One Year stand with ISB

This Blog aims to capture my affair with ISB and beyond.

Name:
Location: Hyderabad, India

I promise not to make this a chronicle of events unfolding in ISB or the world in general. These posts will generally qualify those events with my thoughts. At the same time I promise it will be enjoyable :-)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Term 3 subjects

Oops I did it again. I havent updated dear bloggie since 2 weeks. I think this was the longest hiatus. Anyway here I am back again.
Would like to share a few thoughts about the subjects this term:

Corporate Finance: Very interesting subject which teaches yuo everything about the elusive financial world. I didnt knew there were so many interest rates and selecting the right one was so difficult. The prof is amazing and is really the Bhagwan of any thing related to money (read finance). We also call him Chacha Chowdhry with love (hope he is not reading this). You have to be dead alert in his class and hang on to every word that comes out of his mouth. You miss one word and you are done for. You will have to read reams of pages from the textbook to get it. His jokes are also great, especially about the nice guys and how to have a wonderful sex life.

Managerial Accounting: This subject involves using accounting data for managerial decisions. It includes everything from cost accounting, activity based costing, budgetting, common errors done by managers in interpreting the data, transfer pricing etc. The subject is dry and the profs try to make it interesting but they fail miserably. I didnt know a manager's life was that miserable!!

Operations Management: Another dry subject, which consists of inventories, throughput rate, expenses, the Goal by Goldratt, services capacity planning, quality management etc. There are so many concepts and so many relations and so many quantities to remember that you end up getting confused as to which concept to use where. An Operations Manager role has become a strict no no :-))

Entrepreneurship: This subject basically contain love stories between man (which means both the sexes) and his/her enterprise. It depicts in rigorous details the emotional, financial and intellectual turmoils that an entrepreneur has to undergo to build his/her baby from scratch. How he/she has to get it financed from profit chasing venture capitalists, emotionally blackmail the F network and eke out seed capital from relatives, friends and friends of relatives and relatives of friends. How he/she has to toil day and night during the initial stages and then reap the benefits when the enterprise grows. A very thought provoking subject.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Way to go

Its really amazing and it strikes me with more and more force as the days progress and as I do more and more readings. Its subtle, always with the flow and if I was not fed with the opposite since I learnt to read I wouldnt have realised it. Its also a very good thing and literature has finally done justice to something which was long pending. You are wondering what it is?

It is the reference to the female in the third person in almost all the text books, course packs and other material that I have read after joining BSchool. Most of the customers, suppliers, managers, supervisors, workers, technicians, professors, doctors and all the other characters that you come across in typical business scenarios are amply referred by 'she', signifying that they are women and they are here to stay. This is a subtle but a very powerful way of giving women their rightful place and I am glad that its happening. Also we have come across almost 4 successful FEMALE entrepreneurs in the first 4 cases of the Entrepreneurship course which I think is a fairly good proportion. This sends out a powerful message that not only men but women can also start new ventures and be successful. Girls are you listening...

Most of the textbooks and material that I had read during my undergraduate course always had the 'he'. The 'She' was almost non existent. I think this is what forced me to identify the overwhelming presence of the 'she' in the readings. It might also be the case that I read Indian textbooks in undergrad and now I am mostly reading foreign material and the foreign material always contained the 'she' all along. But still the change remains substantial and hope it gets replicated down to the primary school level. In school, all the math, science and other subjects which required reference to a person without regard to the gender always contained the male. Hope the new text books that are written take care of this simple discrepancy and show women affected by the same problems and present in the same decision making processes in textbooks as the males have been shown to have.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Gossip Gossip

Monday 8 AM - Assignment Submission Deadline

Sunday 11 PM - Our team decides to meet (After enjoying 3 days of the first long weekend of term 3)
Sunday 12 PM - Started work on the assignment. Till then gossipping about the latest going ons and affairs in the campus. Gossipping about who is wooing whom and who got slapped and who got kissed (and possibly got laid???) on campus. Caught up on the status of the affairs which were going strong, like this coy couple who are seldom seen together in campus but go about painting the town red, this bold couple (or were they just hopefulls) having endless discussions in the corridors. Then there was a lot of information interchange on the slapping incident, the kissing incident(s), the rumours proclaiming who is going around with whom and who was successful in wooing the girl in question and who was not so successful, who has a chance and who is on the borderline, what strategies one can use to be successful, why this girl doesnt suit that guy and vice versa, etc etc...

The one thing that surprised me was the fun we were having discussing these juicy tidbits like a bunch of housewives. It was very refreshing. We didnt realise how the time flew and that we had a catch a few winks before we were ready to justify our findings about the case the next day in class.

Sunday 2:30 PM: Dropped the assignment in the drop box and started for home half expecting to bump into the characters we were discussing...

Meanwhile a bunch of my section mates are up in arms over the issue of CP (Class Participattion which is a sizeable % of the overall class grades) in Entrepreneurship. There are lotsa mails clogging my mailbox wet with tears. The prof made a comment at the end of the class which made a lot of hearts bleed. These are the CP kings and queens of the class which never get enough of it. Aw Cmon guys and gals, theres life beyond CP and grades, and expressing your opinions and making your points, whatever. This is a non issue. Its not worth spending a single thot. Focus on Marriott and Donner instead. Chill, take it easy, play it cool and as AA said 'enjoy life' with all the beautiful things!