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.