Quarter 2 - Week 6

After a good long holiday last week, I rolled up my sleeves and blew the dust off my books. Caught up with everything that was covered until now, since we had our MacroEconomics midterm coming up. Oh, did I mention we had a retest also sheduled this week for our QM1 disaster? (We seem to be making this re-test thing a habit, no wonder I'm studying all the time!)

The week passed by like a bad English movie in theaters. And then began our classes. In Macro Economics, we studied a little more about the IS-LM curve, and how they dance together. For those who don't know, the fiscal policy and monetary policy are handled by the government and Federal Bank respectively. And as two distinct bodies (or however distinct they can be), they need to ensure that balance is maintained in the economy. IS talks about the investment behaviour, LM talks about money supply and demand (The amount of ready cash, or liquid cash and the bonds). For now, just think of the IS-LM thing as an X mark. As and when one of the curve shifts, a change is made to the other to modify the position of equilibrium (the centre point).

Managing Organizations took an interesting turn this week. First, we discussed how an organizations lifecycle is. We learnt how it starts off as a dream, and an entrepreneur takes it on and brings it to life. Then it has to be "disciplined" and you need to look into the finer details, and that's something entrepreneurs are not good at. They know how to dream, the bird's-eye-view they got down pat, but on the ground they're... vulnerable. So you need to bring in a professional manager with an eye for detail, who'll get down into the nitty gritties and hammer processes and rules in place. He's the one who tweaks the company to bring it to an efficient body. Once this is done, another crisis hits the org. People begin to ask for more responsibility, they resent the one-man-tell-us-what-to-do approach. So then you need to give way to "divisionalism", give the sub-teams more responsibility for their domain. Once that phase gets over, the next crisis is how to bring these divisions that are too far apart, to the same vision. Once you've managed to again bring all these teams under control, after a while it becomes a little looser, and then you see your firm become a place where all the teams collaborate, and share information. And this is so far the last stage of the org's growth.

I think I just understood why we need to differentiate, and then integrate. It sounds stupid to an engineer, but it makes the parts stronger. In many ways, this seems to show how we grow up from kids to adults. You start as a baby with infinite possibilities, you're the most flexible thing, and you zip around in every direction stopping to sleep,eat or poop. And then begins our "education", where it's hammered into us that 2+2 = 4, not 5. We're taught that 42 is the answer to everything. At one point, we begin to question this 42. Why's it not 43? With our new-found knowledge of how the world works, the me-teenager goes out and rebels against everything, and asks for some control of my own life. Once we go and make all those mistakes that our parents kept protecting us from (Dont put your finger in the fire, kid..), and come back wiser (Ouch, mom, where's that balm?), then slowly our parents now getting a little wiser treat us like adults and involve us in family decisions. Differentiation and integration right there. So, does this mean that apply human life to org life and you dont need to do an MBA? Sounds far easier, can tell you that. And that was just the first session!

In the second session, we got to know of a bunch of organizations that did things in a completely different way from what our ancestors/wisemen/leaders/writers told us. And they succeeded! Stuff like letting people decide their own work-timings, giving all information on the company (including everyone's salaries) to the employees, letting the employees decide what other companies should be bought over! How was it even possible, how did it even work?! And life seems much more nicer for the guys who work in those companies!! And then we began to wonder, wtf?! What was all the last half-quarter (octer?) all about?! Our prof expected this, he's most probably been seeing this reaction for ages now. He just calmly tells us that this worked for these companies, doesnt mean it will work for everyone. FYI, the companies are SEMCO, ABB, Imagination and some company in Copenhagen, Denmark (dont remember the name, will get back on this). Try seeing how things happen there!

BizStats, wow. After an octer, ok, half a quarter, we get to *really* hear the word statistics. I dont know how we didnt wonder about that before? We NOW got to see how you take a sample from a population, and how you make sure it's a RANDOM sample. Not haphazard, but random. This word is apparently taken very seriously by people who poll (pollers?). And then we got to see how every possible random distribution will ultimately get mapped onto a Normal Distribution using their means. Basically, just think that there is one curve called a Normal Distribution, and that EVERY possible random chart that you have can tend to move towards this. The rest of the class was a blur in some math calcs, need to read up and get back, nothing specific to summarize here right now.

Finally, to talk about the exams. Sigh.

How is it possible that you study so much for a subject (Macro Economics), and then when you're just about to write the paper, you forget the basics of the IS-LM curve. For God's sakes, I just read it yesterday!! And I totally understood it!! The paper was awesome, like last time it tested the basics. And unlike last time, I was lost. That's all I want to say about that. So, just to remember, reading for 20 hours for a topic does not necessarily mean u understood it.

BizStats was easy-peasy. I'm just hoping our prof doesnt think we're not worth his time, and just wants to get it over with. Hang in there prof, we're not dumasses, we'll get better! :) In any case, this paper was very easy to do, an almost no-brainer.

And the surprise entrant! We had a Managing Organizations surprise test on Sat! He asked us to describe what made SEMCO do well. If only most of us knew what the hell SEMCO was. Apparently, a surprise test covers not just every reading meant until that day, it also includes the reading FOR the day!! I just wrote something, came back and read the SEMCO material. I couldn't have been farther off from the truth. But that's what happens when you try to act like you know something, when you dont. And you get caught with your pants down. On fire.

One thing for sure though. That SEMCO process, it stands against everything we've learnt so far, and yet, I still want to experience it. Sounds like a real fun place to work. Look it up, here's a link on it:

http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf

Here's one of the CEO's talks:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/

Quarter 2 - Week 5.5

A weekend with nothing to do. Bliss.

Now, back to hit the books for the upcoming exams next week. Sigh.

Quarter 2 - Week 5

Funny how when you have exams coming up, every topic seems to make sense.

I must have spent quite a lot of time trying to read the Managing Organizations class binder AND the book, or even BizStats (Complete Business Statistics, ahem!) for that matter... I would invariably (and very bizarrely) fall asleep after 4 minutes and 22 seconds.. either that, or my mind would wander and I'd end up thinking of horses(wtf?!). Weeks would just pass by, and my book would be open on page 3. everyday.

But when midterms come up (like the ManOrg one this week, or the BizStats quiz on the very same day), suddenly the book opens up to you, and you actually understand the stuff that's in it. Remember I was cribbing about how I wasn't understanding jack about Random Variables in the BizStats class? One look at the book, and the two and 2 came together.. :). I was on a roll, in two days I had managed to read up the portions for the BizStats test. On Thursday, good ol' me started reading up for the test on Managing Organizations. THE mid-term I might add. The exam was on Saturday. *The mission impossible tune was running through my mind the whole evening, with a horse galloping for good effect*. In any case, I managed to cross 3 pages and reached the end of two articles... TWO! Unfortunately, it was 1 AM that night (or morning), so nobody came by to give me an award.

The next morning, I groggily woke up at 6(the alarm rang at 6, but the bed was really glued to me and wouldnt let me go, so I somehow fought it and got out by 6.45... The Battle of the Bed, every Friday and Saturday at 6 AM, watch it to believe it), and rushed to class by 7.45. In the Macro Economics class, we got the results of our last quiz, I'd got a 5 on 10. Whoopee, I thought! And then the prof says "Anyone with 6 and below, please come by and meet me, we need to go over your fundamentals.. If you have any doubts, we can clear them up". Whaaa?!?! I thought 5 was good..! We then proceeded to discuss our quiz, and we watched as all our defenses went out the window (or were unceremoniously thrown out the window, is more like it). That quiz was just too cool, tested all our fundamentals with the most basic of questions! Damn. And some guys had the audacity to get 10 on 10 in it. The nerve!

In Managing Organizations, we tried to fish for the type of questions he'd give us... there were constant questions about "Sir, what should we read for tomorrow? The binder or the book?" and the prof, time and again, said "See, whatever is covered till today is coming tomorrow. I cant say that nothing will come from the binder, but you definitely have to read from the book." After all these questions had been answered, one student asked "Sir, what should we read for tomorrow? The binder or the book?". I think the prof got pissed. His voice seemed just a leeeetle more menacing than usual. After he STRONGLY addressed this question for the last time, we got down to the day's case. It was about a company which had quite a few divisions, and they were struggling with coming up with new innovative products because of their horizontal/differentiated structure (Ahaah! Article 2!! It's useful! For those who dont know, when work is broken down into specific areas/tasks, then those particular areas/divisions kinda get divided from the others, so they're distinct. They can then focus on that area and get a whole lot better at it. Unfortunately, that tends to bring communication down by quite a few notches due to inter-team alienation).

So we discussed and decided it would be a good idea, to pluck one guy out of each division, get them together to build and innovate, and once they're done send the prototype to the normal divisions to efficiently build it. That way communication is not an issue, since they're in a temporary team and you overcome the issue of working together. Apparently, this is called integration (bringing these different teams together). So when you do both differentiation and integration, that's when you are being ambidextrous, since you can be efficient and innovate at the same time. The engineer in me kept yelling all the time, which idiot would first differentiate and then integrate, you could have left it as it was in the first place! Stupid engineer should have read Article 9. (I wasn't there yet.... yet!). I remember something about complexity, formalization and centralization being thrown around (All from article 2!! Looks like I wasnt the only guy reading the articles for the first time!), the best thing was the prof was agreeing with us. Looks like we were doing something right after all!

In BizStats, we discussed the Continuous (Uniform and Exponential - distributed over time), Normal Distribution. I had read this because it was coming for the quiz, so yeah, I already knew the stuff he was going to talk about. That was till he started talking. That jackrabbit can still hop around randomly, even when you've read the random stuff in advance! Goes to prove, you can't predict random, even if you've read random. Aaargghhh! Anyway, he was talking about how we can map these variables, and proceeded to give us some pretty cool live examples.

When class was done, the newborn manager in me began calculating. You have another 7 articles to read. Around 6 chapters in the book too... which everyone was saying was an irritating book in the first place, apparently the articles were way better. On top of that, my facebook horoscope had very plainly said that I was supposed to focus on the task at hand, and not worry about distractions, not now. Taking the advice of a virtual fake, I ended up not going to work so I could study at home. I had taken the horses into account, so according to my calculations... I would be done by 7 AM on Sunday(Wait, what??!). I didnt have the time, so me-manager decided that I should skip the book, and only read the articles. I was finally done by 11 PM. Then the me-engineer who was happily sleeping all along, woke up and said, you've read the articles, you can read the book till 1 AM. At 20 pages per chapter, you only have to read 80 pages, skip the first two chapters. Stoopid logical me-engineer. But very tempting advice, so I did it. And promptly kept falling asleep, even the four horses that were galloping around were not able to wake me up. Once I was done (or had given up), I fell asleep and thankfully, didnt have any nightmares about the two oncoming tests. Funny, how the horses always ride without the mares and vice-versa.

The next morning in Macro Economics, we studied the IS part of the IS-LF model, honestly, I was thinking about the two tests, so I only remember the part where we talked about how the GDP will rise only if the investors WANT to invest and the banks want to lend. That's why we kept seeing articles like "RBI prods State Banks to lower interest rates". There were some math formulae which linked all this stuff, and other blah blah. It was interesting, but my mind was elsewhere.

In the Managing organizations test, I wasn't lost.. but I wasn't found either. Some of the terms were alien to what we read in the articles OR the book. Even the me-engineer remembered that some terms weren't there in the book for sure! Anyway, the prof had been smart in ensuring that there were negative marks. Since half the course was full fundas, he didn't want us coming up with our own.. so he said for every wrong answer, minus one mark. That hopefully deterred some of us from guessing. Didn't deter me though, so I look forward to one big egg when the results come out.

The BizStats quiz was even better. Two very simple looking questions. And I didn't know how to solve them. I was cursing me-engineer because I was awake till 2 AM that morning, but he was the guy solving those numericals then, so I didnt have the heart to tell him anything. 20 minutes passed by in a flash! I was still scratching my head at the end of it, me thinks that this was some kind of googly, and required the application of binomial distribution TWICE in each question. Grumbling at my great preparation, I left the college, never looking back ( I was driving, and didnt want to meet with an accident. If I looked back, then the hospital would have needed to be internet-enabled for me to write this article with a different ending).

I think I've digressed quite a bit in this post, what with the horses and all... but you now have an idea as to how a person who's deriliously studying for an exam is like, after the exam. With 5 hours of sleep everyday over the entire week, this is what you'd have to go through to. And I dont have kids, imagine the poor souls who do! Looking forward to the free week this week, since we have no classes on account of Diwali! Whoopeee!!

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.

Quarter 2 - Week 3

Last week, our Business Statistics prof gave us an interesting assignment. Given a bug database (I dont know how he got it, the source remains a mystery) he asked us to find out all the information that we could, given this database. As an example, we could find out how long people took to fix bugs, whether the developers were working effectively etc. etc. The techie in me wondered "What the hell?! People are fixing bugs, and you're not happy with that?" The answer to my own question dawned pretty soon, "It might be loathesome to sit and look at all this, but you probably want to find out if they can do something better or faster. Or you can find out if someone needs some help, but is probably too proud to ask for it. Or in the worst case, probably isnt even aware that he needs help". The manager talk has already begun... is it a good sign?

So this "fun" assignment comes with a catch... use open source database and all from Open Office. AND run some queries using SQL. Apparently, we have all the time in the world to learn up SQL and figure our way around Open Office for the first time. A part of me thinks he's doing it to keep the pressure up on us, to add those inherent capabilities that these IIM products are famous for - time management, prioritization, the works. Another part of me says he's doing it because he believes open source is a good thing, and he can spread the word in one way - bringing it to his work, i.e. us. And probably we can spread the word in our own way.

Right, so this was last week when this assignment was given to us, and I've spent almost 20 hours just figuring out how to use this damned software. Staying awake late, working on it in office (and feeling suitably guilty about it), waking up early, I'm slowly getting used to it (Question to self: Why am i here again?). Still, when Friday came along, I was feeling reasonably good. I had gotten a chart or two out, and my partner and I were ready to do some serious sifting.

The classes started off with Macro economics, we have now entered the realm of Aggregate Demand. This is basically the total demand for goods and services within an economy. We're going through the Keynesian(pronounced keen-see-yun) model, made up by the guy who brought the US out of the Great Depression. Fancy accomplishment, that. How did he do it? He told everyone that to build the GDP of a country, you need to spend-spend-spend!! To all of us techies, when the formula was shown on the board, it made sense. If you spent, you got a whole lot of GDP since that extra spending keeps circulating in the economy. If you save too much, then nobody buys stuff, and if no one buys stuff, then jobs are not there, and if jobs are not there, then nobody buys stuff. Vicious circle!! We understood how the US is a consumer-spending driven economy, China is an export driven company, India is an investment and services driven economy... if even one external factor is affected, everyone dances! We slowly have begun to appreciate the roles played by the consumers, the investors/corporates, and we had just begun understanding the role the government plays. What gets me, is that we dont seem to be noticing anything other than monetary stuff that can be valued. The implicit advantages/disadvantages, the stuff that can not be quantified or rather we dont want to quantify is nowhere in the picture. It's all about the money... well, it is Macro Economics after all.

Managing Organizations was pretty cool this week. On the first day, we studied a case of two companies - one very process oriented, good, cheap and effective, though it treated its employees like "horses" with blinders as one of our classmates remarked in a light vein. The other company had people who mixed with each other, spent enough time understanding every one's work and not just specializing in their own. Communication was awesome in this company, yet they were slower than the first company. During the discussion, we noticed that when presented with the chance of building a new design, the second company did better as they were more flexible and communicated well, while when it ultimately came down to production, at the end of the day, the first company got the contract. A sad story, in my opinion, where in the second company did quite well in getting their act together and thrived on the uncertainty of the project, but lost it in the end because they didnt have the cost effectiveness of the first company. And here, I learnt my first real lesson about organization structure. While an employee would love to work in the second company, a person would want to be the CEO of the first, where everything was clear and streamlined. I learnt that a company should be structured based on the industry it is in, so that it can thrive. Hurts to know that you cant have a fair and fun company, if you're in an industry which requires cost-effective measures and extremely high quality. It doesnt let you experiment with new ideas, or concepts purely because it puts your current system at risk. Sigh.

Business Statistics - what can I say? We had a quiz on day 1, and yours truly got battered! I dont know where my brain went for a walk at that moment, because it sure as hell wasnt in my head when the quiz was going on. Must have fallen asleep, due to the lack of sleep from the last week. We started studying random variables. These aren't really "variables" in the terms we use it in comp sci lingo. These are functions. Basically, we try to figure out our payouts(what we can get) considering the different results that can occur due to probability. The example given was simple - consider there's a fraud happening in a company, and you've been called in. Would you analyse each and every transaction to see where the fraud is? What if the cost of the investigation is so much that to check each and every fraud, you'd probably have to shut down the company as that would be far cheaper. So, this somewhat talked about how you "hedge your bets" carefully. I wont say I totally understood what the guy was talking about. Two days went by in a blur of formulae, and examples that seemed to make sense when he was talking about it. Man, that guy is a jack rabbit. I dont know how he manages to move around so fast, it's really difficult keeping pace with him. I must grudgingly admit - he's brilliant, seems well read... it's difficult to point fingers at inspiring figures like that. He can actually get away with taunting us, which he does, just because we're in awe of him. Awesome! Anyway, we've finished our assignment, somehow, let's just hope that he finds our queries enough. BTW, the results for that quiz on Friday came on Saturday - did pretty bad. The prof told us not to worry, it's apparently legacy. All his first tests, no matter how easy it is, people suck at it. Make me feel a little better.

Good thing the tests are best three out of four! :P

Quarter 2 - Week 2

Why am I taking this casually? I cant just read 10 pages of one of the subjects and walk in thinking I'm well prepared! Good thing, the momentum hasnt been built in class yet, I have got a lot to catch up with!!

We already seem to have finished Binder 1 in MacroEcon, I dont even know how that happened.. I havent even seen the first article! She's warned us to put a little more back into it, she's not going to the extent of making and discussing these binders if we're going to be slacking off. She also doesnt like us falling asleep and biting nails, so remember, NONE of that. But all in all, she's a fun prof, she is very passionate about this subject and finely maintains the balance between care and no-nonsense. The subject is beginning to seem interesting too... we're studying GDP and how we attribute the National Income to that. It appears that we can even determine the standard of living in a country, though not very accurately through these numbers. We've begun to understand that the government really DOES play a role in helping the country out. Apparently, they come up with this thingy called a fiscal policy that describes how they plan to implement taxes and build up on infrastructure. We understand how the GDP of a country depends on the way its consumers spend, the government spends, capital investments that take place and the net exports of the country. China is exports driven, US is consumer-spending driven... man, the techie in me is really getting impressed with all this stuff!

In ManOrg, we finally seem to have come to the point of emotion. All this time, everyone's telling us that quantify, substantiate, be logical... now we seem to come to intrinsic organization behaviour. Through a case study, we debated what we could do to help modify the company's structure keeping its current spirit and identity alive. The prof's reminded us to read the articles before coming to class. So gotta do that!

BizStats was unique. We studied probability, but interestingly, not by theorems. Our prof actually got us a bunch of dice, and packs of cards. He actually made us roll those dice and pick cards, and used it to explain probability to us. We already knew the basic fundas (first week of probability after all), but have it explained to us this way..? Man!! True, he's still jumping too fast for me... but I really need to build my pace. I sure didnt read anything for his class!

Moral of this rant, read.. read!! Now that I'm done with my blog backlog.. or rather bloglog, I'm goin to sleep, wake up tomorrow (holiday, whoopee!) and ahem, read up! Wish me luck!

Quarter 2 - Week 1

We had a one week vacation. That's it. We dont get any time off for another three months! Our schedules have been made available to us. We have Macro economics, Managing Organizations, and Business Statistics - 1 this quarter.

Our MacroEconomics prof has been really kind to us by giving us 2 phat books, and a bunch of binders to read from. Here I was, struggling to read half the book in a subject in our last quarter, she's handed us two! The binders will be given to us periodically. It's been made abundantly clear to us that if we dont put our backs into reading these books and coming prepared for class, we'd be lost in our later sessions. She's quick to tell us that no dumb/deviating questions will be entertained, I'm really suspecting she's spoken with our previous profs about our mentality. We sure are interactive, but we tend to go insane with our questions!

Our ManOrg prof is the cool calm types... he's mixing theory with case studies. We started off with studying the structure of organizations, the apex, the operating core and the middle levels. The additional sections that support this structure were also mentioned, I dont remember the names now. He's given us a book, and a binder. Sure is a lot to read this term, methinks!

Our BizStats prof means business. He's extremely fun and energetic in class. He makes up for it by being a total terror in terms of expectations. A no-nonsense guy, he's told us in politically correct terms that he wont listen to our bullshit. Deadline means deadline. Practice means practice. He is not going to hold our hands and lead us along the beaten path. He's clearly told us to read the book, and that in his class we get to see how it gets applied. He also seems to be a fan of open source software, he's getting us to install and experience some cool apps. Let's see how that goes. He is really well read, and makes a lot of references in his jokes to things I fail to catch half the time. Sure keeps us awake, I'll give him that! Who else could probably makes statistics seem like an interesting subject?!