Learning a skill

Last four years I had been working in the Learning and Development area and had been discussing about the cycle of learning a new skill. After a long I have started learning a physical skill - swimming. The first thing I have learnt is about the importance of a coach, the right kind of coach. Second the importance of feedback, unless someone tells you what you are doing wrong, you would never know about that. Third is conscious practice, you seem to get the knack almost immediately, but to be able to do that is not easy, you end up doing the same mistake till you consciously start observing what you are doing. Even then at times when you become weak you resort to your natural ways. It's a great learning, particularly because I have decided to work upon one of weaknesses. I always knew that it is a weakness but I have never admitted it consciously to myself and therefore never really worked upon it. But based on the 360 degree feedback I have received I felt it is time for me take it up head on.

I want to use the insight that I have gained while learning swimming to this goal too and I'm sure it would shorten the cycle.

Yesterday we had a great party - we had biryani, music, dance and booze for those who drink. We had invited our Faculty and they did turn up. They were very sportive and had no reservations to shake a leg with us. It was really nice. I shall post some pics a little later, right now I have to catch up with my MGEC assignments.

Dr. Dunked

Fun continues at ISB and this time its my studygroup mate Dr. Viswa's Birthday. Dr. was a willing victim. We led a procession from SV1 to the rec centre. There was a proposal to dunk the mascot, monitor aka maneater, and me (highest CP in marketing. I tried to divert the focus onto others. When we reached the pool excitement was so high that people forgot the birthday boy and went after the monitor and the mascot.

Later they turned to the doctor and he got dunked gracefully. After that they indeed turned to the studygroup mates and me and the other two got dunked and what followed after that sheer madness and by the time the madness ended everyone except the one lady who scared of water got dunked. Then we did a rang-de-basanti type trust dunking. The cake was rightfully used to smear Dr's face completely and in the midst of this some people discovered another secmate is the twin brother of Dr who got separated at birth and did the cake smearing to him too. He must be wondering why that special treatment was given to him. As someone said brothers need not be born under the same roof, after all.

Some pics for you to share the fun:

Sleeping in the class

After the three hectic days that were spent in attempting the assignments I was really tired on Monday. And as the Statistics class was going I was slipping into a state of sleep despite all my attempts to be awake. While all this is happening our official photographer Mr. A managed to get couple of snaps and followed it up with couple of more snaps of mine speaking to the prof and he also gave them some funny names. Have a laugh at my cost :)


Caption: Sleep_Best


Caption: You had doubts after all that

Let me know if you have any other comments.

Credit for the nice pics goes to Ashish Naredi.

An inspiring day

A Philippines corporation has suddenly become more popular than HLL and its CEO is the new visionary for all of us. In one day we have learnt a great deal about this company.

It was inspiring thing to see five people sitting in one room with full commitment and continuously work more than 12 hrs in a focused way despite having so many differences and arguments. Somehow I never saw such a committed effort in all the five organizations that I have worked. I always tried to remain committed and focused but got distracted by inability of people in agreeing to disagree and focusing on the objective. I think the key difference is the incentive and the stakes involved. Here everyone has a very high stake and we were all tied together.

This is a great example and I am sure I can find use of this experience in the corporate world to improve performance of individuals working in teams.

Some interesting words that I uttered due to excessive exhaustion - cossing the toin (supposed to be tossing the coin), and that coimbatore is 16 km from Hyderabad (I meant hrs but km is what I uttered. Nevertheless this is nothing new and I had this knack proving myself as a complete fool in the midst of serious happenings and that appears to be my contribution to the general humor

Some random thoghts

Each of us have some common/uncommon thing that we tend to to do whenever you find having lot of time but nothing to do. I too keep doing a slightly uncommon thing. Like a painter who keeps doing some sketching, I too do thought sketching. By thought sketching I am referring to verbalizing what you think others are thinking by reading from the non-verbal cues. At ISB it's very difficult to have that vaccuum, but I found sometime during today's session and did some interesting mind sketching. I am reproducing whatever I have written down, it may sound foolish even to me now, but I still want to just share my instinctive mind sketches. Here we go:

Let me take a backseat, I really don't care what is happening around, let me listen to others, why the obvious questions are repeated again and again, I know everything, what everyone else is saying I know that already, I am better than everybody, I am different, How good is the speaker, let me validate what I already know, I won't talk but I want to be a part of the discussion, can I, I'm better off without an MBA, but I'm here just to prove to others that I too can do something, I slogged hard, I'm start, I have certain desires, hope they get fulfilled without much effort, I hope I can utilise my seating advantage well, Why the hell I'm sitting here, do I know why I'm here, am I wise enough, looks like something important, let me take notes, they are talking non-sense let me take vengeance, let them know that I know, when would this end, how should spend my time this evening, I have been doing certain things and they are working great for me, I'm unique, all the others are very boring, why did ISB make this a graded course, do I need this, what would be served for lunch, do I have a 5 rupee coin for the coffee machine

I also managed to go aroung my SV and take few pics. I could locate a beautiful hibiscus, red chameleon and a peacefuly coexisting rock and tree, take a look at the pics:

First week passes

The first week classes of Term-1 is over, but wait the work and reading are not yet over. There are two assignments and one quiz pending apart from the huge list of pre-reading work.

A sudden change of habits has definitely imbalanced by me. In the second class of Managerial Economics, the prof was doing some calculation and suddenly I opened my mouth and uttered six, don't ask me why I said that and where did that number came from, and the prof went silent for about 10 sec and said "Dude". It was a shocker for me and I couldn't quite understand why I uttered that word. I might have definitely appeared to be the biggest fool for him. Fortunately there is no CP for this course.

Despite being a voracious reader all the time, the amount of reading that I attempted would be almost equal to almost a year's quota. Normally I would borrow or buy and then for about a month or two would eat and sleep with it. But now, I don;t have that luxury anymore.

Lots of crazy things are happening in one of the courses. All those who made it to ISB are highly smart and also very competitive ad this makes CP a very big challenge. Some one raises his hand and prof says that he would only give him a chance if it is a question and the guy starts with, "I think." I never quite understood how can a question start with I think. Another guy starts doing all the math that he learnt with the prof and the prof unsuspectingly falls into his trap and the whole class misses about 5 min of valuable time. Finally all sorts of things are happening in this class. Only good thing is that we are all doing our reading and discussions and the prof is able to reasonably complete the part before the 2 hrs end.

And finally the rain god also seems to have understood that it's time to chill everyone and sent a downpour onto ISB. I wouldn't be surprised of it rained only at ISB as the heat last week, both the sun and the studies, went into it's all time peak for this year; it's quite common in Hyderabad to rain at place and be totally dry at another place that is about 5 km away.

It's time for me to chill and enjoy the long weekend. Will be back with some nice pics.

Of spam and spam filters

Sorry for spamming, that's how most of the mails in my ISB mailbox start with. On the other hand we were trying to decide whether to accept a spam filter based on one test in the stats class. With so many formulae around the difficulty seems to be in picking the right one.

As people are becoming more and more acquainted the sorries are coming down and demands for action are going up. People seem to be finding solace in airing their views directly on mail addressed to everyone in the world and expecting that the concerned party takes a note of popular demand and take some action. But the action is to be taken by a Business Manager not by a club presidentship aspirant.

That brings me to another point, consider the amount of money spent by politicians during elections. Wouldn't it be a good idea to auction the political representation by the amount of money one can donate to a certain fund and then allow the top three bidders to share power for a certain period. That way the money will find a better use.

Also wouldn't it be a good idea to have a rating system for all political parties based on what they do on a daily basis. That way the political leaders can find some useful ways to score points for their party and not hang around the party chief's house. If the human resources engaged in the political arena are utilized for some positive purpose I'm sure we would be doing very well as a country. May be involve them in cost benefit analysis of a regulation supported by economists and that way we can expect them to be sensible and contribute to the regulatory process in a positive way.

Hope Chandrababu Naidu's, and S.M. Krishna's are reading this.