Quarter 4 - Week 3

Now that we have completed three quarters, and three weeks.... we've basically done 3.3 / 10 quarters. THAT means, we only have two-thirds left to go! Now all we need to do, is figure out what we did in the past, and repeat it twice more. That looks like it'll work. I think.

Nothing special happened this week, except for the quizzes (about time they started too, I was beginning to think I was important, this brought me back down to earth). One quiz in OperMan, and another in CorpFin. On the same day. Yes, our professors have synchronized internal clocks.

OperMan - This week was all about Queues and how to setup operations in consideration to this and the service industry. By and large, this was a case-study centred week, both days had us discussing a couple of cases. I hadn't prepared properly, so it came as an utter shock to me when everyone else was rattling numbers and throwing jargon, while I was sitting and hunting for the numbers here and there. (Study, study, study!). The test came and went, and took any semblance of dignity I had. But, never fear, next week's coming near, I'll have some dignity and hold onto it for dear. (Hey, I'm a poet).

CorpFin - More discussion on bonds and their valuation. I think we progressed a little beyond that, I only remember this since it was part of the test. I draw a blank after that. Will update next week, after I study.

MPPO - All the touchy-feely parts of management come together in one orchestra called MPPO. Quite a few of our classmates get easily bored in this class. The prof actually said something like "the young ones don't fully understand what goes on in an organization and the human aspect to it, whereas you experienced ones (he meant old. us old ones, really?) are a little more mellow. You know what the pulse of the organization is, so you are able to absorb the teachings from this course better". A couple of my neighbours were doodling on a pad, so I'm guessing they were thoughtfully considering what he said. Anyway, this week we were discussing ego states (Parent, Adult and Child) and inter-personal strokes and judgements. Essentially about how the way we communicate to people should match how they're perceiving it. If there's a disconnect, communication tends to give way to the friction, and pretty much stops. Strokes was all about how people are thirsting for feedback, and will go for any kind of stroke (positive or negative i.e. compliment or otherwise, in comparison to no feedback at all). The course is definitely something to ponder over, when we consider that most of us are only concentrating on results and data, when "people" by themselves are such a vast, unknown subject by themselves. Hmm.

But whatever said, 1/3 is done. It's a big step for us guys, I'm sure we can make two more! Cheers to us.

Quarter 3 - Week 3

We had classes on Christmas.

I mean, seriously! We're taking this 'passion, drive and motivation' a little too far! While all your friends, Christian or not, get to party the night away and drink to glory, we sit hunched under a lamp trying to prepare for a test on Saturday and a "possible surprise test" on Saturday! Wont all my team members be happy to see me now, gleefully tittering at my predicament while they gallivant somewhere. Should give them more work.

We didnt have Law this week since the prof's out till Jan 19th. A part of me thinks he's tripping on all the wining and dining somewhere in Goa arguing relentlessly about where the justice is in today's service oriented corporate structure and plans to do so till New Year and beyond, the saner part of me thinks he's got some urgent lawyering/judging to do.

Marketing was just about ok on day 1. We were discussing what Infosys was trying to do around 2004 with a Blue Sky team (?) to figure out how they can be more a part of the software pie offering. "Making their pie and eating it too" types. Everyone had made presentations and when the prof calls for volunteers to present their case, after quite a bit of fidgeting and studious concentration on an empty whiteboard by most of the class, one brave lady volunteered and dragged her team with her. They confidently gave their view on what Infy should have done and why. Not too exciting. The second session was awesome! We had Prof. Harish Bijoor (look him up), who gave us the deal on Rural India. Ex-HLL senior product manager, VP of Tata Coffee, and now has his own consulting firm. While I wouldnt say that he shone some brilliant gyaan on us, he definitely shattered some myths about the rural aadmi, and made us look at him with new found respect. 75% of India's population lives and breathes in rural India. That's a lot of people. So many little tidbits which we devoured hungrily, all put to us in a funny manner but with a great deal of serious information in it. Did you know that while 22% of urban women use lipstick (yes, only that much), 11% of rural women use it too. 11% less than 22%, so rural juntas suck? try seeing it this way, 11% of 75% of india's women is more than 22% of the rest. Especially when they use more lipstick than that 22% sophistikat. He came up with so much fundas JUST ON LIPSTICK. It was so cool! So you'd think the most popular brand is Lakme? Hell no, it's Raja lipstick! How rural women apply lipstick is apparently quite different from how urban women apply it... all this and much more, on the day after Christmas. A good gift, and a fitting way to end 2009! :)

Quant Meth 2 - Yes, its Operations Research but I seem to think QuantMeth is a nice think to call it now. Quite heady, u see a lot of stars, and when it's over you wake up with a splitting headache. Naah, its not so bad, our prof's trying to make sure we get the fundas right. So we continue to study Duality and then move into Integer Programming from Linear Programming.

And then we have Saturday's test.

Man, what's with us and not understanding that these profs arent teaching us nursery rhymes. All he gave us was simple funda-applicable problems requiring us to draw on common sense, and all we do is draw on our paper. We'll find out which of our folks were whining even after having done well, many of us anxiously await our marks to find the posers who think they're cool by acting like they've done bad like the majority. Wait for it, ur time will come!!

Managerial Accounting - Blearrggh! I dont like this subject. It's ok. We were learning how to decide costs of our offerings, what is a cost driver, job order costing, normal costing, actual costing.. blah blah blah. I'm sorry, but if you want to know more about this, get this book we're using "Managerial Accounting" by Hilton, Ramesh and Jayadev - TMH publication. The prof's trying hard to make sure we understand the goodness in the subject, but it's being so much of a pain in the bag, and seems to have an acquired test. Like beer. Yuck.

Still, Marketing saved the day with the cool insights into the rural market. A good way to end 2009. Ready to walk bleary-eyed into 2010!

Quarter 2 - Week 8

Ahaah! I see the "My time's more important than blogging" a.k.a "I'm lazy" is raising it head yet again... Gentlemen! It's time to roll that mouse, scroll it and keep the keyboard at the ready, we've got a long fight ahead of us...!

WTF? Who writes such stuff, this is a PGSEM diary, not a rant spot (It's not?). On to what we're here to talk about, Week 8. This means we have just two more weeks left of classes in this quarter after this (Awesome!!!! Cant wait!), and then we'll have exams (SHITTT!!!!). Now anyway, why would this quarter be any different from any of the others?

Well, to begin with, we had a project (that's like fourteen times bigger than an assignment) to submit by Friday, and as fate would have it, nobody was done (or started) with the assignment... so someone asks the prof a week ago - "Sir, when's the last date to submit the project", and the prof says "The next Friday", and the whole class went "Whaaaaa??? Sirrr!!! No time!! Pleeeeeeeease Sir...!". The prof cut everything short by saying "I expected this, ok, I wont stretch the deadline... next week is our last week of sessions, we will be doing presentations after this, so those of you who submit on Friday, I'll take your assignments. Those who dont, have to get a hard copy to the PGSEM Office by the Thursday after that. I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY SUBMISSIONS ON THE FRIDAY AFTER THAT!" Glad that we got an extra five days, we went "phew!". But our bag isn't complete yet, we also had a QM assignment set for Sunday, a QM quiz that was on Saturday, and trust me when I say this "The QM assignment is like two normal projects." What, an assignment bigger than a project? That's right, it is... you'll find out when you come here.

So a couple of week nights, half of Saturday and the whole of Sunday was spent at IIMB while we tried to figure out what questions to ask to make our data fit the question, er, i mean get the right answers. I think we finished by Sunday 6 PM, and immediately got started on our Managing Organizations project. That's right! ON A SUNDAY! That's family time! (In fact as we speak, in the mid of the next week, I have just sent out a draft of our latest doc for review). So junta, rest assured, if you plan to do this course, and you wanted to be on the IIMB campus, you'll BE on the IIMB campus, even if you'd rather be elsewhere. No doubts of that.

This week in Macro Economics, we had another prof come in, since our actual prof was away on leave. She spoke to us about fiscal policy and what the government can do to influence spending. Maybe I was stuck on the impending QM quiz the next day, or the couple of assignments, that I was unable to pay much attention to what was being said. I mean, I was listening, but I wasnt really listening. Like a block between the short term and long term divisions of my brain. Divisionalized form, anyone?

Managing Organizations went neatly, we were supposed to look into the working of organizations that go from "Good to Great" and how they ensure their employees are driven, and how a common vision goes a long way for everyone. It pretty much said that for an organization to succeed, your primary resource is your people. Keep them happy, keep them motivated, and give them direction... they'll be efficient inherently. Yea, yea, common sense you say, but this had pictures! and nice bold headlines, and even had the not-so-unimportant distinction of possessing DATA! It had stats in it! Hah, in your wildest dreams you couldnt come up with numbers to match your common sense, so there! (Come to think, all our articles have had the exact same attributes, some of them have gone further to lend credibility by appearing in the Harvard Business Review. Guess someone thought it would be a good idea to have this stuff published, so people can refer to a one stop spot for how to "Manage an Organization"). We studied Aravind Eye Hospital again, and saw how they went on to become a highly efficient and successful hospital. All with minimal donations/funding by "badde bhaiyas"! The next day, we studied "Why transformation efforts fail", which I think everyone really wanted to know, as in why can an org not maintain the changes it proposes... So we saw the 8 reasons for it (yes, there are eight. I'd show you the article, it's bold and black, and highlighted on another chart as well!). In brief, it said that you need to stress the urgency of it across the org, make sure your employees GET it! and then purposefully put in small successes along the way to keep morale up, and maintain it for 5-8 years, that's when it gets into the actual org psyche. Useful pointers here are there...

QM, well, remember I said if you read and come, you'd get everything the prof said? Well, with the coming quiz, couldnt read the stuff... so a lot of nodding here, shaking there, sleeping everywhere. The first day was pretty much a recap of the portions for the next day's quiz.. so that was ok. The next day we did "ANOVA - Analysis of Variance". Even the name sounds important enough, so I can say without hesitation that I've not understood one of the most important fundas of all time in statistics. So need to read up (atleast now) and come prepared for the next class. The quiz was, well, let's just say... well, it was easy to read for certain! Interesting problem and all that, my analysis may have gotten a *little* derailed... I think I reached Chennai instead of Bangalore, when I started at Madurai. Yep, a little derailed.

Oh, totally forgot! We were supposed to have a surprise quiz in Managing Orgs on Saturday. Only, everyone knew it was the last week of "actual classes", so EVERYONE read the article of the day. The prof comes in grinning with a bunch of test papers, to find all the students grinning back! And he knew, for the first time, that the class was ready for the surprise quiz. And hence came the line I'd remember for quite a while "I take it the surprise quiz is no longer a surprise quiz.". Our classmates sure are a fun lot, I'd never thought I'd be playing hookey, throwing tantrums and pleading the hell out of a prof, trying to convince them to postpone a test/cancel it/give out the answers anyway (wait, the last hasnt happened... yet). It's good to be back in school.

Quarter 2 - Week 4

When you dont have an assignment to complete, it's such bliss! :) And when you have two holidays in the week, it's bliss-squared..! Monday being one of those 2 holidays, I spent it trying to read Macro Economics.. we had a test/quiz the coming Saturday. I must have read 25 pages in 4 hours? No, dont get it wrong.. the book's easy to follow, I just kept getting distracted. That must be the most dangerous thing ever, it's very easy to get distracted, there's always something that is just a little more important. I'd come home early the entire week and try to read Macro Economics, and it was quite tough to trudge along. But I kept at it! Persistence... thy name is my name! Friday also was a holiday, and I managed to read up the sections for the test. Anyway, October 2(Friday) was a holiday at IIMB, so we'd catch up with the expected class schedule by coming in on Sunday. Sigh.

On Saturday, we started off with Macro Economics. We discussed what the government can do in times of recessions. How they can give "antibiotics" to keep the economy sustainable. We then began a discussion on the Great Depression, what caused it, what could have been done to avoid the difficult period at least to the extent we could take it to. The quiz was held in the last 20 minutes of the class. Man, I really liked those questions. Yes, they were simple, but they were crafted in such a way that we would have gone over all our fundamentals within 20 questions. What googlies! We're eagerly awaiting our results. The next day, Sunday, we continued speaking about the Great Depression and what were the mistakes we could have avoided and how this affected the majority of the western world. A question was raised, why should the government bail out the people who caused the mess in the first place, what message are we sending out. The words of our teacher ranked true - When a doctor has a patient who may have, let's say, a drinking problem. If the patient is in the ICU, struggling between life and death due to some liver-issue, the doc won't say 'I wont operate on you because you didnt listen to me, and you didnt heed my warnings'. He'll do his best to save the patient, and give the bhaashan later. Seemed sensible enough..

Managing Organizations was theoritical this week. Bugger, we were pretty sure that we'd have a surprise quiz on Saturday, and when our prof came in with this ghost of a smile on his face, there was such a rush for the books and readings so people would cram as much as they could. Amidst yelps, howls and pleas for "postponement by a day", he was quite sure-footed when he told us that the surprise quizzes were meant to test our readings. If you are unable to spend a little time reading the articles, then you wont get much out of the class. Dont share your worldly knowledge about the questions posed in the test he said, he was more bothered about whether we got the right idea. We must have grumbled for a minute or so, and then we got into the groove. I am learning to write loads of crap, and I must say I'm getting pretty good at it! We are still talking about Org Structure, and the reasonings behind wanting to restructure. We had a case to study for Sunday, but I was unable to read it up properly. Anyway, I paid attention to the discussion hoping to gleam something out of it atleast... Next week, the midterm examination. The horror!

Business Statistics. (Note to self: Why do I bother?) Waste of my time, and the prof's time... He's still talking about random variables and I'm getting zilch. No matter how many times he says "practice, practice", I seem gung-ho on testing the limits and not doing anything. We spoke about Binomial distributions, Poisson distribution, Normal distribution, Chebyshev made an appearance somewhere, Turing also said hi. I fell asleep in the class! Asleep!! Tell you what, when I'm studying for the coming quiz next week (yes, that's another nightmare I have to prepare for), I'll go over the discrete random variables chapter properly and then let you know what it was that he was trying to hammer into our brains.