The story of my 1/6 MBA

Now that I am a 1/6 MBA, I think I am in a position to comment about my experiences over the last 10 weeks or so. These include lessons learnt, mistakes made and more importantly assumptions changed. But all these come with a disclaimer: These are personal experiences and might not hold true for everyone everywhere.

Everyone asks what you actually learn at a B-school. I too never used to take a business school more than a branding machine producing high reputation graduated to be swallowed by starving corporate to show “We hire from IIMs” or “We have XX IIM graduates” on their corporate brochures. But an MBA does teach you many things, some explicit and some implicit. It changes your personality and way of thinking. To start with it teaches you the importance of punctuality. You won’t want to miss your attendance or be thrown out of the class for 5 minutes extra of sleep when you know that this will hurt your grades (everything in a B-school is linked to grades, funny isn’t it?). Second explicit lesson you learn is to put in the best you can in everything. Relative grading makes sure that you are up on your toes always, so you slog till 4 in the morning preparing for some stupid marketing case for some XYZ firm or some assignment for some freaky professor. Now here is where dilemma creeps in. Its 4 in the morning and there is a class at 9 in the morning. Sleeping now will mean a probable attendance in the class but at the cost of some penalty in assignment. A quick cost benefit analysis (this is one thing you do every now and then without being taught in the class) and you realize that you can always sleep in the class (there are tricks for it, of course). So you continue and complete the assignment till 5 or 6. Other explicit learnings are to follow rules and respect the limitations, treat the professors like Gods (a fallback of IIM autonomy) etc etc. But I think it’s the implicit learnings and attitude changes that are more interesting.

You start walking, talking, thinking and eating MBA terms and jargons. A simple TV advertisement which till 3 months back was a nuisance now becomes more important than the cricket match during which it is aired. You start dissecting the ad in terms of product, place, place, promotion (affectionately called 4P). You look for brand dilution, brand extension, product enhancement blah blah. So when Crocin launches pain killer, you jump off the chair crying “brand extension” and when Pepsi comes out with new “My Can” you scream at the top of the voice “packaging strategy”. You understand that the Amul Macho ad thrived on the shock value of the message and launching Scorpio as a car instead of a SUV took a hell lot of analysis.  That was marketing for you that come packed nicely in a huge bulky book called Kotler. Best thing about marketing, books don’t help you any ways, it’s all common sense.

Next subject to creep into an MBA’s daily life is OB (organisational behaviour). You start analysing everyone and their behaviour trying to put each and everyone in one of the umpteen 2 by 2 grids classifying every possible action of a human being forcing to change the notion about human beings as species having complex behaviour. Maslow becomes your God father and you gleefully apply his theory everywhere. So when someone is hungry, you deduce that “his primary needs aren’t fulfilled”, this you never did that 3 months back.

An even funnier subject is Economics. The subject has so many assumptions that you begin wondering if there is anything practical about it. Every theory start with so many disclaimers that it can put a mutual fund offering to shame. As demand curves exceed their demand and supply curves never short of supply, you begin wondering the market dynamics behind them. Is it a monopoly or a competition? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Just another course out of 100s of them. At least its better than Business communications which starts with the assumption of all of us being illiterate and stupid. How to write an email, a letter etc is taught with the help of set rules. It will make all great writers commit suicide if they hear there are well defined rules for writing English!! I wonder if I am following them while writing this, he may fail me if he reads this J

I am dreading to go back home and talk to normal people with these implicit learnings. I may start deciphering an advertisement on the dinner table and my parents might take me for a madman. Or worse, I might try my hand in defining the behaviour of the girl next door in some of the grids of OB coupled with a demand-supply analysis only to discover that my assumptions about the market being a pure competition was wrong. This might lead me for an image changeover coupled with personal selling and trade discount along with referent power of my mother which might not be so easy. So you see, being an MBA isn’t that easy as it looks like.

But the bottom line (courtesy, Accounts), I love being an MBA student!!! Have to say this to complete other 5/6 of my MBA happily. It all depends on how good you are at filtering stuff and how dexterous you are in dozing off in the class J

PS: I don’t know which style of persuasion I used in this article. I don’t know whether I lived up to my brand image. I don’t know if you will ever try this product again (repeat value, that is) or if you liked it, was it problem solving or transformational or informational or some other appeal. Forgive me if you can, for I am a troubled soul confused between marketing, OB and economics, trying to make sense of these mutually exclusive theories in tandem.