The Roads Less Travelled …

“Who are you?”

To this most existential of questions, you can have a number of answers; from the name that your parents gave you so lovingly and that your friends have dissected and bisected over the years to create unique and sometimes embarrassing nicknames to an equally enigmatic answer of “How does it matter?”

However, when you stand in the well of a classroom at IIM Ahmedabad rubbing your sweaty palms with anticipation of presenting your half-baked analysis of a case, the above question raises a scepter that is far more forbidding than its avatars in other contexts. It throws you at once into this whirlpool of numerous possibilities.

You are of course you. The fact that you are probably thinking that waking up on the right side of bed or seeing Jennifer Lopez latest crassly made video is the cause of your current misfortune, makes it impossible for you to be anyone else. However,you cannot, as the manager in the case cannot (he might have fought with his wife the previous day), allow such trivialities to affect your judgment; in effect while you cannot be you, you cannot also not be you. You are in my favorite catch, Catch 22!

Compounding this is fact that the entire class’s eyes are riveted on you; the sacrificial lamb for the day. Of course, everyone empathizes with you and everyone is your friend but do not ask anyone to take your place. After all, would you have if it was one of them? You have become for sometime both the savior and the sinner,but not one of them.

Now, coming back to your initial quandary, you must have realized by now that you are trapped. Thereis no escape. So all that is left is for you to do is to do your best. You can be silent. It may project either your inability to understand simple English or your deep understanding of the nature of identity that you know that everyone knows about you (given that you are in IIM A this can be slightly difficult to pull off). Alternatively, you can advertise your ignorance by blurting out whatever your name might be.

Your best chance however, might be in falling back on the age-old tradition of story telling in the first person (a euphemism if there was any). You draw the picture before the class; bring out the financial, marketing, production, moral, ethical and marital dilemmas of the manager into the class. Telling his story, you become him, though always being yourself. In tradition of all great storytellers, you take the case to a point, where the threads seem intertwined as snakes biting into each other tails. And then, the denouement – snip. A seemingly brilliant piece of analysis on your part (oops manager’s part) unravels this most complicated of tangles into individual parts whose solutions is mere child’s play.

The class is stunned and the professor impressed. You return to your seat amid the generous thumping of desks like a king after a long string of conquests. Finally, you can be your own self again, wondering whether talking to the pretty girl you wanted to talk for so long, earlier in the morning was a cause for the recent turn of events.

Blogged with Flock

It’s 8 in the morning and I have classes starting in an hour. Breakfast would have just started in the mess but going there so early would be sadder way of killing time than writing this blog. This might come as a shock to some but yes even in the first term at IIMA you do have some time to kill.

One thing that IIMA shows you is the value of every second. Where earlier you would have spent hours doing something that would be classified as nothing later, this place forces you to account for every second of your life. With so much to do and often one’s personal preferences coming into play, the idea of prioritization just gets drilled into ones head.

I had often wondered what do they teach in a management school. And why is CAT the selection procedure for the IIMs? While the academic merit of the examination and the quality people it selects (or leaves out) might be debated, I have come to believe that it tests what is probably the essence of all management studies; “The ability to function under constraints“.

The ability to make tradeoffs; the quality of your decisions under pressure; your ability to identify the needle in a haystack of problems is what separates a good manager from the bad. These are not your standard mathematical equations that can be learned from a textbook. They are principles to be internalized. After 2 months in this place, I am coming to believe that the load in the first term is not a matter of accident (the courses just added up to generate the load) but built into the design of the curricula to aciheve the aim of making better managers out of us.

technorati tags:IIMA

Blogged with Flock

This blog has not been updated in quite a long time, and though it can be justified on the workload at IIMA it just tells half of the story. More important is fact that I get very little time to devote to things that I normally blog about; books, movies and football.

However, that’s not to say that life is uninteresting in IIMA. On one side there is the famed course load of the first term (cases, quizzes and assignments) that stretches your mental limits to the extent you never thought existed. For me there are also the rigors of coming back to the student life itself; the uncertainty, learning new things everyday, new people. In addition, there is the competitiveness with 280 students slugging it out on every quiz. After almost 2 months, infinite quizzes (yes, I have actually lost count), 3 WAC reports and a
mid-term here, I am fairly certain I have stabilized in my current environs. Most classes actually seem to be interesting with the case study method allowing for a greater degree of class participation than ever in my educational career.

Then there are the extra-curricular activities. There is a fair concentration of quizzing enthusiasts in this place and we manage to meet up regularly; meaning I am back to one of first loves. And junta regularly plays soccer. In addition, I have in the past 2 months managed to catch a few movies too; Lucia y el Sexo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Touch of Evil and The Talented Mr. Ripley are some of the good ones I have seen. With the premier league well underway, I saw my first Manchester United match of the season yesterday and have generally kept track of the football happenings. Hopefully will blog about my views on the various comings and goings once the transfer window is closed.

Having left my entire collection of books back in Bangalore (a situation I am rectifying in the term break), I frankly do not have anything outrageously interesting to read. Just finished reading The Goal, which was a recommended reading in the Operations course. Though I cannot really rave about the literary merits of the book, I have to say that it presents a new way of teaching basic concepts. Almost a textbook in terms of the material it deals with, it can pass off as a novel, though how interesting terms like throughput and bottlenecks are to normal users I do not know.