally shot any plans of a relaxed week. But then again, if you didn't feel out of your depth in the last two weeks of the course... then you aren't really feeling the 'stress' of a college education, are you? Then again, if only someone could come up with a way to make education a little less painful and still provide better learning.. that'd be awesome. OR... we students could buck up and actually read stuff diligently during the ten weeks.

Naah, that's not gonna happen.

New Enterprise Financing

We had this hugely detailed case this week, about a venture(RBS) that's looking for a second round of financing. The actual case was done in 6-7 pages, the exhibits were the gigantic part spanning almost 20-odd pages. The class begins with the prof asking us about how we would go about making the decision to invest in this company, and what are the questions that we'd like to ask about the details in this case. He reminds us that 'Asking questions is a costly process. Choose your questions well'. After a pindrop silence of a couple of minutes, the questions slowly start appearing and the prof puts them down on the board. He then moves on to describe to us the way he typically would structure questions, and breaks them down into four overarching sections. He goes on to do some number crunching, and projects some numbers for the next few years. He suggests that it's always good to start with constructing the P&L, then the cash flows, and finally come down to the balance sheet. He ends by saying that considering the type of sales projections, the financing would need to be well-defined and that probably whatever the company's trying to raise in this round might not be enough. And that given the experience of the CEO, while he's done an admirable job thus far, one would need to consider if this company requires a change in management. A very strong flashback appears in my mind, from all the way back in Managing Organizations from Q2 - 'What got you here, might not get you there'. Nice to be reminded about that again.

The second session was taken by a guest speaker from a venture capital firm, one of our prof's battle-hardened colleagues. He spoke to us about the investments made by him and others in the Indian VC space, and how the returns are reasonably through the roof (though one of our classmates pointed out that only the successes were mentioned here, and not the failures). He also took some time to describe the type of companies here, and how many of them were solving problems specific to India, and how that made these ventures special. He also described how certain sectors in India actually helped boost the local venture ecosystem (For e.g. the telecom sector helped build the image of some of their Indian suppliers, which then let them play at a global scale). Had this been our first encounter with a VC, it would have been an eye-opening experience. But maybe there's just nothing different that VCs do from one another. They're all playing to a standard set of rules, but where the individual scenarios unfold slightly differently from one another. The fun must be coming from each individual experience of financing a company, because it sure as hell doesn't seem that fun from the description of the process.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

The less said, the better. Students came by, one team after another, to present their topic for the week. A couple of them had the audacity to not even bother to prepare for their material, or to check if their slides appeared properly on the machine it was supposed to be presented on. The prof's typical fire was missing from the stage, as he sat as part of the class, interjecting with a few key points now and then. Urging us to read specific sections again, he mentioned how thrilling those cases feel when you read them for the first time, and that it can be quite inspirational to us. I'll just take his word for it, because our presenters definitely don't seem to feel that way.

I can't believe that we have to submit ourselves to one more week of cold, dissected case presentations next week. It's a horrible way to end such an amazing course, and an amazing three years at college. But I guess, as a class, we did fail the prof. One lesson for life -> You don't need to be the one who actually screwed up, you just have to be in the same place at the same time... you'll get screwed anyway.

One week left. Life beckons... where am I... who am I?

Quarter 11 - Week 8

Camels are very interesting creatures. They are called the ships of the desert, but they come with their own humps... that's like a conflict of interest (you know, the vehicle and the road?). But irrespective of hare-brained meanderings at 1 AM, the funny thing is this particular creature came up quite often in this week's sessions. Oddly enough, it was repeatedly spoken about by our guest speakers, both entrepreneurs from different courses. It was the standard line of 'the camel and the man in the tent' (about how you slowly inch your way into the tent and force out of the 'incumbent'). The other camel incident is related to the 'one straw that broke the camel's back'. More on this below...

New Enterprise Financing

This week started off with a guest lecture by Kiran Nadkarni. He's well acquainted with our prof, and is also currently an entrepreneur... you probably know his current venture, if not him.. it's a not-so-small enterprise called Kaati Zone. So our man takes us through his journey and how he came to be in this business. Apparently he's a hardcore numbers driven guy, but he likes to fly off the seat of his pants once in a while. He used to work in the financing domain, and one of his last activities as an employee was to start and lead the ICICI Ventures endeavour. After a while, he had done his time, and so decided to quit and shift to the US. Somewhere in the next few years, he began to get THE itch. And so, he decides to face the world from the opposite side of the table - as an entrepreneur.

He walks us through the business that he's built up, and how he came to today's state. He also describes how he made a few nutty mistakes, which as a prior investor he should have known better. He went on to elaborate on the importance of team work, and how its good to have people with diverse experience along with you to make the journey a little less disconcerting. Not too much finance-related takeaway, but quite a bit of realistic advice for potential venture creators.

The next session was on a case about an investment firm which has just found that one of its investees is choosing to hide critical elements in his updates, which they should be concerned about. And we come to the understanding that providing for means of control is always an important aspect of financing. To keep entrepreneurs/investors in line. and not to run towards their own selfish end goals, certain checks and balances should be enforced.

We had a couple more theory papers to discuss in an extra set of classes that were scheduled on Sunday, where the prof takes us through understanding what goes into deciding the right moment to approach the markets for an IPO, and about whether or not an entrepreneur should go along with investors who he doesn't trust. We ended by discussing the fundas of one of our assignments, that was supposed to help us get a hold on the concept of DCF for valuation.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

The prof walks in with total enthusiasm to discuss the day's cases, and asks out in a cheerful voice 'How many of you have read cases x, y and z'.Slowly, hands start popping into the air, and the prof looks confused as he asked why approximately half the class hadn't. The smile becomes a little less sure now, and then he asks 'I really don't know how to proceed... you guys have to help me out here. How do I discuss this case?!'. Then the serene, yet impish smile we all know comes out and he says... well, I told you I'll not keep unnecessary expectations from you. So here goes, for the next two weeks, you guys will prepare presentations on the day's case, and describe it to the class. I'll sit where you're sitting now, and mark this as part of your class participation.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this looks like that one straw that finally broke the camel's back. I'll reserve my comments on the matter, all I will say is that I was quite disappointed with my class' attitude. This is my last quarter, and a course as important as REIL did not deserve this end.

The prof takes on the day's cases anyway... they're about Dainik Bhaskar, Titan Edge and CavinKare. The underlying concept of all of them appeared to be the same, in the face of adversity, how does one find innovative means to come out at the front... and how! All these cases were about bearing down on the unsurmountable, and just making things work. How Dainik Bhaskar got into every new geography as No.1 or No.2 on day 1 due to their innovative market research methods, or about CavinKare's sly guerilla attacks on the traditional and large FMCG brands, again through interaction with the customer, gives you the feeling that anything can be done, if you really believe in it. Titan Edge was more on how to break technological barriers and challenge incumbent wisdom, thereby giving you a place in history. Just because leading experts in watches couldn't find a way to make watches very slim, Titan found a way. One that pleasantly surprised many of the large watch players into having renewed respect for India's innovation capabilities.

The second session was a guest lecture, where we were taken through the entrepreneur's journey from idea to execution. There's a lot of customer interaction that seems to happen, not to mention strong changes to a business model depending on its viability. Here too we are made to understand the important of teamwork in a venture, and that of hard work.

The assignments are now piling on faster, and harder. This week had our teams staying up late nights to crunch the forecast numbers of the venture. Next week we have two assignments, and the week after... there are some very critical submissions. Finally, we have exams... but meh... who really cares about exams when you have periodic supervision and grading.

P.S. 2 weeks left.

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.

Quarter 11 - Week 6

Coming back after a break seems to have caused a memory lapse when it came to classes. For some reason, there was very few actual readings for this week, so it was more like a two week vacation. Profs come in to class, see our vacant stares and go 'Good Lord, don't tell me we need to do a flashback to the events from a couple of weeks ago!'. It's a good thing they're able to do a 10-minute recap after which our vacant stares are more related to the high-frequency transmissions being broadcast rather than the connection/flow that we're supposed to be going through. In any case, it's time to buck up... the assignments and projects have begun to exert some pressure.

New Enterprise Financing

The prof quickly wraps up the Kakofonix case, and moves on to Marconi. Marconi's a lot simpler than all the other cases thus far. It talks of how founders expect to raise capital through multiple rounds from investors, and what percentage of share they're willing to part with. Once all of this is calculated, and when we see how dilution works out in advanced rounds, we begin to add some realism. It's like one of the investors asks a question after pondering for a while... 'But, what if we don't get our promised return. What if the valuation actually drops?'. Uh oh, go the other investors, we should think of that. A little huddle and argument later, they proudly come around and say that 'All right, if the price of the share goes down, then we get to have an anti-dilution clause, thereby protecting the final value that accrues to us'. So all of a sudden, the entrepreneur who's expecting to hold 55% of the company (as an example), ends up with just 6% (again, an example)... because to ensure that investors can exit at their target value, SOMEBODY has to give up share and it can't be other investors. Anyway, in this case, the terms also suggest that the valuation can go anywhere between 60% and 140% of the expected value, and that the founders dont want to go under 26% share, and investors don't want to get under 50%. So we look at all the extremes, to see how it pans out and what could be the ultimate value that all shareholders receive. We also looked at a view of approaching funding, and how entrepreneurs have a fundamental issue to figure out - do they want to create value or do they want to control the firm. Economics vs. control, the prof calls it, so we look at that aspect and see how anti-dilution, preference shares, call/put options, drag along/tag along options play a part in this whole shenanigan. Awesome stuff!

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

The prof now moves away from the ownership and intrapreneurship module, and tries to help us get more onto the plane of self-knowledge and mastery. First off, he asks us to describe what we proudly hold dear as Indian, stuff we don't find elsewhere. So people give out stuff like charity, friendliness, tolerance etc. etc. lots of nice thingies that we think we're proud of. We're then made to sit through an hour long video that describes the predicament of farmers in rural India, we have a lot more people out there than in urban India, and we get a glimpse of how bad their situation is. We see example after example of what prompts people to commit suicide, and at the end of the session, we really wonder if we are of any use. Sitting in our own comfortable cocoons, we shut our eyes from everything bad. It's sad when we think that India's more known for its generosity, when we are shown evidence after evidence to the contrary. Shows just how little we know about what's happening here.

If that wasn't hard enough, the next session was a guest lecturer who speaks of how old age is a slowly approaching iceberg. The speaker talks of the increase in the number of separation cases of old folks from the family, the emergence of old age homes, and the intolerance shown by today's busy youth to their parents. We hear of examples where the elderly are 'forced' into grandparent-hood, just because the parents dont have time. And when the kids grow up, these very folk who helped settle them, the grandparents, are treated as useless pieces of furniture around the house... just obstacles that come in the way.

This week definitely shook me, with so many problems all around us, I count myself very fortunate that my issues are not as dire. I have the choice and freedom to attend classes at one of India's most prestigious institutions, to spend my time anyway I want, to talk to whoever I want to... how many others can claim the same? And yet, what am I doing with all these privileges...

Quarter 11 - Week 5.5

I never thought I'd see another week 5.5 again, brings back such memories! So if you happen to visit the past, you'd know that due to a mixup, some of our classes were delayed by a week. This week was supposed to be the return of balance to our peaceful world. So anyway, we had only one subject with back-to-back sessions, and it was definitely a session worth coming in on a Sunday for.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

We had three cases for the day, and a heck of a load of readings. However, we focused on just one of them, the prof's own journey as an entrepreneur. I remember the feelings and thoughts that I had while reading the case, it never occurred to me that entrepreneurship could have so many potholes along the road. Yes, I knew of problems due to capabilities, bad timing in markets, inability to raise funds, and all that... but it never occurred to me that well known people could be problems themselves. The prof showed us one side of the industry, one only spoken of in Bollywood movies where there's a hero against a bunch of villians... the only difference being that here, in real life, heroes can lose.

He pointed out a few areas where he made mistakes, and mentioned what all should have been done differently. He also gave us a live example of what happens when you connect too emotionally with your business or idea. He argued that being entrepreneurs, we should have the strength to call it quits when things appear to smell bad. Sticking onto it just because of your emotions is akin to riding a tiger, the longer you're on it, the harder it is to get off. At one point turning back is no longer an option, and you just hope for the minutest of probabilities of goodness to come through.

In its own way, it reminded me of STDM from last quarter. The concept of throwing good money after bad, and the concept of Prospect Theory (When you're looking at things in the losses frame, you tend to take a larger risk than you would have otherwise). The prof then talks about how low things got, and he mentioned what it took for him to get back on his feet and stop feeling the after effects from the misery of the fall. He's not the first prof to claim this, and there have been other profs who try to stress this across to us in as non-fanatical a way as they can... there is a higher force at work. Irrespective of the faith from which you come, our prof stresses that at the end of the day, they all say the same thing. He mentions how important it will be for you to constantly keep an ear out for a sign from the understated, the subconscious, the 'spirit' or 'elements', call it what you will.

At the end of the class, it's not like the athiests suddenly got converted to believers... but I'll definitely say that those who believe had one more encouraging voice that helped settle their muddy waters just that little bit more. The prof mentions that the whole of the second half of their course is going to try and cover resilience, in the face of obstacles, which he thinks is going to be very valuable to those who want to take the unbeaten road. I, for one, look forward to it.

Quarter 11 - Week 5

You know you're getting old when you think that updating posts can happen even two-three days after you're actually supposed to. Talk about a 50% delay in timelines! This would NEVER happen in the IT industry.. or atleast it wouldn't be estimated for, despite what reality keeps suggesting. The good news is that the stats engine suggests that people actually read the blog in these last two days - there are people looking at the interview process from waaay back in the day, one of my first few posts in fact. That's the zero-th year students, or should I say potential candidates.. then there's another set of people looking at what's happening in Quarter 3, apparently a bunch of first-years who just can't stand the suspense of the weeks to come. Still, oldies always feel good that atleast someone wants to hear their war stories... so no complaints from my side.

New Enterprise Financing

The prof takes his time... we're supposed to be doing two cases this week, but the prof intends to ensure that we get the fundas right. He takes us through examples of how different rounds of financing happens, taking the example of Cartographics Online. He goes on to explain the meaning of the terms pre-money and post-money valuation. Apparently, early stage investors are this full-on secretive types. They don't like that free-market, efficient-market theory in all its finery, but prefer to keep information close to their chests... just like entrepreneurs. Sure, the entrepreneur runs around saying 'I do this, I do that, my idea is this and that' but try asking him 'HOW' he does it. VCs apparently do a similar thing. They don't want to talk about how much money they spent to get what share of the company, so if a company is valued at 1,000,000 dollars, and a VC is willing to invest only a 100,000, then he gets 10% of the company. Imagine him going out and saying that to other VCs, the replies can vary... the worst case scenarios are 'Chee, you put only 100,000?' or 'Chee, you got only 10%?' or 'Chee, the company's only 1,000,000 dollars?'. To save everyone any downside, they say 'ok, you know what, if I don't give you my 100,000 then technically you'll hold a value of 900,000 dollars'. So we'll all go and say that we invested in a company with a pre-money valuation of 900,000. For some reason, hiding the exact info seems to work for this industry, so I'll leave it at that. The kicker comes when the prof tries to show us how the company in question, Cartographics Online, should worry about its assumptions when predicting the future to VCs. He says that it's important to do a sensitivity analysis to find out that even if you were to go a little wrong, how much will it actually impact your final share of the pie. There's also a little talk of how the pie shares get diluted when newer rounds of investment happens, and some magic formulae that explain this. The way the prof puts it, you're surprised that this is post-grad level stuff. Then again, he's keeping the problem simple (which still in any case can't hide the simplicity of the funda here).

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

Right, so you remember the rant from last week? The way the prof went all ballistic when we didn't read? This week we were supposed to watch some videos, and everybody thought the videos would be shown in class. The prof comes in, asks did you watch the videos, hears about what happened... just shrugs his shoulders and tells us 'Even after knowing everything I do, I still lost my temper the other day. I went back and asked why that happened? I was obivously angry, and one thing you should know is that anger is what you feel when you dont accept that things happen that you cannot control, and therefore you should have no expectations in such scenarios. And I realized that you people reading is beyond my control, and therefore I should set no expectations. This course is for you guys to understand the important facets of life, and if you want to treat it lightly, feel free... I don't gain anything anyway.'

After some time, he does point out with a gleam in his eye that this doesn't mean we get to shirk off readings through the rest of the course. He does have some control over us, our grades and all, so that still allows him to exercise some expectation. Anyway, nice guy that he is, he sent out some links for us to check out later. With a firm announcement that we should watch it, as they were videos that would be of great meaning to us - videos on Happiness, hardship, self-esteem, love, anger etc.

The next session had us discussing three specific Jataka tales, stories of leadership and the prof gets us to discuss what we thought were the salient points that we could take from each of the stories. The whole point was not to treat the stories like gospel, but just to absorb what lessons we could take from it. The stories were the 'Apannaka Jataka', 'Makhadeva Jataka' and the 'Mahakapi Jataka'. Good stuff, nice takeaways, and definitely a reminder to re-read the Jataka and Panchatantra tales. God knows what I missed as a kid, which I might realize as an adult.

Takes a while before I realize that five weeks are up... and there are only another five to go.

Quarter 11 - Week 4

For the first time in three years, New Years was not ruined. Yes, I understand that education is a very important of life, but in my perspective so is the concept of starting afresh, after a night of frivolity! And the events should never meet... NOBODY, atleast no sane person, likes to spend New Year's in college, no matter how insightful the day's classes are. And so, for the first time in my life at PGSEM, New Years was spared. And I spent it the way any normal person would... sleeping.

New Enterprise Financing

Man, we were still on that damn Vegetron case. I thought we'd done and dusted it, but apparently not. Luckily though, we actually finished it halfway into the first session and then we moved on to Adjusted Present Value, where we describe the effects of the various sources of funding on the enterprise. We did quite a bit of glancing over the different types of funds and the math of it all. The Corp Fin textbook actually describes the entire funda quite well. Finally, we're ready to tackle the case of Cartographics Online next week.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

So we were supposed to read a couple of intrapreneurship cases for the day. And apparently there were a few cases from a couple of weeks back which the prof wanted us to go through. He kindly sent a reminder on the day before classes, so that we'd be prepared. The day of the class, he walks in with full enthu, gets us warmed up and starts discussing the case. After around fifteen minutes, he makes a reference to one of the cases and goes.. "Do you see it?" with all the expectation in his eyes. 10 seconds of pindrop silence. And he asks "Didn't you read?"... 10 seconds of pindrop silence. So he ignores that, and goes to the next point. Within a couple of minutes, he asks "Get the connection?", and when the same thing happens, there's this incredulous look on his face. "Has none of you done the readings for today? Those of you who did, raise your hands!". Surprisingly, for a class consisting of PGSEM and PGP, five-six feeble hands go up, out of over seventy. For the first time during my PGSEM journey, I heard a prof admonish the hell out of us. This guy was furious! Doesn't raise his voice beyond an acceptable limit, but his anger is evident. He explains how REIL is not a subject where you can just sit there, you get to take a lot away from each story he brings forward, provided you read the case. Each reading, each case is picked after strong deliberation on whether it brings out a key value, and if we don't read it... it's as good as doing nothing. He continues the class, every once in a while sighing when we don't get it, shakes his head and moves on. Towards the end of the session, he calmly tells us not to bother coming the next day if we don't read the cases for it. He ends by saying that if we continue not to read, he'll just sit back and make us do presentations in each session while he grades them. It's not something anyone of us wants...

The next session obviously has a marked difference. Everyone's commenting, bringing out points and the prof's keeping up with the pace by jotting them down and adding some refinements of his own. I know that most of us consider this elective to hold some deep content, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for us to keep up with his requirements if we're to unearth it.

Quarter 11 - Week 3

Nothing special about this week, just the cold December mornings and the standard cusses about how we end up in class by 8 AM instead of snuggling in bed under a warm blanket. Then your thoughts go out to those batchmates of yours who finished last quarter, and how they're gleefully sleeping soundly in their warm homes. Tends to bring out very un-Christmassy thoughts...

New Enterprise Financing

This week, we continue a little with the Capital Market Myopia paper. The funda for this, as I've mentioned last week, is that people go about investing in stuff that is actually good, but because there's so many people investing and they've got their blinkers on, the sector gets filled with money - which is not so good. Innovation and money tend to bring out the worst in each other... you need to starve one to make max use of the other. Anyway, our prof's trying to approach it from a different angle. We were discussing if there were some early signs that we came across, that should have pointed out to the investor that it's not the right time to do that particular investment. And so we pore over the GDP data for those years, the returns that the companies tended to have, and relevant data about the population (such as unemployment rate) to identify the possible signals that investors had. One thing the prof said stood out in my mind... sometimes people see other people investing in something, then you tend to wonder if the rest of the world has gone mad OR are you not seeing what they're seeing. That's a dangerous place to be in, says the prof, and it inadvertently leads you to making the same mistake they did.

The second session had us discussing the case of Vegetron, and how they came up with estimates for cash flows, and a balance sheet for the next five years of that startup. I didn't really catch much, because the professor's voice was being drowned out by my snoring (I'm not entirely sure if the snoring was in my head, or out there for real). The prof did say that you need to love numbers, I understand now why he said that. But yea, he says that we need to give this a manual run after class to really get the funda across. Maybe once I do that, I'll be better poised to understand the nuances.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

We had this guest speaker who looks like he's a simple person from one of India's many villages. He comes in, introduces himself, and then spends two sessions just yelling at us and making us feel worthless. That's it. Funny thing is the whole class was hanging on to his every word. He talks of how the IT wave ruined our country's progress, and how we avoided hardware development which is difficult but far more profitable to us in the long run (both socially and financially), in order to make a quick buck out of software which is far easier but has had us do the equivalent of slaving over work that no sensible person would do. The only reason we do it is because they're paying us for it, and we dont bother finding a more efficient way to do it. The concept of time vs. money comes out very clearly when you look at why we do what we do, and why the clients do what they do.

He talks to us about how India has so many problems, and how if we apply 1/10 of our mind, we can bring a great deal of happiness to many of India's underprivileged folk. He shows us examples of guys who travel to tribal village in various parts of India, or inside volcanos in Indonesia just to bring clean drinking water or electricity to the people who live around the region. He gives us more examples of how students who fail to pass out from some of India's colleges are groomed and now paid a hell of a lot more than India's finest Ivy League scholars by some of India's top corporates, after they're trained at simple institutes started by some visionary men. He talks of how we can make a difference, but just because of our colonial heritage and our middle class mindset, we hold ourselves back.

He challenges us to break away from the rut and do something useful with our lives. He stops short of asking us to drop out of the Indian Institute of Management, just pausing to say that we're just here to get yet another certificate, or sticker of authenticity using which we anyway go back and do dull jobs. He expresses his anger and disgust for the IITs and IIMs saying how they've ruined the country when they could do so.. much.. more. Instead of encouraging and developing visionaries out of the capable minds that come to them, they just convert those minds into more expensive cattle. The fault doesn't always lie with the institute, the students still have that middle class mind, but it's the institute's job to help students break those shackles.

The class stays silent for most of the two sessions, either pondering how right he is, or how wrong he is. Time will tell if anyone takes his talk to heart and really does something. God knows we're capable, and there's plenty of opportunity out there. We don't need to be in the IIM to know this, or help do something about it, but now that we're here... do we have the courage to make use of what we know for the benefit of others and not just ourselves? Or are we still going to be a better breed of cattle?

Quarter 11 - Week 2

The hustle and bustle begins, half of the courses started this week (courtesy of the mixxup from last week) and the halls are bustling again. Starting at the bookshop where the long queue snakes from outside the door, to the Amrith Kalash cafeteria where you spend half the lunch break waiting in line to buy a token, and the other half wolfing down the meal with the case study for the afternoon's session.

New Enterprise Financing
This week has us discussing funding sources and the differences between VCs and PE guys. Apparently HNI individuals/trusts play around with a specific class of assets called alternate assets. This is approximately 5-6% of their capital, and goes towards VCs and PEs, real estate, oil, arts etc. Depending on the size of the VC fund, it wields a certain amount of power in the new venture arena. We even spend a little while discussing basic differences between the types of firm ownership, how partners are compensated, and how returns, once harvested from a venture, are not reinvested back in... that's the name of the game. The prof takes us through the stages of new enterprise funding and talks of the gates between them, and how certain problems with the venture partners should be unearthed far earlier in the process than much later.

The second session has us discussing more about what makes new ventures tick, and about why some ventures tend to come together, mainly due to aspects like capitalizing on knowledge intensity... or for something far easier to understand, like having a global footprint. We had a case for the day, not so much a case, more a reading that talks of how myopia can affect the ecosystem/field. Apparently, individuals tend to think from their perspective while investing in new ventures, without realizing what can happen at a large scale when everyone invests. By themselves, it appears to be a really good decision, but when you look at it from a larger perspective, you tend to realize that there's too much money in the game, for a value that doesn't measure up. And it was not only the individual's fault... collective thought was just missing. Or so I think the funda was. The example was the hard disk storage domain back in the mid-80s.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning (REIL)
The prof starts off with an abstract talk. Speaks of how this course is something we should be aware of. He wants us to uncover a deeper meaning for ourselves, by paying more attention to what we want... to what we believe in... and to have some sort of direction. He opens up a little about himself, about his journey and then speaks of how we seem to be missing ownership. This lack of ownership is what tends to crush innovation, and he's hoping that by the end of this course, we'll walk out knowing what we want to do, and what we're willing to take ownership of.

We spend a little time discussing the characteristics of entrepreneurs in the second session, and the different aspects that make a workplace entrepreneurial. It's interesting that we are now drawing block diagrams with words we learnt in school. Stuff like passion, competence, trust, support, discipline... these are lofty goals that we're primed for in school. But something goes wrong, and we get to hear all this again when we come to do an MBA. Anyway, we move on to discuss the difference in the outlook of an entity as it transforms from a startup to an organization, and about how people tend to choose between two roles in their lives - One as an administrator, and the other as an entrepreneur. It's quite interesting to see the different outlooks of both these types of people, and as to how willing to stay low down in a hierarchy need not mean that you should be willing to remain at the level of an administrator. The prof only says one thing, even if you're a clerk by the time you retire, maintain that spirit of entrepreneurship and know that your choice is conscious. I know it sounds a little abstract, but I think his basic funda is that irrespective of our station in life, there's no reason to hand over the reins to any other individual. Be your own master, he says.

2 weeks down, eight weeks to go.

Quarter 11 - Week 1

Damn it, I'm still here.

I come in to campus on Friday, and the regular classrooms look much emptier. It's like PGSEM Quarter 7 and 8 all over again... the halls are a little less noisy, the energy a little low, the mad scramble for the attendance monitor at ten minutes before class (I never really understood that, we have like 15 minutes to swipe... why the hell was everyone waiting till the clock struck T-10 anyway??)... anyway, I miss that. I think I was actually happy last year this time... it looked like more space to breathe now that those 'damned seniors' were gone, felt a little lonely this time around.

Would have stayed that way, had it not been for a couple of things. One was the small bunch of us 2009ers who hung around for yet another quarter. A couple of them were sneaking back into class, hoping to do an audit (they'd be mad to actually take more credits and go through the pressure, even if it was just one more quarter!), a couple others actually willing to undertake the extra credits because.. well.. they're crazy... and finally there's a bunch of students who just took up the freedom and kept some credits for one more quarter. So they kind of made up for part of the melancholy. Then... a few juniors were walking around confused as usual like we tend to be, see me and walk up to me. "What the hell are you still doing here? Why can't you get out and leave us in peace!" they ask, another guy asks "Failed, aa?". As I correct whatever misconception comes across with a tinge of despair, confusion and glee... the remaining gap was filled. Home, sweet home.

New Enterprise Financing

One of our profs from first year happens to be teaching this course, he's the prof who did the first half of corporate finance for us. This course was really given the two-thumbs-up by many seniors (personally, I think to spite us and make us go through one last round of pure hell), and I just had to attend this one... especially since it says "New Enterprise". Imagine my shock when the prof outright says "Guys, I've gotten feedback from your seniors that many join this course thinking that it's going to be about entrepreneurship. This is not about entrepreneurship. This is hardcore finance topics, where we study the numbers of new ventures.. and study the various aspects of the same. You better like numbers, and better remember corporate finance and FinAcc, else you're in for a load of pain... there's the door, get out while you can". Here I'm thinking that let's save one course slot for this guy, it'll be good.. and here he deflates any entrepreneurial learning bubble that I had within the first five minutes. Yet, the introduction of the course still sounds interesting. Appears to combine the concepts of FinAcc and CorpFin to understand issues that come up while dealing with new ventures, both from the perspective of the entrepreneur and the investor, leaning more towards the latter.

Of course, the standard drivel about it being a heavy course... lots of reading, lots of numbers, standard pain and relative gain etc. I'm going to give this course atleast a looksie, before considering if I should make a switch. The prof doesn't gain anything out of this course, I do... and seeing him plead to us to really think if we want to be in this course if we don't appreciate numbers much is worth giving it a rethink.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

It's a mouthful, and I'm thinking of just calling it REIL next time onwards. Why oh why can't people come with less complicated names. In any case, there was some botchup by someone either in the PGP or PGSEM arenas (I'm betting it's the PGPs.. the PGSEM office makes their plan way out at the start of the year and it's far too simple to screw up. Think about it... 10 weeks classes, 1 week break.. repeat 4 times... really, how could we POSSIBLY screw up?). Thanks to that, our classes will only start next week.

This totally spoils my concept of a weekly update, but I guess we'll just have to get around it... one week I'll probably write up a double-sized account for the week that was.

It's good to whine again. It's good to be back, even if it's just for one more quarter (hopefully).

Quarter 10 - Week of Exams

The storm clouds are rumbling above. As the batch sits for its last set of exams, it begins to get dark. Come on, it's GOT to mean SOMETHING atleast... hunh, hunnnnh? All we needed was an orchestra in the background doling out some music that sounds like impending doom. People scratched their heads for the last time. They had a frown on their face, replete with pursed lips, for the last time. They took one last sneaky look at a neighbour's paper.. for the last time.

Business Data Mining & Decision Making

Ok, so I haven't started yet on this take-home paper. The prof is either extremely confident that we won't copy from one another, or he knows it won't help anyway. No, I'm not talking about 'It doesnt help in life if we copy now', I mean 'What the hell are you going to copy, and are you sure it's right in the first place?' I like to think profs have their minds filled with little cherubs when they think of us.. dreamy little angel-faces. BUT.. enough of the profs. I have atleast done SOME reading of the questions, and they look do-able. So I'll sit on them for a while.

Strategic Thinking & Decision Making

The last time around, the prof had come up with a bunch of questions that required us to use a fair amount of analogy-tical (Is that a word? Analogous doesn't sound right... it seems... continuous!) thinking. This time though, if the answer was X, the question typically were like 'blah-blah-interesting-blah-blah. Does XYZ apply to this? How, which and why?' It's almost like a trick, to make us look up all three article sets, read them in the exam and figure out which applies! But in any case, it didn't seem too heavy, was just right, and it's one of the few times I came out of the exam without worrying about whether or not I was atleast in the same ballpark as the actual answer.

Soon after the exam, the zombie-faces around the block gave way to enlightenment. College was done (for most of us)! After some hanging around, people decided to move over to their favourite addas outside of college for one last meetup. In a flash, the block was empty. In hindsight, all this probably caused a sudden depression in the area. The rains could not have come at a more appropriate time.

Quarter 10 - Week 10

As is typically the tradition in the last week of classes, people are frantically running around bleary-eyed, cursing the printers, yawning every two minutes and punching in a few words into their reports every time the prof turns towards the board to write something. And yet, most of the seniors had this spark in their eyes. I wonder why.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

The class presentations were split across the two sessions, where each group came over to describe what they pulled out of their raw data. Quite a few of the teams seemed to use the C5.0 classification model to do their analysis. There were a few teams that played with clustering and market basket analysis. Personally though, I liked the text analytics ideas. There wasn't much detail provided on how the algorithms worked, or any non-intuitive observations like the diapers and beer sales (Trust me, every group was gunning for some kickass insight like this!), but the very fact that this requires the analysis of grammar and spoken words lends some grandeur to it.

Strategic Thinking & Decision Making

The first session gets completely wrapped up in a case. It was a good one, it combined aspects of Prospect Theory with ethical decision making. There were so many aspects to look at, though the choices were reasonably obvious. I say reasonably obvious since a person could go on and on describing why other options are also equally valid, but for some reason, this one tends to hold itself out.

The second session revolved around the concepts of planned rational decision making, and naturalistic intuitive decision making. The funda's pretty simple - in times of great stress, you'll be damned if you sit and weigh all the options, and decide which one's rationally best for you. Emotion plays a part, time plays a part, so you tend to be a lot quicker in decision making. You would think up one option, and then intuitively accept or discard it, then think of another solution, and repeat the same process. Therefore, the prof asks, if you're anyway going to go back to your old ways when your decision counts the most, what's the point of all this learning?

Practice. The whole point is practice. You can't stop yourselves from making quick intuitive decisions, but you can train your mind to intuitively find the closest possible good option. There's a lot of good info surrounding how other people do it, and what we can learn from it.

And so endeth the last class of the last official quarter.

In a fit of nostalgia, and sudden recognition that we need to capture these moments for a lifetime, a whole bunch of people were running around class taking photos of one another, the classroom, the benches, themselves, the attendance monitoring device and the profs. Sure enough, after all the classes were over, a horde of people move all around, to the area behind the audi to take a few pics, and then to the amphitheatre to take more pics.

Saturday, the 19th of November 2011, was a special day.

Quarter 10 - Week 9

My classmates are really restless... it's two weeks to freedom for most of them, and the tension in the air is palpable. Some of the guys are tearing out whatever hair they have left, despite everyone telling them to chill... only two weeks left. Some of the others are wear blank expressions, head in one hand, the day's case study in the other, and people come by saying "Hold on man, just another two weeks!". The combination of rushing around for project work, and knowing freedom's this close is tearing our people apart. Stay the course, people... just hold on... the end is nigh.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models
We got a little deeper this week, with sessions on text mining and web mining. The first was taken by a guest speaker, who discussed what his company does, and how they use their mined information (collected from various sources like blogs, social networks etc.) to identify what people are saying about a brand or organization. Now text mining isn't very simple, as the word 'Care' has a very different meaning from 'Dont care'. So it's the string of words that actually has more meaning than a single word itself. A lot more hullabaloo about how the summary is being done, and after some examples of actual customer projects where they've worked, it 'kinda' got clear as to how text mining is done.

The second session, being about web mining, was easier to understand. Easier since the prof talks about stuff like how you move from one page in the site to the other, how you understand when the usage on the site peaks, what are users more interested in etc. All the more fun when you consider the example he takes - of a matrimonial website. So he goes on to explain what percentage of people actually make a purchase/payment on the site, and what are the most popular pages etc. One of the strange findings was that traffic peaked around 4 AM in the morning, and the prof wonders why the vast majority is logging in that early in the morning in the first place. Then comes enlightenment - the time's according to US time, and there's an audible signal of understanding across the class. Fun stuff!

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making
We're still on the emotion bit... why we decide what we do. Today started off with understanding how our brain functions, and how we make decisions. Apparently, two parts of our brain help to make the decision - one is more dependent on our primal instincts, the other tends to reason. So, the fact that people tend to wait instead of jumping to conclusions show that they rely on the second part, as against people who react immediately and impulsively. The prof goes on to show us some images, and asks us what sort of emotions they incite in us... and based on that, he claims why certain emotions are more likely to cause larger effects than others.

We then go on to the concept of ethics, and personally, it was a rehash of what we studied in EBM in Quarter 8, so just a few new nuggets there. Oddly chilled out class this time, it's getting frighteningly calm. We know what that means...

Quarter 10 - Week 8

Last week was a brilliant break from the typical rigour (*cough*) that we face on the weekends, on account of Diwali. Now, any sane person would think that you have a holiday so that you can relax... but obviously that sane person hasn't done the PGSEM, much less prepared for a project that was due to be given in three weeks! Three weeks? That's a lot of time, you'd say. And I'd agree, if it wasn't for the fact that WE'RE NOT GETTING ANYWHERE!! WE HAVE THE DATA AND THE DAMN THING ISN'T ALLOWING US TO MINE IN ANY REASONABLE WAY! WHO THE HELL INVENTED DATA MINING!! It's a good thing I'm taking this quite well, and not over-reacting.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

We had the research assistant take our class, and he typically does a good job. But he sort of over-estimated our concentration this time around. Our man is trying to take us through a practical demonstration of how people choose what liquid detergent to buy, based on brand, price, quantity etc. And how the effect of price can affect purchase decisions.

With all sorts of magical flourishes, he stands at the front of the class and with eyes glistening with the promise of the future, and no mic, explains some fundas which I couldn't hear. But they must have been good, as the front benchers weren't looking all around. Some of the guys out at the back are straining their ears, hunched forward, staring pointedly in the hopes that they can lipread. Some others are poring in a concentrated manner on the news of the day. In a nutshell, either the speaker should get a mic in future, or give us our handouts so we can run the experiment. Now all we have to do is get that message across.

The second session was a lot more chilled out (for most people). It was a interim casual report of where we've reached in our projects, and where are we stuck. So that actually passed by like a breeze since a lot of people had some very interesting projects.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

This week had quite a bit going for it in terms of a proper case discussion. We ACTUALLY read the news article/case! Well, atleast most of it, and most of us... enough to discuss! The topic was about the Challenger disaster, and what could have been the potential decision failures in the system. We go on to discuss how our biases tend to play a role in our decision making, and how we need to be aware of them. We also did a small experiment on assumptions. The prof puts up a slide, and makes us all write atleast 10 assumptions. And then he goes on to explain, how our assumptions affect our final decisions. Being the kind of people we are, we tend to abstract away and assume stuff... because apparently if we DON'T make assumptions, then we get stuck in some sort of analysis-paralysis.

So the next time you go around assuming stuff, remember... you're moving forward.

Quarter 10 - Week 7

You'd expect that as the finish line draws nearer, you'd get re-energized to run faster. I do have another quarter left (oh, the choices one makes...), and I'm looking forward to a couple of really cool courses (New Enterprise Financing and Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Leadership) *fingers crossed for no schedule clash*, but still it's almost a feeling of relief, and the 'slow down, whats the hurry' syndrome. I want to think that I'm going to miss college once I get out, but I'd be lying. I can't wait to be done with the busy Fridays and Saturdays, the sleepless and least-efficient weeknights. Yes, I know I'll miss the refreshing gyaan (in most cases) that's being poured on us, which we then go and spout to our colleagues as if we came up with it... but hey, three years is a LONG time in an MBA programme. Let's get it done.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

This week continues with more lab sessions... so we do Artificial Neural Networks and Market Basket Analysis. The funda of the first is that the model slowly learns how to set weights to the various inputs such that the output can be predicted. It still uses the concept of training data (the set that is used to prepare the model) and the testing data (the set on which you try to confirm if the model does indeed work). We got to see that sometimes models need to be 'tricked'. You'd oversample one particular segment of input records, to balance their weightage towards getting the final answer.

Why? Let's take an example. Let's say you want to understand attributes of the people that are likely to use an online dating service in India. So ASSUME you run an analysis on your users (OMG, you have no privacy concerns, you have no ethics etc. etc...) and ASSUME you find out that a majority of the participants like to watch TV shows about war, wrestling and cricket. ASSUME you also find that the majority would still browse through the profiles of the opposite gender, EVEN if they were already hooked up. Now you're wondering if something's off, even the so called sensible women, epitomes of loyal partners in relationships *cough*, appear to be going nuts. What you don't get immediately is this. Anyone who uses chatrooms in India knows that the ratio of men to women in such sites is *very* high. It would have been much higher, had we not had some nutty Indian guys parading as women online, for whatever psycho reasons they have. So your results are actually dominated by male attributes. Therefore, you try to oversample the women in the group, to get a more fair representation amongst the genders. Then, the results you get are more likely to be attributes of the psychographics that visit online dating sites. Get it? No? Remind me not to join the faculty at the IIMB.

The next session was about identifying what options in a set go together. For e.g. when you visit a supermarket, is the purchase of bread and butter highly correlated, or is the purchase of milk and vermicelli highly correlated (yum, payasam!). Therefore, the Market Basket Analysis tries to see if you can identify any trends in co-purchases/activity in a particular field. Fun analysis, lots of weird looking graph, but some interesting thoughts from our lab guide on what could be the possible reasons for the correlations we seemed to find. For e.g. milk and cheese. A possible reason could be that they're both being refrigerated, hence stored together...). Incredibly fun stuff.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

We go even further down the emotions route, we add the concept of affect this week. There were a lot of interesting principles.. stuff like how group decision making appears to be as flawed as deciding by yourself, since people tend to go with consensus more than rational debate. Or how you're likely to think more about how a particular decision benefits you rather than the company. Or why people who're advertising about 'Feed a child' always show you an EXTREMELY impoverished kid, to bias a rational decision making process. It's not a bad thing, it's just that people appeal to your emotions, instead of your logic, in some scenarios.

Or even the fact how you don't understand the scale of certain problems. For e.g. if there are two jars, a really big one with a lower percentage of green to red gems, and the other is a much smaller jar with a higher percentage of red to green gems, you're more likely to pick from the big one when asked to get more than 10 green gems in your hand (because you seem to be overawed by the magnitude). Or even when you're gambling, you're given a chance to win really big with lower probability, or win very small amount with a much higher probability, and you pick the latter because you enjoy the concept of winning more than the value of what you're winning. So the point is that the way elements AFFECT your decision making process is not visible to you, but it should hopefully be visible to others. So try to get groups to think together, and question each other, rather than letting one person dominate the discussion and then sway the group in his/her favour.

Next week's a break for Diwali, so it should be quite chilled out. I so look forward to being waken up by noisy crackers at 5 in the morning. My alarm clock chime just doesn't convince me that its worth waking up early anymore, maybe this will change that perception...

Quarter 10 - Week 6

It's been a reasonably calm week, not much out of the ordinary. The profs continue to remind us about the upcoming projects so that we don't go crazy in the last one week. They're still very optimistic. Their faith in us is troubling... or rather guilt-inducing. Whatever works, right?

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

We continue with labs this week, we've been doing stuff on K-clusters and Decision trees. The funda of the first is simple, take reams of data and let the software (Clementine in this case) work its magic on it to bundle them into clusters. The more clusters you decide to have, the more 'internally aligned' the clusters are supposed to get. So, after a little hulabaloo, you get 4-5 clusters with descriptions like (Male, under 30's, <50000$ income), (Females, over 40s, >30000$ income)... etc etc. The second session had us doing decision trees, where we feed in a bunch of inputs to the software, drag in a model and 'train' it with one part of a data set. We then just apply the trained model to the rest of the dataset and check if it still accurately identifies the type of output we're expecting (based on its understanding of the training data set). Totally takes the fun out of number crunching, but saves us a heck of a lot of time. Yay. And here I thought, the point of number crunching was to identify some human aspects of what were evidently just becoming statistics.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

A very creative midterm, if you ask me. The prof tries to compare a Prisoner's Dilemma with a marriage, and asks us what strategies go where. Or he asks us why Apple comes out with an iTunes store, what's the point of it? Was it strategic, or a hint from God? Some questions like that, which required us to think, assume and chew on. Finally when we start discussing the solution, heated debates about what assumptions are right, what weren't. Why one answer is as good as another... sigh, that's probably why some IIMB profs stopped getting creative with their questions. It's difficult to 'hold on' to assumptions...

We were supposed to do a case in the next session, but apparently EVERYONE forgot there was a case, and didnt even realize that the handout wasn't in the book. The perplexed prof has come totally prepared for a heated case discussion, and then realizes to his consternation that the guys in class didn't even realize there was a case (though in our defense, we had a friggin' midterm!). So already tired from the debate, and the futility of it all, the class gets cancelled and for the first time... in our time at IIMB... we were left with a free period. I should be happy! Wonder why it doesn't feel good then.

Quarter 10 - Week 5

It's the usual calm before the storm... midterms are beginning this week, project proposals are also expected to be turned in. The guys working on their final projects are frantically running around trying to give some shape to their mid-term submissions. The profs have now stopped chiding us on the fact that we're not reading the readings, and have not sarcastically taken on to the 'In the reading you SHOULD have read, the saying goes...'. Everything's normal, we're in the midst of the sea and there are no rocks to crash against, yet.

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

We're coming to the more complex data mining modes - we just began with text mining this week. The prof takes examples of how words by themselves are not as important as n-grams. These n-grams are certain combination of words that actually have a sensible meaning. For e.g. 'great' is a good word, but 'not great' implies sometihng else entirely, while 'not great aesthetics' implies yet another meaning. Hence, he goes on about a case where they had to identify trends based on feedback left behind on something. I'd have been more specific, but I'd fallen asleep thinking of n-grams.

The second session was our first practical session on Clementine... which does some pretty cool stuff with data. It's like excel, only that you can do some cool graph-y things with it. Combine data sets, filter stuff out, sort it, sample it... and finally display or extract stuff. And we got to work on a cool data set too! One of login data of students and profs.. probably to check attendance and other such stuff. Good fun...

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

We continue down the emotion route... further refining our understanding of Game Theory. Apparently, humans are lazy, that's a shocker! They tend to make decisions based on incomplete information and rely a helluva lot on their intuition. Again, such a shocker. The funda appears to be bounded rationality. We tend to look for answers, and will continue looking till we get what we deem to be a satisfying answers, and not the optimal one. We also seem to have some sort of an opinion bias? We are more likely to think our harebrained ideas are the awesomest, while some brilliant ideas from others are downright crappy. Apparently, our intuitive part of the brain is different from the reasoning part of the brain. What makes it worse, is that we can't realize when our intuition is suggesting something downright wrong.

We're also quite risk averse! If we're getting a chance to look at good things happening, and are confronted with two options, we're more likely to take the less risky one. And if we're getting a chance to look at bad things happening, and are offered two options, we think 'what the hell' and are willing to take much riskier options. So, interestingly, the way a problem is phrased to you ends up with you taking different decisions. Good tip to have, no? It's one of the reasons we stay invested in a market that's obviously going down (because we *think* it will come back up again anyway), or why we don't invest in markets when they're going up (what if it goes down?). Interesting to know how nutty we can get!