Many firsts many lasts..

The date of 16 February 2009, Monday would remain etched in my memories for many reasons. It was a day of many firsts and many lasts in my life, more specifically my academic career. This was the day when I officially attended the last class of my studies, finished MBA (barring exams J), made my last ppt etc. There were various firsts as well which were a perfect ending to the various things I have done over the last 2 years here.

Firsts

• First time a professor slept through my presentation. He was sitting on the first desk and a mere distance of 5 feet separated his resting body and my restless soul
• First time I had or more specifically I attended a class at 8 AM in the morning. Funnily, this had to be on my last class as if the class scheduler was waiting with me to give this final blow
• First time I have seen a person sleeping over in a one-to-one conversation. Sleeping in a class listening to a ppt is fine but asking a question and then sleeping is a thing I realised is possible only today
• First time we went to write a quiz after a whiskey shot. The shot was a toast in celebration for a friend who got a job an hour before the quiz. Nothing could come between our traditional shot-for-job celebration and us
• First time I saw a guy using a camcorder in the class. He even made a video of me presenting the case to the sleepy professor with funny images of mine getting flustered at the obvious mockery of my night’s sleep and hard work

The various lasts that happened that day were:

• Last class of my academic career, at least for a long time to come
• Last academic presentation, a random case was an apt end to the stride of presentations I have delivered here
• Last quiz of my academic career
• Last exams of my academic career for a long time to come

The last day did not come without its glitches; I had to work till late night to prepare the case, a thing which I did only in the very first days here around 1.5 years back. It was almost an academic night out, a thing which happened only in first year. The case reminded me of the very first case given by the OB professor when all of us were perplexed as to how to analyse the case, here it was a bit different, I was alone but was equally perplexed nonetheless.

Looking at the last day and the first day, I believe a normal curve would fit in the description. However, it would have to be a really skewed normal curve as far as effort put in is concerned. The start was with a huge amount of effort which tapered with the time spent here. My earlier post on “Life as exponential functions” would summarise most of it. Nonetheless, my MBA is over now and I am all set to move beyond academics, into the real world where case presentations are not so fraud, where audience generally does not sleep in the presentations. Let’s see how it turns out…

The Side Effects of an MBA

In my two articles I have given an account of MBA course, which is generally either positive or neutral and generally tries to capture the tangible effects. Here I try to explore the side effects of an MBA which are carcinogenic and start breeding in the blood of every MBA the day he/she puts his/her foot on an MBA campus, only that the symptoms of cancer are visible sooner than the actual cancer. Even after this nobody does anything to remove these tumors which lead to an explosive growth in their sizes hampering the norm al course of life of everyone around an MBA student.

People going to an IIM start thinking of themselves in no lesser than some God simultaneously forgetting about other 180 odd self professed Gods. This lead to ego clashes between every one with every one, where in everyone thinks he is correct and the other person is some idiot who has no right whatsoever to speak in the presence of His majesty. People become short tempered ready to blow the fuse at the slightest of provocation. They just become intolerant of other students, simply intolerant of their mere presence around them, looking frantically for pettiest of reasons to rip each other off. Even a slight error on someone’s part is blown out of proportions thinking this as the only chance in the lifetime they have gotten to get the better of the other person. Forgiveness is a forgotten virtue and is considered a vile by many. There are no friends there, only contacts and batch-mates which may help you bargain for a job sometime down the years when you need one, that too not because of friendship obligation but because of alma mater ties. It may be purely because of being more mature and practical than each of us was in our undergrad days when emotions were strong and lifelong friendship really blossomed amongst fellow hostelites. Or maybe having worked for some times in the harsh and unforgiving corporate world may have changed us. Each of these can be a reason, independently or as a combined package, no one can be sure though.

One very peculiar change I personally observed in fellow MBA grads is the ever declining ratio of emotional quotient. People lose their sensitivity and become hardened; which may be appropriately called stress hardening in pure engineering terms. Personal and intangible issues take a backseat and life of almost everyone becomes mechanistic to its extreme point. Humans turn into machines churning out PowerPoints and word reports at the pace of Brett Lee bowling on WACA pitch. This murder of the child within each of us may also be one of the reasons of the perceived hostility amongst almost everyone.

Other thing people forget coming to a b-school are their pre MBA relationships. It is a widely accepted fact that almost 50% of pre-engaged couples break up within the first 6 months of their MBA and start afresh with someone inside the campus. Now is this due to lack of time to spend with the first fiancée or plenty of time spent with someone else on the compulsion of assignments or projects, I have no clue. The funniest part is that people surrounded by so many people get so lonely that they don’t have a soul to talk to. Maybe that drives people near to each other and the sheer distance from the original loved one takes the relationship away. I am no authority to analyze the issue morally since it is a totally private matter of the involved parties. But certainly I can observe and look at the issue as a neutral connection.

Studying in a fully residential course, I can relate some causes to these side effects. Group assignments and projects were supposed to foster team spirit in people working together, but here they achieve an opposite of that. People spend so much time together for work related reasons that they get bored out of each other. Now generally if you don’t like someone in real life, you simply ignore him and things become normal, but here you have to work with the same person acting as a coherent team. The very thought of a free rider eating away the fruits of your hard-work can be very frustrating and disheartening and when you that happening almost every day you just want to kill that parasite. These frustrations search desperately for a reason to be vent out.

The other reason can be simple pressure to do better than others, on whatever expenses it may be. Competition doesn’t end with cracking CAT, it starts from there. People realize the laws of supply and demand and most likely they learn it the harsher way. The relative grading system doesn’t help either. People go to all extremes to stop the other person from getting a better grade or a better job, in fact even a better friend. Effect, no respect or gentle feeling for others since they all are your competitors before being anyone else. Sadism is the art which people acquire automatically, taking extreme pleasure in every small thing that can cause even the slightest of pains to the other.

I do not know if these changes are found only in an IIM or only in a fully residential course or are these just a common phenomenon with every MBA course. What I really know is that, there are not many friends out there, if you can find some you are a very lucky man. People believe that the only way to be on top is via someone else’s head. I believe that a B-school teaches to be shrewd, unkind and diplomatic besides the other never ending boring theories and may be these are the learnings which will ultimately matter in your adventures when you step into the corporate life.

Hustling and jostling with these side effects of MBA, I still think I can finish off my MBA. Just think of these as the side dishes in a multi course meal; “they add to the spice of the meal” and you have a totally new perspective of the things J.

The next 1/6 of my MBA (total 1/3 )

Here comes the account of my adventures and learnings (pun intended) over the course of completing the next 1/6 of my MBA. It may seem like a sequel similar to some stupid never ending Ekta Kapoor soap, but hey there is at least one difference, this doesn’t start with a K.

 Coming back to the main plot of the story which is to crisply narrate these 10 weeks as they went by like a whoosh (not the pet name of a classmate at IIMK), it would be totally unfair if I don’t give due importance to the biggest extravaganza any MBA student experiences during the course called summer placements. Every B-school organizes it and every student has to grab a place to intern for two months. They say it is an integral part of an MBA and enhances learning giving practical and real life learning beyond the shallow books and crappy assignments but as I went through the process I found the process itself so rich that it itself is enough to teach all virtues supposed to be taught by the internship. Not wasting any more time describing this circus since I have already given an elaborate account in an old post here, let me get on with things beyond summer internships.

Continuing on the steep learning curve which you started climbing in the first term, you learn more jargon. Your talks become more gassy and lesser in substance. If you could speak for 15 minutes on nothing in Term 1 now you could add 15 minutes comfortably to this. This term the best possible subjects which enriches your jargon vocabulary hugely are OB2 (yes, it is back again) and Business Ethics (sexy, funky name). OB2 is all about learning about organizational culture, structure, functioning and everything which has the remotest linkage to an organization. It starts with teaching what an organization is and continues to pop new terms like differentiation, integration (nothing at all to do with calculus you morons), horizontal, vertical (again no geometry in this) and many more 2 by 2 grids, only that this time they classify organizations instead of individuals. At least they are more sensible this time since organizations are at the least non-living. I was amazed to learn the linkage between the technology used by an organization and the structure followed by it, and learnt how the structure influences the culture of an organization. Fellow students were brain-washed that whichever organization did not take a bottom-up approach (I love doing it, though in a pub!!) and indulged in a non-participative mode of decision making is the biggest culprit in this civilized society. Just imagine workers and laborers running a manufacturing facility where the average education standard of these people is senior secondary at the best.

The best possible course any MBA student can encounter is Business Ethics. I can say this on the basis of only two terms, and I guarantee it. Nothing can beat it; nothing can even come close to beating it. The amount of gas involved is overwhelming to someone who has a bad appetite for non-solid/liquid states. The course is intended to make socially aware and more ethical corporate citizens but in itself contain mutually contradictory statements like, “ethics works”, which basically means whatever works for you is ethical and is circumstantial. Wow, in one statement ethics redefined to suit everything which is workable. Many many frameworks grace this course too as this basically is a spoilt, younger sister of OB. People doze off in the class listening to the scintillating intercourse of spirits roaming freely in the classroom, and the best thing, you need to write about the learnings of the course in the exam for 3 hours. People who ran out of gas during these 3 hours of “who is the biggest gasser competition”, are labeled as unethical students with a D grade to shine boldly on their grade sheets.

More economics was bombarded this term with many more curves, revolving again around demand and supply, and many more theories more than enough to give goose bumps to poor souls like us. But still it was a course which looked sane, sensible and logical. Accounting came in a more horrifying disguise dressed as Cost Accounting which made students search frantically for cost drivers every time they see an empty wallet. 100 types of costs made lives hell of already accounting scared people. Corporate finance was one beautiful course which added tangibly to my knowledge database. I actually have started understanding markets, shares, bonds etc. The most beautiful concept was present value or Time value of money which somehow fits itself snuggly in everything which you can lay your eyes on. A decision to do an MBA can also be quantified!! Now that’s learning, isn’t it?

Other intangible learnings which can be termed as side effects of an MBA like intolerance, frustration and back stabbing will be dealt in a separate article for it deserves much more air time than a paragraph at the end of some other article.

This time around I am not that fearful of going home in the company of more civilized people since it’s the second time and I have learnt how to keep my jungle life separate from normal human life. I no more use jargons in day to day conversations hence don’t have the fear of being termed, “Not fit for civilized society” by my loved ones. The girl whom I talked about in the last article is no more in pursuit since the market wasn’t pure competition after all.

I would end by reiterating, “I love being an MBA student”. The reason also remains the same, to complete the remaining 2/3 of an MBA. I have become so dexterous in dozing off in class sitting at the last bench that I count at least one hour extra when I plan my sleep every night before retiring which helps in sneak in an extra hour of movie watching and enjoying myself. Long live an MBA course J and hopefully investing in an MBA would be as profitable as investing in mortgage and junk bonds.

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. 

Team Work, Free Riders, Parasites and Leeches

The most overused phrase in corporate world is team work and team play. All organizations look for team players and only they are considered a good fit in an organization. Personally speaking I also believed in this concept till a certain extent because this allows proper work distribution and all that. I should say that this belief of mine was shaped by the people I worked with as a team in my corporate career. I had not worked with different kind of people till now who behave totally arbitrarily and are very interesting and simultaneously very irritating in their behavior.  

 An MBA teaches you many things, some explicit and some implicit. Learning from people and learning about people comes under the implicit part. 90% of tasks and assignments and tasks in MBA are group tasks which are supposed to teach you how to work as a team and cooperate. I don’t know if the primary objective behind these group tasks is to learn team play or to learn how to tackle non-contributing and negatively contributing team members and use this learning in your career. Before going ahead, let me explain the psyche of these two species in some more details and introduce one more category. 

Free Riders: Non contributing members who are a liability on the remaining team members are affectionately called free riders. Quite an apt description I must say. These are people who believe in the theory of symbiotic living but only partially. They will stick on with you, contribute nothing, take the benefit and move ahead. Their focus is solely on how not to come in limelight and how to hide their incompetency. They do not show any sense of self consciousness or shame in blatantly copying other’s work. They believe that it’s the duty of others to feed them as they themselves are so much incompetent. A true believer of social theory of justice they are: Distribute not in proportion of competency but of need.  

Parasites: Good thing about free riders is that if they don’t contribute, they don’t either disrupt other team members from working (incompetency is the reason), hence others can work and feed them considering them necessary baggage. Now imagine a case where some people don’t contribute and simultaneously spread negative energy in the group. These can be people who will work as well but will make sure that the team never works as a team. They try to show that others are wicked and shrewd and want to steal the credit which only they deserve. Everyone else in the team is a predator for them waiting for any opportunity to eat their hard work as if they are the only one who can contribute. Contributions made by others are insignificant and irrelevant for them. 

Leeches: The third kind of people you come across are those who are a combination of free riders and parasites. They dont work but keep on lamenting about what others are doing or have done. These act as critics to your work without knowing a bit about it. They try to show off about their knowledge but from the sidehelm only. They never enter the arena but try to make the rules of the games. Very interesting characters infact!!

Now why am I writing about people and their psychology is a question which can be asked. Reason: 2 months into an MBA and I have met and worked with all kinds of people. Sometimes it becomes so much irritating when you work and others either screw up your work (as a team evaluation) or others take credit for whatever you have done. I am not saying that everyone knows everything and ignorant and non-knowledgeable people should be ousted totally. What is more important is the will to learn and contribute in whatever way one can contribute to the team task, how much ever insignificant it may be. We all are here to learn and no one is perfect, what matters is how much are we willing to learn and add our bit to the team. Why should 3 people carry the burden of 3 other almost dead people on their shoulders when all 6 of them are equal and have same pressure to perform? Why shouldn’t they shrug and throw these people without caring for them? The reason can be only one, their own social life and attitude towards others. I don’t believe in social responsibility of carrying dead weight over my shoulders, but still I do it. I am ready to feed poor and helpless beggars who cannot do anything but not rats and cats who will tomorrow bite me if need be. Either they should publically declare that they are incompetent and need social help in order to survive or they should try to behave like respectable students at par with others.  

This might be a controversial topic to delve into but meritocracy and hard work is what I believe in. If all are considered equal, they should earn this status and not take this for granted. If they don’t, others have all the rights to consider them inferior and try to dominate them. Respect cannot be enforced; it can only be earned by your behavior and deeds. So try to earn your own self-respect and the world will respect you.

 

Why An MBA???

This is the question which may have very well costed me a seat at IIMB. This is the question which most of the people preparing for their B school interviews/admission essays dread answering. This is the question which maybe the most clichéd question in any interview. This is the question which all aspirants prepare the best yet this is the question which nobody can answer perfectly.  

I may have gotten an admission to one of the IIMs, I may have worked for 2 years but I am still not very sure about the answer to this question. What I dread is that even after doing an MBA I might not be able to answer this question. And this fear is amplified after I read the book “Snapshots from hell, The making of an MBA”. The book is about the first year at Stanford Business School, a school among the top 3 business schools worldwide. The book is about the struggle to cope up with the academic rigor, to get used to the cut-throat competition, to worry of not getting a job and more importantly the struggle to survive. And finally it also tries to answer the question and it would be a lie if I say that I don’t agree with it. We will come to the answer later. First of all lets see what an MBA is and what an MBA actually is. 

So what does an MBA from XYZ school provide the graduates with? Is an MBA more of a fancy degree than some real stuff? Is the school matters more than the education itself? Will the graduates end up being at the same position 5 years down the line had they played Golf and boozed instead of learning how to run a company at the school? Will it be fair to say that all a business school does is put a higher price tag on its graduates? The answer to all these questions is YES and NO. What I feel is that an MBA is both. It makes you sellable, it creates demand for you but that demand is also right. An MBA student learns 100s of different things during the course of 2 years. He is among the crème-de-la-crème when he enters a prestigious business school. He is already one of the better brains around, so he deserves all that he gets after his graduation, every penny of it. But it is also true that an MBA is a bit overrated. It’s the experience and sweating out in the corporate battlefield which ultimately separates chaff from the wheat. Its just that the odds of an MBA being the grain are higher than being the chaff. 

Coming back to the question, Why MBA. I still don’t have an answer but I would like to quote from the book itself.  It diversifies the outlook of an individual, forces people to learn about everything ranging from IT to OB to marketing, gives people poise and self-confidence, and more than everything gives the power of networking. The contacts made during the two years last lifelong and reap rewards continuously. A business school gives an opportunity to mingle with bright, business minded classmates and to give serious thoughts to all kinds of business careers. A business school doesn’t take anyone to paradise; in fact it teaches that there isn’t a paradise.

So now, is a business school worth the effort and the investment? I have already taken a decision and till now not repenting it. So, decide for yourself…