Time for a break

It had been a roller coaster ride since the day I landed at ISB. Thank god it had not been anything like what I imagined it to be. I had been stretched in all possible directions.

I never thought I would stay awake beyond 12 midnight but 2AM became the norm now. But for the support system of ISB, it would've been impossible to survive the rigor.

As the core terms end and the electives start there is yet another cycle of unsettling and settling. New section mates, new group mates, and new profs. Placement fever is about to begin and I think things are going to speed up from now on.

There is an attempt to launch an official ISB blog and something may happen on that front shortly. Of all the four terms, this term end exams were the most strenuous in terms of preparation but when it came to the exam hall, two of the exams got finished in less than an hour.

As per my original plan I should've been flying to China today. But thanks to the miscommunication from CEIBS, I'm happily sitting in Hyderabad. I don't what I would've been feeling if I was actually going but in hindsight I am more happy to be at ISB. I would be able to take more courses and focus on my goals.

Two/three days back suddenly I felt that I should write short stories. I also quickly came up with a storyline too. It is about a love story at a call center. A young graduate joins the call centre and his team leader happens to be a girl. Though she is elder to him, he gets attracted to her. He likes her confidence, the way she handles tough situations and tough people. She also moves freely with him but by the time the guy develops confidence to tell her, she gets engaged to someone else.

He goes ahead and expresses his love to her but she brushes him off saying that it was just friendship and she can't imaging marrying and living with him. She gets married a month later and leaves the job to join her husband in another city. The guy goes and meets her and for a brief moment she gets a feeling that may be she was little to quick to deny the young guy but then brushes it aside and bis adieu to the guy.

Guy goes back to his job, feels a little sad for few days and then a young girl joins his team and he starts feeling that may be he has not really lost his love. He can divert it somewhere else and the story starts again. Inspiration for this story comes from a one liner that my old friend, Partha Saradhi, told me long back. It goes like this - When young, even a donkey looks beautiful and lovable. Though the story doesn't completely relate to what he said, I feel it does.

Hope you liked the story (in the most driest possible expression). I would appreciate encouragement from the readers.

Laziness in me is waking and before it takes over let me click the publish button. Good bye for now

Crazy Day - Sec E's last day

Yesterday was section E's last day and it was a crazy day. First it was our group's turn to do the GSBC presentation. Our topic was on child labor and we had enough mix ups since friday. Everyone in the group became lazy but for few of us it was important and we pushed it till the end. We managed to get hold of a nice video clip from ILO's site and played it. The video was apt in the sense that it projected the problem but also gave a hint of positive results, which is slightly away from the doomed feeling I got from all other statistics and presentations.

Next it was Prof. Ramana Sonti's class. I really feel that we should've had another two sessions with him. He is highly passionate about the subject and I really enjoyed the INVA course. He suddenly realized that all those in the class were wearing the same T-shirt. I was given the opportunity to ask the last question for the term and for the core terms though I am not the question master.

Once the class was over it was a mad rush for photographs. We must have clicked more than 200 snaps yesterday and we took pictures at all possible locations in the main building. The photo session went on for more than 2 hours. Though we just half way through, the emotions yesterday were like that of the last day. We all know that it would be difficult to catch up with all the section mates together again except may be in the parties.

Once the class was over it was a mad rush for photographs. We must have clicked more than 200 snaps yesterday and we took pictures at all possible locations in the main building. The photo session went on for more than 2 hours. Though we just half way through, the emotions yesterday were like that of the last day. We all know that it would be difficult to catch up with all the section mates together again except may be in the parties.

In hindsight, it is amazing to see how the first half has zipped past of us.

Government, Society and Business

This post is specifically to record what I used to feel before undertaking this course and how I feel now after I have gone through this course (course mentioned in the subject).

At the beginning periods of my career whenever I tried to evaluate behavior of mine and others in specific situations and always drew to the conclusion that rules, legal and societal, influenced the way people behave. After spending few years in the manufacturing firm and having gone through mutiple business cycles I modified my inference that incentives are what that matter. But after coming to ISB and when I look at things in retrospective I realized that apart from rules and incentives, private valuation and utility also matter and that there is a strong interaction between all the four aspects.

People who can influence these aspects rather than getting influenced are the ones who drive change and the ones who create opportunities and turn situations favorable. This is a very interesting realization for me because I can to certain extent now explain the "luck factor."

Also as I started working in 1994, I happened to see the drastic changes that the industry and job market went through.

Let me focus on the job market. When I started the struggle was to get a good job and then to hang on there and if necessary make one or two hops in entire career span. There were very few who changed industry verticals and even fewer who made functional role changes. Coming to the current situation,getting the first job is difficult even today. If you are fortunate enough you get placed directly in campus, otherwise you have to go through a lot of struggle to get the first break. But the similarity in situation changes immediately after that. The moment you get a good break the search for another job intensifies. This is partly fuelled by booming opportunities, to certain extent by organizational practices and to a great deal by the confusion in the candidate.

I forgot about another striking similarity and that is the dearth of good candidates. As I was part of HR department, I could closely see that even today there is a shortage of good talent and then there is a lot competition to hire the best talent. May be this is one factor that drove up the pay packages for campus offers. Organizations have a big challenge to choose between fresh talent and experienced hires. Both these pools create different set of challenges and HR departments are struggling to take a call. While you can hire a decent candidate from the open market who might be desparately seeking a job and is better prepared to do whatever the job demands, the challenge is that you have to sift through a great amount of applications. On the other hand you can easily hire a bunch of young telented guys directly from the campus but the chances of them joining you and later sticking with you is a big challenge. But most of the companies that I had an opportunity to observe, both as an insider and an outsider, follow the market trend and are in a mad rush to hire. There is increasing demand from the business and HR has to deliver. No one has time to measure which method is effective and which one is not. Everyone is trying to follow the best practices of the market and only few know what the real best practices are.

Coming back to the course, I feel that this is a very important course and is exposing everyone to the real issues that mankind is facing as a race. There inter and intra species related issues and it is very important to understand them and then to see how one can influence them in a positive way. I was very happy to hear from Prof. Shiva Kumar that experts whould interact with the political leaders and influence them to take right kind of decisions. Prof. Shiva Kumar is a Member of India's National Advisory Council and it is great to hear from him about how things are shaping up.

Finally, it's time for me to get back to Term 4 and start working on the take home exam and the MGTO assignment. For now it's Adios.

Mr. Chandrababu Naidu on ISB Campus

I met Mr.Naidu once again but this time on-campus. He was here at ISB for a Book Launch.

There was a decent turn out for the event and I think Naidu's instrumental role in establishing ISB at Hyderabad was the reason behind the pull. Naidu talked about inclusive growth apart from everything else. Inclusive growth seems to be topic of the year and I hope that the increased attention from all parts of the society, government and business would aid in realizing that goal. It is in the interest of all these parties to see that there is inclusive growth. I would like to examine how I contribute from my side to this goal.



The MGTO second part is being taught by Prof. Anand Narasimhan. He has done his MBA from XLRI and is totally different from Prof. Louis Martin, the professor who taught the first part. While Prof. Martin skimmed through the topics and never went in to the depths. But Prof. Anand Narasimhan started off in a totally different way and he never tried to hide his reactions though expressed in a humorous and subtle way.

Last saturday we had Mckinsey and Company's preplacement presentation. I think that they wanted to occupy the students mind before the international recruiters catch the fancy of the students.

Our ELP is making progress and interestingly this year for whatever reasons there have been a lot of interesting ELP offerings. At the end there were no takers from some projects, a nice problem to have. Seems like the efforts of Mr. Sarma are paying off.

Coming to Indian cricket, it appears that even the 20-20 format, new format and even the young blood doesn't seem to help. It is absolutely clear that India Cricket Club is unable to manage cricketing talent pool. It is unable to throw away non-performers and is in-capable to separate itself from politics, corruption and divided interests. It would be interesting to see how would a seasoned HR practitioner would handle this kind of situation.

It's time to say good bye for now. Hasta la vista.